Maintenance

Figured that having many users on a machine would create an unwieldy login screen I ran this command:
sudo gconftool-2 --direct --config-source xml:readwrite:/etc/gconf/gconf.xml.defaults --type bool --set /apps/gdm/simple-greeter/disable_user_list true

which changes the login to a manually entered user/pass setup.

I'm using remastersys to remaster an installed Ubuntu and create a custom iso to install to a new machine. Seems to work a treat.

This is downright thorny, but I'm slowly getting somewhere.
CS has made adjustments to the dev ldap setup so that we can get the info we need without excessive modification to our build (that is, we can make anonymous requests for info from the ldap server).
All the interesting stuff gets done after installing some packages. It looks like there's a meta-package called ldap-auth-config that should install all the necessary stuff - primarily the pam stack.
Once installed, the config is done in /etc, and mostly in /etc/pam.d/

I'm making headway, but very slowly - documentation is non-existent.

Researched and purchased several new machines for the lab. We didn't go with the "Technology Solutions Centre" as it is by no means clear whether I can jack up the RAM, dump Windows, and still have a cheap, quiet, warranted box. As it was I got fabulous machines that are dead quiet and quite powerful for a within-budget price.

So, for anyone listening, the question is (for next time):
If we buy a machine on offer, can we double the RAM, drop Windows (and actually save on the price) AND keep the warranty as-is? I'm concerned that buying it with Windows is part of what makes it cheap, and that the warranty is dependent on running Windows.

If we get the right answer maybe next time we'll buy our boxen through TSC.

Greg and I spent a little time looking at options for an online booking system that Judy can use to handle booking of the lab workstations. We settled for the moment on MRBS, and open-source PHP/mySQL system which seems simple and easily configurable. We set it up and started testing it. It's intended to be used for room bookings, with rooms divided into areas, but since all the text on the pages comes from a language file we were able to customize it to handle computers in rooms instead of rooms in areas, very simply, just by editing the language file. The resulting booking calendar seems to be nicely printable, and the CSS is centrally configured via a PHP system which abstracts the settings into variables which are used to construct the stylesheet. We'll probably want to write our own stylesheet when we get comfortable with it, because it's not terribly pretty, but it's certainly usable out of the box.

Pros:

• Lovely clean code.
• Really well commented.
• Documentation is sufficient and clear.
• DB structure is very straightforward.
• UTF8 support.
• Good separation of concerns (page generation, CSS, GUI strings, etc.).

Cons

• HTML 4.01 (could be rewritten in XHTML, but would be tiresome and provide little benefit).
• Not so pretty (yet).

I've begun pulling gear from Lab C. I have the teacher station, the projector and the DVD player/audio setup out. I'm waiting on WO to come and pull the TAO speakers and the cabling for the projector.
I also need to bring in a reversible drill to pull down the white board and so forth.

Stations 1, 7, 9, 11, 19 and 20 all lost contact with the domain controller; 19 was successfully removed and added back into the domain, but as of this writing, Greg is still working on the others. We have heard that Cisco routing equipment is reputed to be the cause of this kind of thing. Caused problems for a Russian class in the lab. Greg will probably add more detail later; he was out when it happened, so I caught the initial request for help and spent an hour on it.

This is what worked:

• Made a fresh build of XP using a 200GB expandable drive in VBox, and using the volume licence installer.
• Did all Windows updates.
• Connected to the Windows Backup file on the Ubuntu Host, and used Windows Backup to restore as much as possible.
• Exported the HKEY_CURRENT_USER and HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT hives on the original machine (logged in as myself), and then imported this into the registry in the VM (logged on as admin(. Some in the latter hive failed due to keys being locked, but most things succeeded.
• Ran Delphi 2005. It didn't know about any of its components, so I had to go to Components / Install Packages, and install all the .bpl files in the BPL directory (this was easy because I'd specified that this be in a separate location in Delphi).
• Started Delphi successfully, and discovered that the PATH was missing most of the PAS file locations, so I had to add them all manually until everything was found. Eventually I was able to compile Transformer and the IMT.

Today I installed Delphi 2009, and all the updates, and then started adding 3rd-party components. I have the latest JEDI JCL and JVCL installed and working, and I'm now looking at Graphics32, which is causing me problems, since there's no D2009 package for it.

Greg found a suggestion on the Web that you could just use Windows Backup to reconstitute a machine inside a working Windows. That's definitely worth a try, so I've done a backup of my C drive (which took four hours), and I'm currently transferring it to my linux box so that I can give it a go tomorrow, using a vanilla SP3 install. Meanwhile, Greg is trying other approaches with BartPE.