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Department of Engineering |
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Teaching System terminals - under the hood (draft)
| These run linux (SuSE 10.3) and are powerful
enough to run most of the programs we use (Pentium D, 3GHz). They have names like tw107.
They're disc-less, but they have 2G of RAM - when they're switched on, they get their operating system and programs via the network. They also "mount" (have access to) files on some central machines: user-files, big programs, etc. Both K Desktop Environment and Gnome are installed. Gnome is our default. The Session menu that's on the login screen lets you switch to KDE, but we've not customized that set-up. | |
Both KDE and gnome provide a desktop and a development environment (a
framework for building applications that integrate into the rest of the desktop). The KDE files are under /opt/kde3 (in bin you'll find
konqueror, the web/file browser, etc). The GNOME files are under /opt/gnome (in bin you'll find nautilus, the file browser we use, etc).
Both KDE and gnome depend on a lower level of graphics support provided by
X.Org
When the terminals are switched on they
- do a "Power On Self Test" (POST) on the hardware via the BIOS
- access the DHCP server to allocate the machine an IP address and directs it to access the TFTP server
The TFTP server provides an initial boot image. When this executes, the operating system is mounted from the cluster server, and home directories are mounted from the file server. It also automounts other file-systems on demand from the the file server and grp-fsrv as necessary: /apps, /export, /public, /groups, etc.