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 * Minimum disk space requirements depend on profiles used for installation.  * The minimum disk space requirements depend on the profile which is installed:

Requirements

There are different ways of setting up a Skolelinux solution. It can be installed on just one standalone PC, or as a region-wide solution at many schools operated centrally. This flexibility makes a huge difference to the configuration of network components, servers and client machines.

Hardware requirements

The purpose of the different profiles is explained in the network architecture chapter.

  • The computers running Debian Edu / Skolelinux must have either 32 bit (Debian architecture 'i386', oldest supported processors are Intel Pentium and AMD K5) or 64 bit (Debian architecture 'amd64') x86 processors.
  • At least 2 GiB RAM for 30 clients and 4 GiB RAM for 50-60 clients are recommended for the main and thin client server profiles.
  • Thin clients with only 64 MiB RAM and 133 MHz on 32 bit processors are possible, though 256 MiB RAM or more and faster processors are recommended.
    • Swapping over the network is automatically enabled for LTSP clients; the swap size is 512 MiB, and if you need more you can tune this by editing /etc/ltsp/nbdswapd.conf on tjener to set the SIZE variable.
    • If your diskless workstations have hard drives, it is recommended to use them for swap as it is a lot faster than network swapping.
  • For workstations, diskless workstations and standalone PCs, 800 MHz, 512 MiB RAM are minimum requirements. A setup with 1024 MiB RAM runs considerably better and is the recommended minimum. A faster CPU will speed things up. For running Iceweasel/Firefox and LibreOffice, 1024 MiB RAM is the recommended minimum.

    • On workstations with little RAM the spell checker can cause LibreOffice to hang if the swap space is too small. Then the system administrator has to disable the spell checker on LibreOffice or students have to kill LibreOffice, resulting in loss of work. Enabling at least 1024 MiB swap on a 512 MiB RAM workstation solves this, and the spell checker runs smoothly. Anyways, we recommend 1024 MiB RAM due to extensive RAM usage browsing the web.

    • Please tune up the swap size either locally on the PC or on the server. Please remember that placing workstation swap on the main server requires added diskspace to the required minimum.
  • The minimum disk space requirements depend on the profile which is installed:
    • main server + thin client server: 60 GiB. As usual with disk space on a main server, "the bigger the better".
    • thin client server: 40 GiB.
    • workstation or standalone: 30 GiB.
  • Thin client servers need two network cards when using the default network architecture:
    • eth0 is connected to the main network (10.0.0.0/8),
    • eth1 is used for serving LTSP clients (192.168.0.0/24 as default or 192.168.1.0/24).
  • Laptops have the same requirements as workstations since they are just movable workstations.

Hardware known to work

A list of tested hardware is provided at http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Hardware/ . This list is not nearly complete :)

http://wiki.debian.org/InstallingDebianOn is an effort to document how to install, configure and use Debian on some specific hardware, allowing potential buyers to know if that hardware is supported and existing owners to know how get the best out of that hardware.

An excellent database of hardware supported by Debian is online at http://kmuto.jp/debian/hcl/.

Requirements for network setup

Default Setup

When using the default network architecture, these rules apply:

  • You need exactly one main server, the tjener.
  • You can have hundreds of workstations on the main network.
  • You can have a lot of LTSP servers on the main network; two different subnets are preconfigured (DNS, DHCP) in LDAP, more could be added.
  • You can have hundreds of thin clients and/or diskless workstations on each LTSP server network.
  • You can have hundreds of other machines which will have dynamic IP addresses assigned.
  • For access to the Internet you need a router/gateway (see below).

Internet router

A router/gateway, connected to the Internet on the external interface and running on the IP address 10.0.0.1 with netmask 255.0.0.0 on the internal interface, is needed to connect to the Internet.

The router should not run a DHCP server, it can run a DNS server, though this is not needed and will not be used.

If you are looking for a router firewall solution capable of running on an old PC, we recommend IPCop or floppyfw.

If you need something for an embedded router or accesspoint we recommend using OpenWRT, though of course you can also use the original firmware. Using the original firmware is easier; using OpenWRT gives you more choices and control. Check the OpenWRT webpages for a list of supported hardware.

It is possible to use a different network setup (there is a documented procedure to do this), but if you are not forced to do this by an existing network infrastructure, we recommend against doing so and recommend you stay with the default network architecture.

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