[plug] Redhat 6.1

[Gavin Chester]

On Sun, 2005-03-27 at 18:37 +0800, David Buddrige wrote:

-snip-

> The task at hand, is to get an internet proxy so that my wife, border and I 
> can all share our 56k modem line to surf the web.  I know this is going to 
> be slow as anything but its better than nothing for the time being [funds 
> being a bit on the low side]. 
> 
-snip-

> Alternately, I wait until I can find someone with another distro and a 
> CD-burner.  I actually visited about 5 different Newsagents today, trying to 
> find one that was open, so I could get Fedora or somesuch.  However, when I 
> eventually found a newsagency that was open and had the computer mag's I was 
> after, it turns out they're all on DVD now - and I don't have a DVD drive in 
> my computer - only a 32X CDROM. 8-( 
> 

I see where you're getting at now.  

You have been suggested the option of installing IPCop because it's a
very good distro for a firewall, router, proxy server appliance on a
dedicated machine - albeit one with a low-end hardware.   However, you
don't want that, you want a workstation that will share the web with
other PCs in the house - all low-end machines.  But, you can't use
something like Ubuntu off magazine covers because you don't have a
reader/burner.  

Sorry everyone, I'm tired and restating the obvious is helping me work
through it for David :-)

I have an alternative suggestion for you that hasn't been considered so
far:
I can burn you a copy of K12LTSP 4.2.0 that I have.  It is on four CDs
(plus a boot install CD), which is what you need instead of DVDs.  It is
really Fedora Core 3 with educational enhancements and the LTSP add-ons
to setup a thin-client network. Only have to choose what you want at
install. 

You would have at least three options at install:
1/ I use it at home with three PIIs (all under 400Mhz) as clients and
this PII450 as a dual-purpose workstation/server for the clients sharing
a dialup connection.  Everything works well albeit slow dialup compared
to ADSL.  The catch for you doing the same is that you will need _much_
more RAM in you your dual-purpose workstation/server to serve the
clients - at least an upgrade to 256Mb, more better (I have 1Gb).  Keep
things low-stress on your server by using IceWM or XFce over Gnome or
KDE (too resource hungry).

	OR

2/ You could run the clients as fat clients (with harddisks and running
apps locally) that just login to the workstation/server to share web
access.  This will require much less server RAM and CPU grunt.  Also use
IceWM or XFce.

Both (1) & (2) are a no-brainer because I found K12LTSP to "just
work" (TM) out of the box.

	OR

3/ You could install without any of the LTSP add-ons and just treat it
as a stock FC3 install - but available to you from CD rather than DVD. 

Let me know if this is going to solve your problem.  Please send a
response to the list to END the thread and also send me your address
details OFFLIST.  I would only ask to be reimbursed the cost of the
media (five disks) plus postage :-)  

Regards, Gavin Chester.