Requirements

There are different ways of set up a Skolelinux solution. It can be installed on just one standalone PC or a regional wide solution at many schools operated centrally. This variety of configurations makes a huge difference on how things are set up regarding network components, servers and client machines.

• a router/gateway (IP 10.0.2.1) providing access to the internet (when using the default network architecture)
• the computers running Debian Edu / Skolelinux must have either i386, amd64 or powerpc processors.
  • On powerpc, the installation media will only boot on machines of the newworld sub-architecture, which are the systems from apple with a translucent case

• for the main server (10.0.2.2): this is the one single computer in the network which get's the tjener-profile installed

• workstation(s) and/or thin client (LTSP) server(s)
• thin clients clients
• thin client (LTSP) servers need two network cards when using the default network architecture:
  • eth0 connected to the main network (10.0.2.0/23)
  • eth1 (192.168.0.0/24) serving the thin-clients
• disk space requirements depend on profiles used, but any disk from 8 GiB will be sufficient. As usual, the bigger the better.
• for the thin clients 32 MB RAM and 133 MHz is recommended as minimum. Swap is required
• for workstations or standalone PCs 450 MHz, 256 MiB RAM and 8 GiB disc space are recommended minimum requirements
• for diskless workstations (also known as stateless workstations, lowfat clients or half-thick clients) 256 MB RAM and 800 MHz or more is recommended minimum requirements. Swapping over the network is automatically enabled, the swap size is 32mb, if you need more you can tune this by editing /etc/ltsp/nbdswapd.conf on tjener to set the SIZE variable.
• for Laptops 256 MB RAM and 450 MHz are minimum requirements

FIXME: add links to explainations of main-server and thinclient-server

A list of tested hardware is provided from http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Hardware/ .

Network requirements

Internet-Router

A router/gateway, connected to the internet on the external interface and running on the IP address 10.0.2.1 on the internal interface. The router must 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 i386 based solution, we recommend IPCop or floppyfw. If you need something for an embedded router we recommend OpenWRT, check here for supported hardware. If you are into BSD unix, pfsense and m0n0wall are good choices. Though since they are BSD based, we think they are better suited for more experienced administrators.

It's possible to use a different network setup, this is the documented procedure to do this. 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.