Lake Brantley High School crest

Lake Brantley High School X Terminal Project

Josh Levine (joshl-xterm@levindustries.com)
Last updated: October 24, 2001


What is it?

A system based on the Solucorp X terminal toolkit (http://www.solucorp.qc.ca/xterminals/) that allows our hundreds of old 486's to be effectively used in the school's existing NT domain without purchasing costly NT or MS Terminal Server licenses.

Basically, the 486 workstation boots off of one of four Linux servers, runs a script that prompts for the student's existing NT username and password, mounts their home directory and launches StarOffice. Within StarOffice, the student can browse the internet as well as perform all of the other tasks associated with an Office suite. The great thing is that as StarOffice is fully compatible with MS Office, the students can modify the same documents whether they are using an NT workstation or one of the Linux terminals.


About Lake Brantley High School

Lake Brantley High School is located in Altamonte Springs, FL (near Orlando). Nearly 3,000 students attend LBHS, and use about 600 NT Workstation computers. The computers are connected to five NT Severs via a 100 Mb fully switched network and a fiber backbone between the seven main buildings.

The goal of this project was to put five Linux terminals in every classroom that requests them, while making the terminals as compatible with the existing NT environment as possible.


Programs used

  • Red Hat Linux: Fairly easy distribution to use; lots of RPMs available for easy installation of programs.
  • Solucorp X terminal toolkit: Great project by the author of linuxconf. Does all the hard work for you.
  • OpenSSL: All administrative connections to the server are encrypted.
  • OpenSSH: No telnet or FTP connections are allowed to the server.
  • GDM: Fairly configurable, appeared easier to use (and nicer looking) than XDM.
  • BlackBox: Very fast and lightweight window manager.
  • Sun StarOffice: Appears to be fully compatible (file format wise) with MS Office 2000.
  • NTP: keeps the time on the servers accurate.
  • Webmin: Makes the servers extremely easy to administer (through a web browser).
  • Idled: Logs off users who leave their terminals.


    • Flowchart

    Flowchart (click for larger image)


    The Scripts

    See the flowchart for more detailed information.
  • crontab: Updates the server clocks every Sunday morning.
  • /etc/X11/gdm/Init/Default: Runs cleantask.py to kill lingering processes.
  • /usr/local/bin/cleantask.py: Kills lingering processes. Script written by Michel Dagenais.
  • /etc/X11/gdm/PreSession/login_script: Sets variables, general maintenance.
  • /usr/local/bin/rfindrep: Used to replace variables in StarOffice configuration file when temp user is created. Probably could be replaced with a shell command.
  • /etc/profile: Sets variables.
  • /etc/X11/xdm/Xsession: Starts XSession, runs BlackBox and login_script.
  • /usr/local/bin/login_script: More maintenance, mount user's NT share, launch StarOffice.
  • /usr/local/bin/mntdocs.cpp: C program that mounts drive. Probably could be replaced with a shell script.
  • /etc/X11/gdm/PostSession/logout_script: Unmounts share.


    • Related Resources (those not already listed)

  • http://www.linuxdoc.org/: Linux Documentation Project - an excellent resource
  • http://www.silvervalley.k12.ca.us/~chobbs/xterms/: Writeup of how Silver Valley High School deployed Linux X terminals.
  • http://www.google.com/: Indispensable search engine.
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