Title: Debian Edu/Wheezy - some ideas
Tags: english, debian edu
Date: 2012-02-23 14:30

<p>During my work on Debian Edu based on Squeeze, I came across some
issues that should be addressed in the Wheezy release.  I finally
found time to wrap up my notes and provide quick summary of what I
found, with a bit explanation.</p>

<p><ul>

<li>We need to rewrite our package installation framework, as tasksel
changed from using tasksel tasks to using meta packages (aka packages
with dependencies like our education-* packages), and our installation
system depend on tasksel tasks in
/usr/share/tasksel/debian-edu-tasks.desc for package
installation.</li>

<li>Enable Kerberos login for more services.  Now with the Kerberos
foundation in place, we should use it to get single sign on with more
services, and avoiding unneeded password / login questions.  We should
at least try to enable it for these services:
<ul>

  <li>CUPS for admins to add/configure printers and users when using
    quotas.</li>

  <li>Nagios for admins checking the system status.</li>
  <li>GOsa for admins updating LDAP and users changing their passwords.</li>
  <li>LDAP for admins updating LDAP.</li>
  <li>Squid for users when exam mode / filtering is active.</li>
  <li>ssh for admins and users to save a password prompt.</li>
</ul></li>

<li>Merge debian-edu-config and debian-edu-install.  The split made
sense when d-e-install did a lot more, but these days it is just an
inconvenience when we update the debconf preseeding values.</li>

<li>Fix partman-auto to allow us to abort the installation before
touching the disk if the disk is too small.  This is
<ahref="http://bugs.debian.org/653305">BTS report #653305</a> and the
d-i developers are fine with the patch and someone just need to apply
it and upload.</li>

<li>Adjust to new LTSP framework (boot time config instead of install
time config).  LTSP changed its design, and our hooks to install
packages and update the configuration is most likely not going to work
in Wheezy.

<li>Consider switching to NBD instead of NFS for LTSP root, to allow
the Kernel to cache files in its normal file cache, possibly speeding
up KDE login on slow networks.</li>

<li>Make it possible to create expired user passwords that need to
change on first login.  This is useful when handing out password on
paper, to make sure only the user know the password.  This require
fixes to the PAM handling of kdm and gdm.</li>

<li>Make GUI for adding new machines automatically from sitesummary.
The current command line script is not very friendly to people most
familiar with GUIs.  This should probably be integrated into GOsa to
have it available where the admin will be looking for it..</li>

<li>We should find way for Nagios to check that the DHCP service
actually is working (as in handling out IP addresses).  None of the
nagios checks I have found so far have been working for me.</li>

<li>We should switch from libpam-nss-ldapd to sssd for all profiles
using LDAP, and not only on for roaming workstations, to have less
packages to configure and consistent setup across all profiles.</li>

<li>We should configure Kerberos to update LDAP and Samba password
when changing password using the Kerberos protocol.  The hook was
requested in <ahref="http://bugs.debian.org/588968">BTS report
#588968</a> and is now available in Wheezy.  We might need to write a
MIT Kerberos plugin in C to get this.</li>

<li>We should clean up the set of applications installed by default.
<ul>

<li>reduce the number of chemistry visualizers</li>
<li>consider dropping xpaint</li>
<li>and probably more?</li>
<ul></li>

 - remove/limit ldap bind authentication

<li>Some hardware need external firmware to work properly.  This is
mostly the case for WiFi network cards, but there are some other
examples too.  For popular laptops to work out of the box, such
firmware need to be installed from non-free, and we should provide
some GUI to do this.  Ubuntu already have this implemented, and we
could consider using their packages.  At the moment we have some
command line script to do this (one for the running system, another
for the LTSP chroot).</li>


 - Complete exam mode support by adding Squid filtering

 - Provide surf board / touch screen desktop

<li>In Squeeze, we provide KDE, Gnome and LXDE as desktop options.  We
should extend the list to Xfce and Sugar, and preferably find a way to
install several and allow the admin or the user to select which one to
use.</li>

<li>The golearn tool from the goplay package make it easy to check out
interesting educational packages.  We should work on the package
tagging in Debian to ensure it represent all the useful educational
packages, and extend the tool to allow it to use packagekit to install
new applications with a simple mouse click.</li>

 - add out of the box setup for italc/controlaula/epoptes
</li>