Every user at UST has a shared network storage called MyStorage. You can connect to this from Linux. In the GNOME desktop environment, open Places > Connect to Server... from the menu.

In the box select Windows share as the service type.

Enter the following:
Server: mystorage.stthomas.edu
Share: Users
Folder: yourustusername
User Name: yourustusername
Domain: UST
Name to use for Connection: mystorage

Connect, enter your password, and you can access your files.

The next time you want to connect, select the mystorage shortcut in Places.

Well, eventually the content of the computer science club website will have parts desired by other people. Whether it's using screen shots or text from our Open Source Lab like John's Linux Terminal Server documentation or our Open Source at UST section, it may be desirable for others to use.

Our rights to this content are "all rights reserved" by default under current copyright law. I propose us only reserving some rights under a Creative Commons License. I propose this one:

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 License.

Email addicts may already know about Gmail's notifer utility for Mac and Windows. You can get reminder that you have mail in your Gmail account. It doesn't work for Linux, however.

There are Linux Gmail notifers out there but I had some problems getting it to work.

Enter mail-notification. This nifty notificaton area applet for Linux checks Gmail, but also does IMAP, POP, and system mail boxes. It should be installed on most machines in OSS 429.

Run the mail-notification program and add some mailboxes. With the email server from the UST email howto you can add your UST email. And for good measure add the system email account. Ta da! Instant email gratification.

It is now possible to start a Linux thin client off of our server in the Open Source Lab. It uses the Linux Terminal Server Project to boot from the network. All applications run on the server, but display on the client. It's kind of like the Sun Ray clients, only cheaper and capable of using any PC that can boot from the network.

To try this out on the client machine on the end of the table, reboot it and hit F3 when you see the Dell logo to do a network boot. It'll download the right stuff and go automatically. You can use the qmcs user, password's the same as it was on the client. Reboot it again to get it back to local boot. There isn't an option to reboot the terminal as far as I know, just hit the power button long enough.

Why make a quite nice desktop machine into a dumb terminal? Simplicity in maintenance. You can switch terminals and log in and still have the same files. It isn't just a network share like MyStorage, every file is the same. This makes the administrator's job much easier, as they just make sure one server is working correctly rather than 10 clients. Usually you can have one machine in the corner that's broken, or you get someone who saved their files on the local hard drive and has to use that machine. Doesn't happen in a thin client environment. One system install is easier to administrate. And really easy to add clients to. Plug into the right network, set to network boot, reboot, and it's there.

The event is on Wednesday, October 18 from 5:00pm to 7:00pm in the IT building on U of MN's east campus in Minneapolis, Room # 3-210.

Email Hoang by mailing htvan1@stthomas.edu for more information if you are interested.

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