The Fedora system used in our university data center

The Fedora system used in our university data center
GuideAt the University of Novi Sad in the Republic of Serbia, we teach students a lot of things. From getting started with programming languages to machine learning, all courses are designed to enable our students to think like professional developers and software engineers. The course time is tight and there are a large number of students, so we must make reasonable adjustments to the available resources to meet normal teaching requirements. Finally, we decided to replace the computer system of the data center with Fedora.Previous settings

Our previous solution was to install a Windows virtual machine on the Ubuntu system and install the development software required for teaching under the virtual machine. This seems like a good idea at the time. However, this method has many drawbacks. First, running a virtual machine causes a serious waste of computer performance, resulting in a reduction in the operating system performance and speed. In addition, virtual machines sometimes run simultaneously in another user session. This causes serious slowness in computer work. We have to spend valuable time starting computers and virtual machines. Finally, we realized that most of the software required for teaching had a corresponding Linux version. Virtual machines are not required. We need to find a better solution.

Go to Fedora!

Photos of a data center running the ora workstation version by default
We consider replacing the previous Windows Virtual Machine solution with a simple installation. We finally decided to use Fedora for many reasons.

Development frontier

In the courses we teach, we will use a variety of development tools. Therefore, it is important to obtain the latest and best development tools available in a timely manner. Under Fedora, we found that 95% of the development tools we use can be found in the official software repository! Only a small number of tools are required for manual installation. This is very simple in Fedora, because you can get almost all the ready-made development tools.
In this process, we realized that we were using a large number of free and open-source software and tools. Ensuring that these software is always updated in time usually requires a lot of work, but Fedora does not.

Hardware compatibility

The second reason for choosing Fedora in our data center is hardware compatibility. The computer in the IDC is still brand new. There were always some problems with earlier kernel versions. Under Fedora, we can always get the latest kernel version. As we expected, everything works well and there is no problem.
We decided to use the ora workstation version with GNOME desktop environment. The students found it easy and intuitive to get started quickly. For us, it is very important for students to have a simple environment so that they will pay more attention to their tasks and courses, rather than a complicated or slow user interface.

Independent Technical Support

For the last reason, our department highly appreciates free and open source software. Using these software, students can continue to use them freely even after graduation and at work. In this process, they usually have some knowledge about Fedora and free and open source software.

Switch data center

We found one of the computers and installed them manually. This includes preparing all necessary scripts and software, setting remote control permissions, and other important components. We also set up a separate user account for each course to facilitate students to store their files.
After a computer is installed and configured, we use a powerful, free, and open-source tool called CloneZilla. CloneZilla can create Hard Disk Images for restoration. The image size is about 11 GB. We use flash memory with a high-speed USB 3.0 interface to restore disk images to other computers. We spent 75 minutes setting up the remaining 24 computers using just a few flash devices.

Future work

All the computers in our data center now use Fedora (no virtual machine ). The rest of the work is to set up some management scripts to facilitate remote installation of software, computer switches, and so on.
We sincerely thank all the maintenance staff, software package managers, and other contributors of Fedora. We hope that our work will encourage other schools and universities to switch their computer operating systems to Fedora like we do. We are happy to confirm that Fedora is perfect for us and that Fedora is also suitable for you!

From: https://linux.cn/article-8033-1.html

Address: http://www.linuxprobe.com/school-fedora-linux.html