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Linux Terminal Server Project. Specifically the K12LTSP variety
http://www.k12ltsp.org/.

Scrounge up the dough for some decent servers and you've got a lab that easy to administer and un pieza de pan to maintain.

Don't go any farther than http://www.k12ltsp.org/. They have the best all around linux solution for k-12 schools. Period.

To see how this would work, take a machine with two nics in your house and install K12LTSP. Now, take another old machine, Pentium 90 is fine, slap a 8139 nic in it and plug it into the k12ltsp server. Create a boot floppy, put it in the pentium 90, and turn it on. Low and behold KDE in all its glory! On a 100Mbit connection it should feel like you're sitting at the server... (Simplified, but shouldn't take a SlashDot reader too long to set up. The newest Knoppix CD let's you do this also, just two machines and two CDs.)

Now imagine the ISP running LTSP, and they just give out diskless workstations to new subscribers, much like cell phones, no additional charge for the hardware. Users don't have to worry about managing anything with their computer. For local storage they use USB flash drives. Their camera still uploads their pictures, they can still use a local printer, etc.

Will this replace my computer? No, I would need more than this provides. Would this replace the computer for a lot of my family members? Yes.

Also check out the K12 Linux Terminal Server Project. It's a great way get more good out of your current equipment.

• ws001: login as user001
• ws002: login as user002

Autologin does work in GDM:

http://members.porchlight.ca/charm/wclp/enable-gdm .html#autologin

A workarround to THE bug is documented here:

http://www.k12ltsp.org/phpwiki/index.php/WrkArndGd mBug

I will play with the mentioned bug, maybe a couple configurations will make me breathe more calmly when Im away from the lan heh

Just ask Jim at irc, he's often logged in there, instead of offering help to fix GDM, the solution is always use KDM and get on with life.

Id be happy to use KDM only if it updated wtmp correctly, I even tried applying this:

http://www.ltsp.org/contrib/utmp_updating.txt

But it never worked for me.

Someday, X terminals will be perfect, but for now, Im still struggling :S

I am currently doing some computer volunteering at my children's school and I am trying to lead the charge with OSS. Money and support is tight, so OSS sits pretty well with everyone in charge.

My first project was putting in a firewall. They were running pretty much wide open before I got there. I slapped IPCop on a spare box they had laying around and changed the whole nature of their network (for the better :). They are now running DHCP (no more hardcoded IPs), Squid, and have a content filter (required by management). In fact, they have outgrown the hardware and I am going to be replacing it soon with a rackmount server from eBay.

Next up is a web server - I am using Metadot to build an information portal. The plan is to use it for general school stuff intially. Then, after everyone gets a little more comfortable with the idea, we are going to open it up to the teachers to add their own content. Pretty cool!

They are currently running Windows and are having a hell of a time trying to keep them running. The computer teacher is spending more time fighting fires than teaching! The next big thing I am going to pilot is putting Linux on the desktop, probably by using something like K12LTSP. All I have to do is isolate and confirm those few Windows only programs that are required (grading software, library software, etc.) After I get those running on Linux (Win4Lin or something) we will be good to go with a terminal server rollout.

With an educational discount, Windows 2003 server costs my department $142 (sure, it's more in a commercial environment), I can install it, set it up, run updates on it once in a while, run the baseline security analyzer on it, and forget about it. Give me a linux that does all this in an easy to use manner, and I'll switch. Sure, I could use apt and the others, but it just takes too much time, and you have to worry about various dependencies and what not.

At $142, that's $142 more you have to spend compared to FOSS solutions. What you've described, proved either that your educational institution is filthy rich and caters only for the rich and snobs, or you're just plain lazy.

Most educational institutions, whether state-run or even privately operated (esp. private with visions of education rather than for profit), are almost always tight budget! This is especially true in third world countries! That is why various bodies such as SchoolForge (and their Case Studies), K12OS, Moodle, OpenSourceSchools, KDE Edutainment Project and a lot more others are being founded and.. surprise! Thrives!

Personally, I love the K12LTSP Project. A branch out of the K12OS Project, which when deployed properly throughout the campus, can provide access to all students to high-grade apps in a very stable environment. Access from any terminal in any labs, authenticating via NIS, LDAP or whatever you prefer and access your mail accounts, website or whatever. With backend support tools available such as MySQL or PgSQL and PHP/Perl (okay, maybe that's a bit far out, but I've met 12 year olds who can code!)

Software cost? $0

Mark has made quite a few efforts in the open source arena - most notably (in my opinion) in efforts at putting Linux classrooms down in township schools. See Schools' Linux Users Group that uses K12LTSP - a for-schools offshoot of the parent LTSP project, and chases Fedora. They have done around 70 schools so far - basically a big fat server, a 24 port switch, and a 20 client classroom.

Wizzy Digital Courier is piloting a low-cost internet access system in these schools, initially using overnight dialup using cheap rate phone calls, but enabled to use USB memory sticks to carry data using the UUCP protocol. This means that the price of connectivity can come down to zero, and is not dependent on a wireline telephone company pricing.

Disclaimer:I do wizzy, and I have mod points today so I can post anonymously. Tee Hee.

andyr@wizzy.com

They use http://www.k12ltsp.org. It's mentioned in the wiki.

K12LTSP.org

They are probably using the servers to forward applications to the client display, which is easy to do under X, though I know that there are many guys from Hawaii active on the http://k12ltsp.org/ mailing list, so they could just be thin clients, but the article makes it sound ontherwise.

Either way, the applications run on the server, and is displayed on the client, so that's how the old computers work just as fast as new ones.

I nominate Jim McQuillan of the LTSP Project because this project gives the ability to run Linux on cheap hardware.

This provides a great solution for developing countries and underprivileged schools a chance to compete and contribute.

As you can see on the site, he handles the PR side of open source very well, and he still hangs around in the IRC channel and is very friendly and helpful.

Great resource, but I would also recomend checking out K12LTSP, the Linux in Libraries mailing list, and Open Source Systems for Libraries

I agree with you 100%
Also Note that K12LTSP is an easy way to get started with this. It is basically Fedora Core 2 ready to install with all the cool LTSP stuff included.
Just install the distro on a server with 2 Network cards, buy some bootable nics from disklessworstations.com, slap those in the clients, and away you go.
The mailing list and irc channel are also full of helpful people.
I've been using this setup in a school for a couple of years now, and it saved us so much money we were able to replace our CRT monitors with flat panels.

They'd be perfect as thin clients for a K12LTSP server. For that you need one decent machine to use as a server. It's a LOT easier than administering 20 stand-alone boxes.

As an English teacher I have my students use style and diction all of the time. Style gives statistics that really help us quickly analyze a student's paper for passive voice, pronouns and sentence beginnings. I've set my rubrics by meeting X or Y value for any combo of the stats from style and students rewrite papers until they reach that goal. Yes, I said rewrite. High school students, and most adults I find, rarely rewrite to hone their papers, so setting a numerical goal to the paper allows the students to 'know' where they are at any time during the writing process. It is NOT the only tool to use in teaching writing BUT it gives us, the teacher and the student, a baseline from which we can begin to discuss improvements.

Diction needs support for word lists and regular expressions... it's helpful but rather clumsy in presentation and handling of rules.

Of course, both are OS. I have 35 K12LTSP clients in my class and I'm the happiest teacher in the county.
dgd

You sound like someone who has not actually called on his local schools to see if they could benefit from a thin client lab. You don't seem to realize how many "free" computers schools refuse from their community because they are not "fast" enough for Windows. We have set up thin-client computer labs for Elementary, Middle, and High Schools here in Hawaii and have been supporting them for years. We just did one for the Boys and Girls Club. We use the K12LTSP's distribution of Linux, and, for less than $3000, we can set up a 30-station lab using donated clients and a custom-built dual opteron server.

Setting up a lab is not converting "a whole network to a new operating system." It is a lab. One of our installations is simply a typing lab. Another is used for Digital Photography. I really think you should be sure that you have more experience before you authoritatively state "this is why Skolelinux won't take off for years." We need you helping your local schools by trying before making premature conclusions. There is your solution: doing it rather than talking about why it won't work. If you want clearly defined steps, contact me.

Incidentally, we are definitely looking into migrating our installs away from the K12LTSP to Skolelinux. Fedora core vs. Debian-stable. The perpetuity of Debian and the reliability of the community make for a very bright future for Skolelinux. Kudos to the team.

K12Linux.org is the Fedora distribution with LTSP already configured. I know many schools in the United States are using it successfully.

Yeah, I'm aware that Mandrake has their own term services. I was just suggesting two distro agnostic solutions. I could've recommended K12LTSP, which doesn't require any installation at all, and works out of the box for most hardware, either for PXE or etherboot.
>
I'v been an LTSPer for ?5? years... I started on the alphas and we're now up to v. 4.x. I love thin clients and think that they are great for many situations (though, obviously, not all). My experiances have been so light administratively that I could run hundreds of machines if I cared to.

LTSP is by far the most interesting and easiest way to get a lot of older boxes running quickly. K12LTSP. Well worth the time at your local school districts. In this age of cut-backs the easiest cut is on the exhorbitant prices school's pay for proprietary apps. Look around in some of the under-funded school districts in the 'developed world' and you'll see the same have and have-not situation. K12LTSP is an ethical solution meeting the need for better distribution of tools for education for everyone everywhere.

Yes, welcome, Linus!!!

If you need some help in getting oriented or someone to show you around, send me an email.

Living in Portland is far better than in NoCal. NoCal has too many cars and bad smog.

Here's useful info:

Portland has the largest bookstore in the world.

Portland borders on the confluence of the Willamette River and the Columbia River, one of the largest rivers in the world.

One of the 7 WindSurfing Wonders of the World is in the Columbia River Gorge, on the eastern edge of the Portland metropolitan area.

Portland has one of the largest and most successful dealers in contemporary art in the world. The gallery has a funny name, but shows the work of over 1,100 artists.

Portland has the largest park inside a city in the world. The park has over 74 miles of wilderness hiking trails and 5,124 acres.

Portland is the home of Pink Martini, a band that writes multi-cultural songs. One of Pink Martini's songs was once one of the most popular songs in France. You can listen to the music video.

It's a 55 minute drive from downtown Portland to the ski areas. "World Class Skiing in Your Own Backyard."

The K-12 Linux Project, in Portland, is one of the more successful projects for giving Linux to average users, who in this case are students.

On the other hand: Q. Why do hippies come to Portland? A. Because there are no jobs.

Many people don't like the months of rain every year. They say Portland is the perfect place for slugs and ducks. (However, the rain cleans the air.) Those with the correct philosophical orientation call it Liquid Sunshine.

I wish that this article was hysterical. It is dead on. There is no value to having the best standards based browser when the content you want or need requires IE. Let us not be so slashnocentric here.

Want to know what the biggest threat to Linux in the schools is? It is the administrators who purchase web-based software to address the NCLB mandate or other school tasks. With increasing frequency these applications require some hook that Windows provides. It is presumably innocent enough. The product meets the school's needs - The price is right. ~"Yes it does require IE, but we all use IE so no big deal." In Hawaii we witness this decision being made even while many schools still use Macs with an unsupported and underdeveloped version of IE.

We have put nearly 200 computers into schools and non-profits here. We are running into a lot of these applications in ourk12ltsp labs. A concerted effort has been made to let the vendors know that multi-platform support can result in more sales. We are letting the DOE administration know that standards compliance is of utmost importance to our schools. It is a difficult thing to communicate. The Americans with Disabilities Act may be our friend. It is in trenches like this that OSS will win or die in the marketplace.

It is not hysterical to be alarmed that the most attractive feature of any computer's OS (to the *average* user), it's browser/web access, stands to be limited by the content providers. We can rest assure that the future of China and other developing nations will not be based on using such "standards." This was most recently confirmed at the IIPI conference in Hawaii If you find a commerce site that is not W3C compliant, remind them of the potential market loss. The decision to develop these browser limiting applications are not always intentional.

...has case studies on Linux Terminal Server Project deployments in schools.

Not business case studies, but still might yield some useful results...

I had a hard time installing LTSP for a demo until a friend suggested using the K12LTSP Iso images. Installation was completely painless using them.

Thin Clients in the Enterprise, based on LTSP are alreadady being used a lot. One example is the city of Largo, Florida. Just google arround and you will see. K12LTSP is a linux distro that combines LTSP, Educational software, and the Fedora Core. It is being used by 100s of schools arround the world. It is true that X is real old and has a lot of problems, but it is still good enugh to take on some herculean jobs in the enterprise and academic arenas.

K12LTSP is a very simple way of installing LTSP. Current version 4 is based on Fedora Core 1 with a few updates. As easy to install as FC1.

Although thin clients have been around for a few years now, in those days 300 MHz server CPUs and 10 Mbit/sec Ethernet were top-of-affordable-range. And the performance was a bit clunky.

Now we have 3000 MHz servers and 100 Mbit/sec networks, thin clients can really fly. So long as you forget the clunky days and try them!

I'm doing this now, both at work and at home. The clients PXE boot, download a Kernel, and then run remote X-sessions from the server. An easy way to get this setup is download the K12LTSP custom fedora ISO's to setup the server. It says it is designed for use in schools, but it works equally well in other envirnments. It works really well all in all. Having a $200 client with no moving parts the size of a paperback book is really appealing. Once the Nanode comes out, I plan to set my wife up with one. She can't wait to get the room heater she has now off her desk.

Yes, there is a windows port of pan. I've used it and it works as well as the linux version.

The whole point of this thread (great-grandparent post) was that a way to get started on linux was to start using open source software on windows that has linux ports.

I used this strategy for a school in my area that is now using LTSP
I got the started with OpenOffice.org and programs like tuxpaint. Even threw in some SDL games. When the time came to switch over, the programs that they were used to from the previous year were still there. I also put an ugly windows theme (just for this first year) to keep them familiar with the environment.

Linus Torvalds can go anywhere. It's probably no accident that he and the The Open Source Development Lab are in Portland. (Beaverton is one of the towns that are part of the metropolitan area of 1.4 million people called Portland.)

Portland has the largest bookstore in the world.

Portland has one of the largest and most successful dealers in contemporary art in the world. The gallery has a funny name, but shows the work of over 1,100 artists.

Portland has the largest park inside a city in the world. The park has over 74 miles of wilderness hiking trails.

Portland is the home of Pink Martini, a band that writes multi-cultural songs. One of Pink Martini's songs was once one of the most popular songs in France. You can listen to the music video.

It's a 55 minute drive from downtown Portland to the ski areas. "World Class Skiing in Your Own Backyard."

The K-12 Linux Project, in Portland, is one of the more successful projects for giving Linux to average users, who in this case are students.

Portland borders on the confluence of the Willamette River and the Columbia River, one of the largest rivers in the world. The Columbia River Gorge, on the eastern edge of Portland, is a world class wind-surfing area.

On the other hand: Q. Why do hippies come to Portland? A. Because there are no jobs.

Many people don't like the months of rain every year. They say Portland is the perfect place for slugs and ducks. (However, the rain cleans the air.)

Wow, this looks like a GREAT system for a Linux Terminal Server Project K12! I would love to be able to order a bunch of these and put them in our classrooms. Should be quiet enough and if not, we can yank the hard drives out of them and maybe make cheapo a RAID box out of them. :)

Anyway, I priced a basic system with a refurbished 15" flat screen monitor at $589. Not too shabby for a complete flat screen system. And then get a slightly beafier, headless one for the server for about the same price. Good stuff!

How about just setting up some terminals for people to use? Remeber, not everyone has a laptop.

The 500 bucks would be plenty for a server if you want to set up 10 - 20 terminals on old junk hardware.

I recommend using Icewm with the XP theme (for familiarity) and mozilla. Open office would be nice too if you want to let students do some homework on them.
This is extremely simple to setup using K12LTSP and for the most part you don't have to worry about people hogging bandwith with p2p apps.

Most of the mice had to be replaced (approx $1000.) Because they didn't come with *PROOF* of OS licensing, we had to buy DOS for them all (approx $3000.) We had to create a working software image (approx $800 in labor) then haul them around the district, set them up in labs and ghost them (approx $30,000 in labor.)

Soon they started breaking down (power supplies going out, floppies dying, HD's dying, CMOS batteries going dead, etc.) After all, they were OLD computers. So we had to canabalize systems to keep others running and at times by some of the cheaper parts (CMOS batteries, a few floppies.) This cost plenty (approx $20,000 in time/labor.)

Eventually we decided it was costing too much just to keep them running.. plus space is limited in schools. We wanted to put systems that actually were useful to our students in these labs. You can't just throw these things in the trash (at least not around here due to recycling laws.) The cheapest we found was a place that would take CPUs for $5 each and monitors for $10 each. (The local PC resale place had no interest in any of it.) In all, getting rid of them ran us about another $2000.

If you were keeping track, that means these "free" computers cost the school district around $56,800. With that much cash, we could have gotten 70 brand new PCs from a vendor who pre-ghosts them for us and which have a five year warranty AND still paid for the labor to install them in the classrooms.

And here is something else for you to consider... on average, each tech person in a school district is responsible for 400-500 computers (contrast that to a 1:50 ratio in business.) If the computers require an average of just 10 minutes of time from a tech per *year* compared to a new one, that is as much as two work weeks worth of wasted time.

A whole different issue is how much time is wasted purely by using Windows and the MS model of each PC being independant. People would freak if they realized how much time/money were wasted in schools just keeping the Windows sytems running and installing software vs. how much time needed if they used K12LTSP Linux.

I agree, I work for a small rural public school. Just last year, I retired the last of the 486's running win3.1. If that's not enough, we still have over 400 pentium class computers, most with only 32MB RAM, running Win 95. Every PC we have runs Windows 98SE, except of course for mine which runs freeBSD. As far as software, we use OpenOffice, except for the labs, which have Office2k. As suprising as this may be, we are also one of the better schools in our area, in terms of technology. The school my wife works for doesn't even have a web server or email server!

I have been trying to push for Linux in my district, I am working on installing (that means convincing my super) a Linux terminal server based on k12ltsp. The major obstacle is users, they barely know win95, how are they expected to learn LINUX?!? Most of them don't even know the difference between a browser and an OS, which is a whole other topic. The bottom line, school districts are cash straped. We make due with what we have, that means using "obsolete" equipment, forgoing user training, and just making it work (we use lots of super glue and duct tape).

BTW, our IT department consists of me and one other person. My job duties include, database manager, webmaster, support desk, network technician, desktop technician, network administrator, email administrator, server tech, and sometimes I take out the trash.

Is there a reason they have to run Windows?

Take a look at the K12 Linux Terminal Server Project. With relatively new machines you can be up and going in 2 hours (not including plugging the machines in). I put this in our business lab at the high school and it's been a dream to run. I never have to worry about viruses, and updates/installations are done once. To install a new machine you plug it in, go to the BIOS and tell it to do a network boot. I don't have to worry about any license issues either. If you need Windows, you can also use RDestkop to access Windows Terminal Services.

K12LTSP also comes with squid and for filtering squidguard and Dan's Guardian.

One problem that I've seen with Deep Freeze is when the latest worm comes out. Sure you can reboot your machine and it is clean, but if there is just one machine on your network still infected, you'll become infected again.

Using expensive traditional PCs in classrooms just does not work. Using LTSP based thin-clients does. K12LTSP.org is the answer to the cost issues raised in this article.

Wikibooks.org is a new project that could save millions. Can you say open source textbooks? ;-)

Finally, there are valid points on how PCs are used in the classroom. After 22 years of teaching, here's what I think about it.

1) It is cost efficient use existing hardware that is considered outdated in addition to being free of MS software licensing issues.

2) K12LTSP has pre-configured install CDs available for download , so minimal setup is required.

3) Using diskless clients greatly reduces time spent troubleshooting/changing/testing hardware components on each desktop. When software issues occur, there is a single point of troubleshooting. This saves a fortune in support costs.

4) Far fewer viruses. How much time did you spend patching or cleaning up a MS machine this summer?

5) With some special configuration, they can be used with Macintosh clients.

6) The learning curve with teachers is minimal, and for many students nil.

The administrators and vendors may prevent widespread implementation of K12LTSP in schools, and that's a shame, because in my view this is ideal for both cash-strapped school systems and time-strapped teachers.

1) It is cost efficient use existing hardware that is considered outdated in addition to being free of MS software licensing issues.

2) K12LTSP has pre-configured install CDs available for download , so minimal setup is required.

3) Using diskless clients greatly reduces time spent troubleshooting/changing/testing hardware components on each desktop. When software issues occur, there is a single point of troubleshooting. This saves a fortune in support costs.

4) Far fewer viruses. How much time did you spend patching or cleaning up a MS machine this summer?

5) With some special configuration, they can be used with Macintosh clients.

6) The learning curve with teachers is minimal, and for many students nil.

The administrators and vendors may prevent widespread implementation of K12LTSP in schools, and that's a shame, because in my view this is ideal for both cash-strapped school systems and time-strapped teachers.

I do this for a PK3-8th grade school on 80 or so machines of P200 vintage.

The administration likes the money saved, the kids like it better than Win 9x and some of the teachers like it. The rest of the teachers either tolerate it or hate it.

As for the teachers that hate it, they're lazy and hate anything that's different. I actually had a science "teacher" object to using an OpenOffice book as she didn't like reading.

While we've got all this great technology, teachers simply don't make good use of it. They prefer to "train" students for the job market (this school goes to 8th grade...) by making them do presentations (OpenOffice Impress) rather than teaching them to WRITE.

I teach 7th grade very basic programming using Logo. Better than teaching them to simply click buttons...

• Linux Terminal Server Project,
  
• Open Source Schools magazine, and
  
• Open Source Classroom
  
• Simple End User Linux
  
• SchoolForge
  

This is the reason that many K12 institutions in the northwest are turning to K12LTSP. (Re)use the old hardware, spend some of the new budget on a few servers, hook up the network, and you're finished.
As for the children's response in my school -- there is virtually none. Our children pick up the mouse, ask us where to go, and no other training is often necessary. They know precious little about computers, anyway. Eventually, we hear them bragging to their friends about being able to choose which desktop they want to use.

As for LTSP good luck, I have done many linux terminal based installs but I do not use LTSP as it is to complex and hard to maintain.

Strange, I've had the exact opposite experience with regards to LTSP.
Linux is great run locally, but modern GUIs don't run so well on the junk hardware that most privately funded schools have.
A year ago I decided to give K12LTSP a chance and set up a small server + 3 terminals to demo to my son's school board. Those that understood the tehnology were impressed. So this past summer I purchased a better server and connected the lab's 25 terminals (junk Pentium 90s/120s) to it. Runs like a champ, and we are rolling out 4 terminals to each class room.

The head of the school district of about 25 schools caught wind of it and came down for a look see. They were very very impressed, and would like to roll it out big time.

LTSP is indeed a complex piece of software, but K12LTSP makes it much simpler.

The only one voice of opposition tried to make a point that in the "real world" people are using MS software, so that's what the students should learn.
When I told him what it would cost us to use a MS solution he decided to give open office and mozilla a chance. He's more than happy with the system now.

Remeber that students need to learn concepts, not brand loyalty or even zealotry.
Today's First graders would do well to learn typing and word processing. You can be sure that when they enter the workforce in 15 to 20 years, the current MS windows/office offerings will be irrelevant.

Even easier is K12LTSP, which is an LTSP based distro, booting both etherboot and PXE clients out of the box. Install it on a spare "server," give it a test, and see if it will make the transition for you. Piece of cake to set up, and apt-get for the updates.

You should subscribe to the K12LTSP mailing list, because I know that a lot of guys are struggling witht he same problems, and even have a petition running. I think that most use Win4Lin to solve the problem, but you might post over there. Many helpful people wait to help you.

K12LTSP is a great distro built for what you are talking about... At least some of the packages they include should be internationalizable.

As an aside, Oregon public schools use Linux probably as much or more than any other school district. They even have their own distro!

K12LTSP

One very old method which is lost to many stuck in the Windows-style autonomous desktop computing 'para-dime' is to use Xterminals. Based on off-the-shelf PC components and fat, cheap 2 and 4-way Opteron servers, this old way saves the cost and support headache of many, many drive spindles and duplicated operating system maintenance. The K-12Linux project has shown the way for many schools. Governments and businesses can adopt the same old-fashioned methodology.

Linux is here to stay and it's presence on the desktop will only increase from here. As people get used to the idea that Windows is not the only option, Mac OS may also pick up new converts.

You are an optimist. People buy home machines because they look like what they are used to at work/school/whatever. Hence, most purchases are Windows boxes.

I'm actually a realist. And a realist with access to a large amount of business information through various sales channels. For a large segment of the population, what you say is currently absolutely correct, at least in the US or Canada. In Germany however, the user is more and more likely to be working on a Linux platform AT WORK. Across Europe and Asia, the chances of working on a Linux desktop are going up pretty much day-on-day. That will translate pretty directly to more linux boxes at home. There is also another important side effect of this increase in Linux desktops in a work environment - people become aware that Microsoft is not the only provider of operating systems. Most Joe/Jane User people out there have little or no idea that there are any alternatives. A lot of people would not consider buying Apple systems because thats 'not a PC'.

Breaking that requires breaking into schools and businesses with Linux on the desktop, and that isn't happening anywhere significant in the US. Cited issue is 'the users are used to what we have, why change'. You might have a better shot in Europe. Even the specter of huge licensing costs doesn't seem to have made much of a dent here.

Really, it doesn't matter to me where it starts. For many reasons, the US looks like it will be playing catch-up further down the line as it's margins get undercut by other IT players not funnelling a large chunk of their revenue via a certain company in Redmond. There will still be IT costs - those won't magically disappear just because Linux is widely deployed, but they will be a smaller percentage of the financial capital being laid out for expenses. And the base cost of the OS really is mostly irrelevant to companies - the BIG dollars come from paying for staff or support companies to keep tabs on the servers. Downtime, crashes and unfixable behaviour are BIG factors in working out the costs of an operating system and Linux is generally more stable, has better uptimes, has a proven track record in business , is easier to maintain and manage remotely and is a consistent environment for any UNIX admin to come in and work with. RedHat charges considerably less for it's Advanced Server support than comparable Windows-supporting companies, and for companies with decent UNIX admins, Linux is a comfortable fit into the system without external support.

But to come back to your point about education. Schools probably come top of the table for people who are strapped for cash. Projects like K12LTSP are a godsend for schools if they are prepared to bite the bullet. Many students entering university have Linux skills (from surveys I've seen, those figures are increasing year-on-year).

Linux gaming will be about the last area for Linux users to see even 10% of the games market support Linux from release. But it will happen, and probably within the next 5 years at most.

Cheers,

Toby Haynes

As a technology coordinator in a 2,200 student school district, I feel that articles like this are important as I plan out the future. We have 700 workstations, 94% of them are Macintosh. K-5 run OS 9, 6-12 are now running OS X.

Some of the reasons we stay with the Mac:

Ease of administration: Mac OS X Server and Macintosh Manager/Workgroup Manager coupled with Apple Remote Desktop makes managing this setup possible by one person. Imaging of machines is taken care of by Apple Software Restore.

Price: A $723 eMac ($699 base + $24 for an additional 128MB of RAM). No additional license costs for: server client licenses, imaging software, and virus protection. For $500 I get an unlimited OS X server license.

Years of Service: We can usually get 6-7 years out of a Mac. The 5400s in service all have at least 32MB of RAM and G3 upgrade cards.

For our PC lab I made the decision to move to K12LTSP. These machines were aging PII with 32MB of RAM. a $2,500 dual xeon machine brought this lab back to life for around $100 a machine. I use IceWM as the window manager and installed a XP theme. They run OpenOffice.org. I had one student ask if it was Linux, the rest just blindly use it. :-)

Most of the administrative office uses Windows 2000.

The best tool for the job.

Linux In schools
It would seem in the state of Oregon, they are now implementing Linux in a lot of places that save them money, all with self developed software. They even have their own distro, which is generic to work for any school that wants it.
You can see that there is already government support for local projects. In Oregon, the K12Linux project was started by schools with the help of the Portland Linux User Group, Multnomah County Education Service District, and Red Hat.