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This story is particularly timely given the the Canadian Linux Users Exchange is planning a National Windows Refund Day in the near future. Cheers Bill

I assume you're in Toronto because you linked to a Toronto DNUG. In that case, what you were looking for is the TLUG.

Except that according to the BIG GIANT NOTICE on top of the linux.ca website they are closed. And the website is frozen as of March 2000.

We do that
here and
here.

I agree that it isn't all that good if you can't pay for college. In Canada, I didn't have enough money, so I took out student loans.

While post secondary education might not be possible in the U.S., there is still nothing to prevent a person from scrounging the components of a P.C. They're quite cheap these days. When I was in highschool I built a 286 system for under $200 (CDN). The comperable power today would be a low end Pentium... a much more useful system. I still use a 486 for Linux and as a firewall at home.

If you're so financially strapped that as a student your guardians rely on your part time income to pay for your home.... that's really terrible. I have no idea what to do for those kids.

On that note, for a while there was a great group in Toronto called CLUE, the Centre for Linux Excellence. They would take donations of old hardware from companies (486's) and build systems from it. They would then drop a standard build of Debian onto the machines, teach kids how to use them, then give them to the kids... recommended donation of $25. They eventually buckled under... I think they had problems with rent.

http://centre.linux.ca/

IMHO widespread work like that would be far more helpful than the schools.

There is also a "Free University" movement in Toronto.

http://www.utoronto.ca/acc/freeu/

I'm not sure if you're looking for general advice on how to administer a network, or for education-specific software to run on those systems.

Things like Dan's Quiz Page cover creating custom quizes, while there are some sites that have a specific topic like science. The general site LinuxForKids.org has links to most educationl titles, though the emphasis is for home-use.

If you're looking for help on how to set things up, and administer them, look here at Learnux.

If you're looking for School Administration (beurocratic) software, I didn't find any. That doesn't mean that there isn't any. Take a look here , here or here . Ask these groups questions, there are quite a few mailing lists on this subject.

Right now there's something like this being done at the Corbett school in Tucson Arizona. The link won't show you much other than some drawing by the students, but there's a short description in an email. It's a work in progress, done mostly by volunteers.

Really, it all comes down to making a bunch of cheap X terminals and some application servers. The X terminals can be much cheaper than $400 (refurbished 486's work well enough). Though they are hard to maintain, it's even possible with donated equipment (which, while plentiful for schools, tends to be otherwise useless). There has been a lot of discussion about this on the SEUL-edu mailing list (interested people are invited to join).

Maintenance issues as a whole are very important in schools, with public labs, occasionally malicious users, and a lack of knowlegable admins. The lack of security on Windows and Macs make them totally inappropriate for classroom use, but somehow most schools don't seem to appreciate this. As a result, school computers tend to be finicky and inflexible, and take up as much time doing dumb technical stuff as they do helping children learn.

The alternative is the laptop schools, which is to me a Very Bad Idea. But at least the computers trully are personal -- and if the kid messes up their computer, they've messed up their computer. But there's so many minuses to laptops...

Of course the Riverdale school has been using Linux for a long time on the server side, but recently there's been a lot more activity on the client side as well. I think Linux can do most of what most schools want to do right now, which doesn't make it perfect at all, but perfection is not a serious option to many schools -- or even half-way decent (I'm sorry to say).

Learnux is a Canadian volunteer effort to recycle old computers into useful Linux computers.

CLUE (Canadian Linux Users Exchange) and a few of the Ontario Linux users groups will be at Comdex Toronto in July...

I just work 2 blocks away from Skydome now... I can walk to it. :)
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