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Linux Win In Schools

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the back-to-school-with-tux dept.

Xaleth Nuada wrote to us about a Wired article that talks a school in Colorado choosing Linux over the traditional choices. The reason? Prohibitive costs for licensing, of course. The school's network is maintained by parental volunteers, and thanks to Linux, can be easily maintained remotely. And for what schools use computers for - primarily the Internet, it's a great solution.

1 of 456 comments (clear)

  1. Good! Now the next steps... by Arethan · · Score: 4, Informative

    Linux is making an impression upon school kids now. Great! Now all we need to do is fix the biggest problem with Linux distros these days. They are all designed to be servers!

    In order for Linux to really make a good desktop OS, a distro must be designed with that goal in mind. Namely, get userspace programs out of the RPMs!! Nothing ticks me off more than having to search through a list of installed system RPMs just so that I can uninstall an old copy of mozilla. We really need to get a separate installer for applications, and get it distro immune. This way, people can start making professional looking install packages for their apps so non-geeks will take them seriously. (Sorry, but I don't know any grandmas out there who believe that source code is the best way to distribute applications. We need to start statically linking apps, and using a generic installer/uninstaller sort of like the Add/Remove programs in Windows.)

    Secondly, I haven't seen a gui application yet that I religiously envoke from the command prompt. Get gui applications out of the $PATH! If I wanted to run xcdroast from the command line every time, I would put a symbolic link in /usr/local/bin myself!

    There are other issues that I'm SURE will get me modded down (like X11 no longer being an efficient display method), but the two biggest problems that I see are the two I listed. There are other obvious issues (like the need for autoruns), but most of these have been taken care of. We really just need a desktop inclined distro, and a way to keep system packages separate from user installed packages.

    Okay moderators, down we go.....