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Linux Win In Schools
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.
Microsoft is stepping up efforts to stop license infringement in schools...
Which is pathetic. Microsoft knows the school system is strapped for cash, and now because of their greed, it has backfired. Now the young people of this country will run Linux instead. And Microsoft won't get their money anyway.
Not only is this a blow for Microsoft in terms of market share, but in PR as well.
Honestly, they're volunteering so they're taking time to do things right the first time around. My old high school (which i keep tabs on, as I was the sole computer expert there for years) is horrendous with computers. Using the easily circumventedd security program known as Fortress, they wondered how everyone still played games. And the crappy cyber patrol software would block search engines and leave www.lotsofsexforyou.com open for anyone. For a county with more than 25 schools, all of them running through a single shared T1 (roughly), its pretty bad. Linux could fix a lot of it. The current problem is version differences, they've switched about half the staff over to Windows 2000 servers, leaving the other half on Novell. Thus, no one can access anything as the servers dont have access to the databases any more because the techs are ID10Ts. Rather than pouring money that should be going to teacher payraises and better books, they just upgrade windows again and break more stuff.
Sorry, ranting a little there...but the computer mishaps that my poor HS goes through really bothers me, as it has a negative impact on perceptions of computers and the internet...
http://thechubbyferret.net - Ferret pictures and informative links.
I remember that it used to be Macs everywhere in the schools. The major difference I can see between the Mac of the late 80's/early 90's and linux today (at least as far as the general public would see it) is that there wasn't an abundance of business software available for the Mac back then. There is a ton of quality, low/no-cost business software available for linux today.
There is also a good number of 'fun' software packages out there too -- MP3 players etc. to attract the Internet surfing masses. We just need a killer browser.
I think you're missing the point. There are many purposes for computers in a school system.
Unrelated to the actual teaching mission, computers provide database capabilities for tracking the students' progress and special needs, if any. Grades, attendance, counselor or faculty notes, all can and should be retained electronically. Computers provide communication via messaging or email between administrators and faculty who are likely in widely-separated buildings and often widely-separated towns. They permit rapid production of mind-numbing statistics and colored charts that are so in vogue with top-level edubosses.
Within the educational mission, though, there are a lot of things computers can be used for. For the schools fortunate/large enough to offer computer-focused classes, does the operating system matter? Well, if you're learning C or C++ or Java or Python or whatever, then not really. If you're in a class teaching computer basics (what's a CPU, what's RAM, etc.) then again no. If you're in a lab and using a computer to interface with a data-taking gadget, once more we find the OS to be irrelevant. Foreign language tutorial? Electronic arithmetic flash cards?
There _is_ a role to be played by Windows, though, and you've hit on it. Students who intend to pursue clerical jobs should be exposed through their vocational classes to Windows and Office. Those, as you point out, are the standard tools and it's reasonable to expect that the students will need to know them. However, even these students should be exposed to alternative office suites on alternative operating systems to prepare them for the fact that they might end up in (for example) a Macs-only office. Exposing them to concepts that span a single product makes the difference between teaching and training.
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I think that a number of events may conspire to give Linux a possibility of entering the mainstream market over the next few years, the most prominent events events being...
a) MS tightening up on casual user piracy by actively preventing multiple user installs.
b) added cost of licensing MS products under the new scheme, this will mean that companies will think twice about paying for MS when a similar amount of bucks buys you a single RH Linux disk and a fairly hefty admin staff.
c) some (currently small) demonstrations that Linux now has the capability to function in school and public service environments
d) KDE and Gnome genuinely appear to offer almost everything on the desktop that Windows does (OK the Office suite for KDE is not there yet, but real progress has been made).
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
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Here are a few cool things you can do with Linux for just the cost of the hardware.
1. Diskless art terminals: ThinkNIC (www.thinknic.com) has a wonderful product, a diskless internet workstation. Use some technical knowledge, and you can run GIMP from a server with Remote X, get 4 or 5 of these things at $300 each, and you've got a graphics lab for under $5,000.
2. Web Terminals: I don't mean to be plugging the ThinkNIC (no, I don't work there), but you can use it as a web terminal, placed strategically, like in a student rec center, where kids can surf or check e-mail.
3. Administrative Management: If you're skilled with PHP, and don't want to spend any cash on a competitive product, you can whip up a grades management system or something of that nature with just a dash of MySQL.
4. Haxor Checks: I admin at a private high school, and we just got a donation of about 50 Pentium-133 computers, complete with 2GB drive and 10/100 NIC. So, I set up Snort and SSH on about 10 of them, and put them in the basement of our dorms, sniffing for haxor activity.
5. FreeMail: I don't know if that word is copyrighted, but if you replace MS Exchange (which alot of schools have) with Sendmail or Qmail, you can save quite a bit of cash.
6. Critical Services: Who says you need WindowsNT for a DHCP or DNS server? Linux! A small to mid sized school can run a DNS and DHCP server on one underpowerd box, say a Pentium-100.
7. Support Windows 9x: If you sit down with Samba for a while, you can make it do everything you could need it to do. I have Samba set up as a Primary Domain Controller, and this computer holds all my home directories for the whole school.
What it all boils down to
This is what I have saved with Linux:
3 Windows2000 Server Licenses. (DHCP/DNS Server, Primary Domain Controller, Exchange Server)
1 Microsoft Exchange Server License
5 Windows98 Licenses (ThinkNIC's in the art labs)
5 Adobe Photoshop Licenses (Replace with GIMP)
$2000x5 = $10,000 (Replaced actual $2,300 PC's with ThinkNIC's)
1 Microsoft Proxy Server License (Replaced with Squid)
I hope this gives you guys some ideas.
--Ted