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Linux in High School Labs
lexbaby writes "The Salt Lake Tribune has a story about how Logan High School (Logan, Utah) is using Linux in their student programming lab. The main use is for robotics. There is the old discussion about if Linux is truly cheaper to operate in the long run. Is Linux a legitimate solution to school districts facing a financial crunch?" I hope some of the students involved post pictures of the robots they're building in class.
We setup linux in one of our labs using old computers that otherwise were useless. Using ltsp [ltsp.org], we managed to make usable workstations for word processing and internet access. Based on our experience, linux definitely was cheaper than the expensive windows terminals and citrix licenses.
My school uses nothing but Win2K. It takes 5 minutes to log in, and all is disjointed. The sad thing is that they have just lost their last Linux server, which says a lot.
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Also check out The Linux Terminal Server Project K-12, a cool project devoted to this sort of thing.
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We use Linux in the robots labs at my University's CS department. Because it's robotics we're talking about here, the cost savings aren't significant as the hardware is much more expensive than the software, ratio-wise. The benefit of using Linux is its 'hackability'.
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I think this is a great step towards educating technology students about platforms other than Windows. I think its even more interesting that they are doing robotics in high school. We had a similar program at the high school I went to where we did all sorts of stuff with electronics from robots to electronic repair. The courses counted towards credit with the local university. The program eventually grew to groom students into network engineers working on getting them prepped and ready for their Cisco certifications (maybe a few others at this point). Its good to see that with all the criticism of public schools, that some are still scrapping together enough money to do some interesting projects.
When I was in high school the programming that we did was all done by telnetting into a Linux box and using GCC. This proved to be cheaper for the school district in terms of licenses for compilers (zero cost). This way we were able to keep the costs for computer science courses separate from the costs for maintaining a computer lab. Also, using Linux (and before that some form of UNIX) for computer science put me lightyears ahead of those who had never touched the command line in introductory college CS courses.
The TCO in this environment should be far lower then a Microsoft equivalent. The operating system is free, there are no licenses, and no fees for the purchase of the renewal of licenses for Windows based development software. The support overhead should be non-existant, as the school district IT staff should just set them all up as terminals, or can have images handy for quick ghosting (if needs be).
The GHCA (Greater Houlton Christian Academy) has a nice Linux based lab too. They say they saved a lot of money doing it this way, which seems pretty obvious... Their webpage is here
I live and work in Logan as a UNIX engineer/CTO of a technology company -- this is great news. If you guys at Logan high school need some UNIX/Linux expertise, let me know. I'd be happy to donate my time/services. :) (brian@zyx.net)
-- People who hate Windows use Linux. People who love UNIX use BSD.