Slashdot Mirror
Addison UK Server Roadshow for Schools
NeTraverse writes "Addison UK is doing a Linux server roadshow demonstrating Linux at schools throughout the UK. This is a easy way for schools to see how Linux could be implimented in their school. Nice resource for those schools thinking about becoming enlightened. They are demonstating thin client computing using Linux and Windows-to-Linux migration software WinLin Terminal Server from NeTraverse..."
With the Windows License (EULA) is there any cost benefit in using Linux as a thin client? We evaluated Citrix and discovered the opposite.
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
I think this is a good idea. It never hurts to show pupils what possibilities there are in operating systems. Otherwise they will say: 'Linux, what's that?'
(Warning: context required)
Sig for sale or rent. One previous user. Inquire within.
initially linux is daunting if you're used to windows. buttons are in the wrong place, and my mother complains that the windows don't quite 'feel' the same and that she can't find all the same games!
but... beyond the fear of something new linux has a lot of very real applications within schools. not only does it give us the ability to teach all of the basic concepts, but it pushes beyond applications and should allow schools to focus on the core understanding of a concept (e.g. spreadsheet knowledge rather than excel know how).
i hope that the schools who have this opportunity to take a closer look will do so with an open enough mind to realise this though... but from my experience with my mother, i suspect it will take time before they do really 'get it'.
I'm suprised there hasn't been this sort of "push" before. Why should money be wasted on Microsoft licenses when it could be spend on something more useful? Maybe even education.
I think using *nix is something that needs to be more forcefully sugested to schools, especially with the current financial situation most schools are being placed in (at least in Michigan). You drop Windows, Novell, and expensive website solutions, and convert to open source ones and you're gonna save a heck of a lot of money.
LINUX SERVER ROADSHOW
Our roadshow van houses a fully functional "mini" IT suite of 5 workstations, a server, printers and more, with information and literature on our servers, Linux in general, 2simple software, Netraverse and much more.
Ideal opportunity for teachers and pupils to evaluate Linux and the server system. Remember this isn't just a Linux operating system, this server can provide a Windows desktop enviroment to every workstation, (not an emulator) saving £1000's compared to Microsoft and Citrix setups.
The Roadshow can show you a better way, a way where we can still teach our children ICT as we are doing now, but without the financial noose that hangs over our heads.
**This service is offered without obligation, and is kindly given by our sponsors, to show schools and educational departments around the UK, that there is an alternative to the ever increasing cycle of hardware and software upgrading.** The Addison Server Roadshow can come to your school or town!
OTOH, this approach is to bring the Windows environment to Linux using thin-client computing. How does it enlighten students about Linux? Maybe they'd get the impression Linux is always meant to ape Windows?
.
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
So when they grew up, they knew the ins and outs of their favorite Windows OS.
The point? If Linux is to grow big, focus on making it a great gaming platform. Todays gamers are tomorrows professional users.
has MS already done a similar roadshow, if not i'm sure it'll be keen to send some cheerleader squads giving out products which actually cost money to buy.
Damn, couldn't find a way to make a funny SCO joke on this subject ...
Just string random stupid words together, add several volumes of pomposity, and you get a SCO joke.
Let me try again to demostrate the ease of my method (which by the way I am patenting): How many SCOs does it take to make Slashdot laugh? 1... 2... 3... hold it... hold it... YES!! A Beowulf clusterfsck!!!
Sig for sale or rent. One previous user. Inquire within.
Learning a new environment is easier when someone is younger. If students are introduced to different languages early in life, they are easier to learn. I reckon OSes are quite the same. As far as mom's are concerned, I forced mine to start using Mac OS X after getting her used to Windows. She made the transition nicely (probably because she wasn't very experienced with Windows in the first place) ;)
Soon there will be Linux CD sharks hanging around the school gates, pirate copies of the latest SuSE, rumours that Linux can actually run on "normal" PCs, and so on. I'm half serious, actually: anything kids are forced to pay attention to, they learn to hate.
Sig for sale or rent. One previous user. Inquire within.
From the NeTraverse technology section:
"Win4Lin Terminal Server 2.0 is derived from proven technologies developed for Unix® based operating systems over the last 15 years, most notably those of SCO® (Caldera®), under the product name of Merge(tm)"
I remember a SCO product named Tarentella which did something like thin clients, but wasn't good enuff in our setup. Must we promote SCOde and SCO technology in schools ?
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
(Without reading the article - as usual ;)
:^o
;)
;)
I'll assume they're going to visit high schools and primary schools...
This is a good idea...but:
I see (at least) three problems:
(I'm going to get flamed to a crisp for this
1) From (my own humble) experience...the teacher who takes the 'computer class' at high school is not necessarily a very experienced computer-user. He is usually a random teacher who was sent to a course to learn about computers, someone else set up the network for him, that is all he knows.
More often than not his students know more about the computers they are using than the teacher.
(Ah, sweet memories...Anyone here who did NOT hack the high-school computer network?
Now it's stupid of me to generalize like this, but I don't see the average teacher installing linux just like that without help. I'm not saying that teachers are stupid - just lacking experience perhaps - and no, not all schools have an IT department. (OTOH Usually there's a 'whiz'kid around, who's more than glad to help...)
2) Don't Micro$oft and Apple sponsor schools and
give them free computers? Do they still do that?
(The obvious idea is: Get the kids to use your
software and computers in school --> they'll want to use them at home and later at work as well --> more customers)
How do you convince the schools to switch to linux (and potentially miss out on future freebies?)
3) See 2, the kids (and parents - the ones who pay the bills) will want what 'everybody else' uses. Experience with $%#% Word etc is perceived as being essential for getting a job. OpenOffice? Hmmm...don't think so.
Of course it's not all bad....
Obvious advantages (for a school)
- Linux is cheap.
- Linux is secure.
(And it will be placed in an environment where
its security-model will get thoroughly tested
- By 'exposing' kids to linux earlier we can increase it's acceptance. (see 2)
- Will run on older hardware (schools have limited budgets)
</rant>
(quoted from NeTraverse Win4Lin Terminal Server S2.0 web page):
Win4Lin Terminal Server 2.0 is derived from proven technologies developed for Unix® based operating systems over the last 15 years, most notably those of SCO® (Caldera®), under the product name of Merge(tm).
So their technology is actually derivated from SCO's... prepare to get sued.
“Wait for Hurd if you want something real” –Linus
school children are now encouraged just to make a good attempt at spelling and trying to write works how they sound.
MS word will then automatically pick up the slack.
I used to work for a large educational organisation in the UK. Microsoft wanted to work with us on their stand at BETT, which is a big education fair in the UK. I met with the Microsoft people and they explained what they wanted - basically educationalists from the organisation I worked for to do various demonstrations using MS software showing how it could be used in schools. We would get a load of free software in return.
I raised the point that I thought that the demonstrations they were suggesting were not very educational and poorly designed. I was amazed at the response I got from them. They basically said they didn't care if they weren't educational. They were just there to get schools to buy MS software and to try to get the maximum profit from schools. They actually said that, bare faced. I couldn't believe it - at least they could have pretended to be a bit interested in the educational aspect.
And before some of you respond "they're a business, what do you expect, it's only about profit" etc... I have worked with various companies before on joint projects between industry and education and most of them have been great - really helpful, genuinely interested, really wanting to do something to help educational organisations. IBM were great on one project for instance, and they didn't try to milk it for publicity either. That day with Microsoft I felt I'd really seen into the heart of the beast, and it's not pleasant.
This is a good idea - and reading it over it seems to be aimed at the non-savvy user. That being said, do you think they will get confused when they click on contact us and there is no actual contact information?
none, zip, nada. Not even an email address or a mailto: link...
Anyway - good idea, just don't be surprised when the requests *don't* flow in...
Create music
Kids can learn important computer skills on ANY operating system. Schools should be using Linux cause it allows them to put money back into other educational programs, like arts -- not because of some fancy road show, and certainly not because it can run Windows apps.
I Geek
Well, there might no point in "enforcing" several operating systems early in life.
Every people will have to deal with different languages in his life, but how many people on the whole will have to use linux ? Unless (and sometimes even if...) you're working in the IT or do scientific research, chances are that you'll never have to deal with linux.
So I believe that learning unix-like OSes should be a personal choice. Most people are happy using MS Word, and thus I don't see myself anytime soon praising the benefits of early "latex editing in emacs" learning.
I'd rather see me children (which I don't have yet...) learn italian than linux early in life.
But I'll bite. :)
This isn't college. Kids will only learn the basic usability issues that'll get them ready for "real" CS courses -- provided they even want to go that way.
By learning through Linux, they'll probably be one step ahead of the students bound to Windows. As a general rule, those familiar with Linux have no problem running Windows. The opposite is so not true.
"Outlaw it. Ban it. "Linux is bad for you and you can't get it!""
I think SCO's doing a good job here.. they even compare Linux to illegal music! What are the students waiting for?
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
SCO is combatting this scourge right now. :)
'I believe that children are the future' or some such sap. Schools have boards of governors who are parents, that have influence over what the school does. Schools' IT budgets come from our taxes. So, isn't there some scope for an advocacy groups of IT-savvy parents to push Linux in schools through becoming governors or lobbying them, providing voluntary assistance, and identifying preferred suppliers?
--- Yx3 = Delilah ---
It's kind of sad how some people insist that software should be chosen on some lofty ideological principles instead of acknowledging the cold, hard reality that MS Windows and Office are and will be the de facto standards in business worldwide for the decades to come.
Sure open source has its uses like the success of Apache and Linux in the server markets shows. However, most kids will not end up as system administrators but office workers who will only do word processing and spreadsheets. It is essential to get them familiarized with the standard tools of the trade at the earliest opportunity.
In contrast, those kids who end up as professional IT workers will always have the curiosity and skill to learn the more esoteric things like altenrative operating systems and other by themselves. There is no need to waste society's resources on trying to teach these difficult subjects to everyone.
BOO! TERRO
I don't see it as enforcing kids to learn Linux (remember the teachers won't know it either), but allowing schools to do more with the available money.
Having the whole class huddling around one PC while the teacher demonstrates something is no way to learn. Each student requires individual access to a PC and applications and that costs money.
Open Office is entirely adequate for the topics my kids are covering
That being said, I think that "word processing" computers should remain Mac OS or Windows.
*Today, this is only true of some distributions.
I know of a distro at ofset.org that is available. It is being used at quite a few places in india to demonstrate linux and its capabilities for school children.
At my college (that's a high school to you Americans) here in Winchester we had that guy from Smoothwall come to talk to us about Linux. He did a great talk and really got some people interested. Of course, I was already running Linux, and didn't like it being made popular ;)
pirate copies of the latest SuSE
Actually, SuSE doesn't ship ISO's for free, so kids can't get legal SuSE even now (as CD images, that is). This is also the reason so many have been unable to try out SuSE (including your truly - had I been able to try it for free, I might have recommended it for my company over Red Hat. It's easier to spend company money than your own).
I think this arrangement is pretty lame. People should be able to get SuSE ISO's for home use for free, while charging for corporate desktops and SLES.
Save your wrists today - switch to Dvorak
"acknowledging the cold, hard reality that MS Windows and Office are and will be the de facto standards in business worldwide for the decades to come."
I don't remember what the de facto standard was when I was at school. It certainly wasn't the same as it is now. Technology changes constantly, that is its nature.
Children need to be learn general principles not how to use Microsoft Office 2000 SP2.
I work in several Primary schools in the UK and, although this is a step in the right direction, it doesn't stand a chance.
Most schools have already got full networks with windows. They won't be interested in replacing them.
Even one of the local "showcase" schools which doesn't use the Research Machine software which is all-but monopolistic in British schools (thanks to government approval), has a massive RM network with Windows. The windows licenses are already paid, the hardware is already there, the thing is configured and working and cost a lot of money to put there.
Schools are kept in a constant upgrade cycle to meet new pupil/computer ratios all the time (yes, even Infant / Junior schools). That means they are spending £10,000 a year or so by just keeping their networks up-to-date enough to run the latest kids software, putting enough machines it. There is certainly a need for a thin-client structure here, especially with all the old donated machines etc.
But, they won't be interested in re-training / hiring staff that can work the server or in "yet another" network upgrade. They won't be interested in replacing their systems with an "unknown".
Most schools are currently being offered and considering, as well as actually buying, XP upgrades for their RM networks (we're talking in the region of £40-50,000 for a small, suburban infant school, here). Thin-clients alone would save costs, certainly. Thin-clients on a Linux-based server is even better.
Even if you could convince the board of governors and the school itself to make such a quantum leap into the unknown, they won't know what it is, they can't/won't see the benefits and they can't afford the downtime.
I am hired purely because the networks they have are in and working. Most of the problems I run across are basically things which teachers can do but just don't have time. Most secondary schools have IT-specific staff and I'm proof that the Infant/Junior schools are heading that way.
Once they have trained, knowledgeable IT staff with ***purchasing power***, we can start.
They also should have started publicising earlier... it's coming up to end-of-term and most schools already have their full upgrade for next year planned out and paid for. One school I work in has their entire IT budget for the next three years planned out on 100BaseT CABLING.
This project could also be helped along by things like Tesco's Computers For Schools voucher schemes etc. Free computers if the kids parents spend enough in a supermarket.
Basically, I'd love to see this. My day is filled with silly nightmarish systems that make simple changes virtually impossible (e.g. taking 8 hours to set up a wireless network between an outdoor classroom and the internal network... gave up in the end due to software problems, old hardware, poor network configuration and the red-tape associated with getting new IP addresses).
Thin-clients, on a stable Linux base is a dream for me. Unfortunately, I have to deal with "manager-style" staff in schools who ask "can I get onto the internet if I log in to the hard drive?" and "I've always wondered what the little wheel in the mouse did" (TRULY). These are the people with buying-power.
These people aren't gonna have a clue what we're on about and certainly won't part with the time or the money required to have someone come in, format ~100 computers back to basics, install a network server and have someone on hand to maintain it all.
It's a nice idea. I want them to try to convince people. Unfortunately, it's gonna be a very rough ride for them while RM still has a monopoly and while the government and local education authorities does little to try to educate them.
I don't know how the funding of computers in schools works, but I assume MS must get their cut somewhere, and as a taxpayer, I don't think that would represent a good use of my money.
As regards the 'well, the real world uses MS stuff', firstly I didn't realise that the purpose of schools was to churn out a bunch of MS-using automata and secondly, if the children are taught the principles of the various packages (i.e. what a word processor is for, the things that it ought to be able to do, how to look for help) they ought to be able to adapt their skills to proprietory alternatives over the course of a wet Wednesday afternoon.
If the UK government wants a competitive and innovative IT industry, it ought to recognise that getting kids into computers via stuff you can actually tinker with would probably be a good start :-)
there are such things as timezones you know...
"What do you mean you have no ice? Do you expect me to drink this coffee hot?" - Random Customer, Clerks
(Ah, sweet memories...Anyone here who did NOT hack the high-school computer network? ;)
;-)
I graduated in 1975. IBM came out the the PC in 1981.
There was no network to hack you insensitive clod.
The truth shall set you free!
I never said FORCE. No one is forcing anything. Simply giving an option by letting people know it exists. There are people that don't know Linux (or any other given OS except maybe Windows or Mac OS) exists. But I'm all about choices. Stick vs Manual tranny, HTML vs WYSIWYG, Linux vs Windows, etc. I like more control. Not everyone has to (like I said, I put my mom on Mac+Apple 'cause it's easy and generally less buggy than Windows+PC).
But I agree. I'd rather have bi-lingual kids, though bi-OS would be nice too...
And yes, I know it doesn't run on 6502 machines...
It's kind of sad how some people insist that software should be chosen on some lofty ideological principles instead of acknowledging the cold, hard reality that MS Windows and Office are and will be the de facto standards in business worldwide for the decades to come
Get real! Decades from now, computing is going to be nothing like today. The whole of the life of the NT family spans just over one decade. Two decades ago would you have backed MS against IBM - I think not.
I'm no Linux zealot but it's noticable that OpenOffice is making strong growth. I wouldn't dream of trying to predict beyond the next ten years but I'd give 50/50 that OpenOffice will be bigger than MS Office in 5. Even died in the wool MS types at work are looking seriously at OpenOffice, and that's only the 1.0 release.
I've just spent the last 21 months as network person at Moor Park High School in Preston, Lancs. I implemented two Linux servers which did internal www which staff could access parts of via their W:\ drive, mail, proxy (with authentication and ability to block kids by a gui), ability to reclone damaged NT/2000 workstations, quota limits for kids, staff and pupil shared areas (accessible via S:\ and T:\ drives), shell access for kids, remote KDE/GNOME desktops in a window for staff (not that they used them!)...
/etc/passwd in many ways) - such as ftp, ssh, local or XDMCP access, you can chown and chmod files and directories to them, and it just works. It can be, however, an absolute nightmare to set up, and so I've written a document on the subject and how to get past a number of random error messages here.
The whole thing cost them £400 in software. Unfortunately two weeks ago they still insisted on me spending 7 hours a week standing in a library doing duties telling kids to take their coats off... and all for less than six pounds fifty an hour (probably 9-10 USD per hour). They're now looking for three people to replace me. I've now gone self employed and am the cheapest IT person I know even at more than twice the rate they paid me.
The biggest difficulty I found with implementing Linux was getting it to understand our existing username/password database. You have several options, some of them being:
- Make everyone set a new password (bad idea - they'll want to know why)
- Use pwdump.c (available from Samba mirrors) to create an smbpasswd file from your existing NT or 2000 server.
- Use John the Ripper or L0phtcrack to crack your existing account database. This isn't such a great solution, as some passwords could take weeks to crack, and some passwords will get changed after you cracked them.
- Use Winbind, which is part of the Samba suite which will talk to your existing NT/2000 setup and make those user accounts appear as ordinary users. This is an absolutely great solution once it works; you can give them access to any service you want (it works through PAM, so it's as good as having them all in
- Read the comments in smb.conf
Management are always a problem, and it's the usual scenario: if it's Free, it has to be crap. If this is a problem, then instead of telling them how good it is, just show them. It's not difficult to find a spare unused machine in a school, or to boot Knoppix onto something, and you only need something with 16 or 32MB to install Debian or an old version of RH onto it and make it a useful server - machines of that calibre of write offs in UK schools right now with all the money the UK government are pumping into them. (This quarter alone, we had £27,000 to spend on IT - something like $40,000.)
Set something up, and implement a feature that your network lacks - quotas, web, email, cloning (use Partition Image - a much nicer replacement to Norton Ghost), proxy server (use Squid and Webmin so that your boss can easily add users to a list of banned people). Consider writing a cronjob to automatically copy everyone's home directory once a day, and then suddenly you'll be able to restore someones work from backup from any particular day or week (depending on how much hard disk space you have - a couple of cheap maxtor 80GB disks or something similar will do the job) in the space of ninety seconds *every time*. No more messing with backup tapes. (But still do tape backups, because you don't know when a lightning strike/minor earth tremor is going to destroy every hard disk...)
Write a manual. "This is how our Linux boxes were set up. The IP is this, here are the open ports, these packages were compiled from sourc
>> (Ah, sweet memories...Anyone here who did NOT hack the high-school computer network? ;)
;-)
:)
:o
> I graduated in 1975. IBM came out the the PC in 1981.
> There was no network to hack you insensitive clod.
heh heh heh
Geeeeeez you must be old! <<grins, ducks and runs for cover>>
but eh....
<nostalgia - eyes glaze over - voice starts to wheeze>
the first computers I got to use in high-school had tape-drives (yay, mini-cassettes
and monochrome screens. No hdd's.
Half or more an hour to load a smiple BASIC program, 20 minutes to fiddle with it, end of class.
The next high-school I went to had networked DOS machines with colour screens <<gasp>>, running a Unix emulator (serious!) written in eh...C or BASIC I think. (Press Ctrl+C et voila...i'm at the command-prompt)
Fun things to do in class: Observe what file my neighbour was trying to access from the (woofully underpowered) server, try to open the same file - watch network lock up...end of class.
The last high-school I went to had a network of
Macintosh classics...which was completely overrun by virii and whatnot...that was fun too...NOT.
What did we do with these Macs?
Wordprocessing...in fact, that's all I ever seemed
to do at high-school...glorified word-processing classes.
The best high-school hack I heard of was one where some kid had written a little TSR that would randomly remap all the keys on the keyboard after each key-press. It was probably some sort of boot-virus, and it had spread over that schools entire network. My brother never had any 'computer' classes because of it
</nostalgia>
If this thing takes off, MS will most likely fall all over itself to provide "deep discount" liscensing schemes for education. They're not stupid: this is basic strategy 101 for them - catch 'em when they're YOUNG. A mind is never too young for assimilation. When i went to college there were Macs everywhere... /t
#!/usr/bin/english
hey guuys iam jst wonergng what for time time?
http://benz.mine.nu
I'm not that old, but when I went to High School there was no network also. PCs were still kinda new, now granted, I built my first Sinclair when I was 9, but when I was in High School the whole thing still hadn't really taken off. I'm sure there must have been one or two in the school somewhere, but I can't remember where. We had no computer courses... actually I did have one now that I think about it, but it was a 'gifted' summer school class, not a regular course.
Typing class (on actual typewriters, not computers) was the only thing that actually applied to computers in the regular curriculum I think. And it has actually turned out to be a lot more useful than any high school computer course is likely to be.
The local university, however, did have a network I got into occasionally. That was my first exposure to nethack, running on a univac. Ahh the memories ;)
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
Where can i dl them?
most public schools are living on fundings from government or other sponsors. so if they're switching over to free products, is it possible that they'll get a cut in funding?
eg instead of giving this school $20 million on IT, the government can now assign the money to, say, public transport.
and what would spring to mind when you tell the school board that the software costs nothing but you need extra staff and training etc to set everything up?
sometimes a better product doesn't equal to a better solution. and for some people, they would rather deal with money issue than dealing with time or human resource issues.
this reminds me one of my marketing lectures, which drew an analogy of getting to a beach head first during a battle will always ensure victory.
This line:
The whole thing cost them £400 in software.
should have read:
The whole thing cost them £400 in
hardware.Obviuosly. Just to clarify, that got us a cheap box with an AMB Duron 800, 512MB ram, 2x80GB hard disk, 3xRTL-8139 network cards, PCI 128 sound card (sound cards are useful in servers, particularly when you don't normally have a monitor attached - for £15 for the card and some speakers you can program the thing to literally speak to you whenever there's a problem - handy and easily done with Linux).
We also had a problem at Moor Park with kids wasting vast amounts of printer paper and ink all over school. I wanted to use LPRng and Samba to make every workstation print to printers via that server, and that way we could use printer accounting to track/limit what individual kids could print out, and/or bollock them or charge them when they print too much. Unfortunately after discussions with the headteacher I still had to spend every break and lunchtime standing in a library telling kids to take their coats off - in addition to taking my own breaks and lunches.
If your network is well isolated from the Internet (i.e. no-one can initiate a TCP/IP connection from outside), and security isn't your main concern, get yourself a copy of TightVNC (I used 1.2.6, which worked fine for me), and install it on a few workstations. By making a few changes, you can then make the TightVNC server run completely silently in the background (provided you disabled Task Manager for kids, and they can't get a process listing any other way). A few extremely rushed notes from my manual on how to do this:
As local administrator:
Now you can call up the desktop of any workstation in school by running vncviewer and typing in the machine name of the computer you wish to view. By giving computers sensible names corresponding to their location around school (such as librarydesk1, room21row2col3, food, room18, etc), you can suddenly call up any kid's desktop and see what they're up to. Serious privacy and security concerns, but very useful when weighed up against having to run around the place like a headless chicken all the time because someone else doesn't know what the cAPS lOCK does yet!
If you're running Apache, you can then write a CGI script that gives you a map of all the workstations in the school (formatted, for example, as HTML tables). For each computer on your map, make it link to:
http://10.67.24.116:5800/?password=p5a2s78s243w2 d
- and then you have a clickable map which will bring up the display of any workstation in school in any java enabled web browser. But that's almost completely unsecure, so the risk is your own. Make sure you pick an extremely hard password and that said webpage isn't accessible by kids. Make sure also that no-one can see the password in the URL as they look over your shoulder.
Just to reiterate, that's nothing more than a fun but messy unsecure hack. Don't do this unless at least 50% of your kids have learning/behaviour difficulties...
--
Andrew
It is a shame this is not further reaching, something that has always amused me about Windows, and this is all versions including XP is that it is not properly localised.
I have XP, on my work machine, set up to have my locale set to English [United Kingdom] and yet it still manages to put "Color" into dialogs. It must be rather fustrating to try and teach kids to spell colour in the English way and yet have to use a computer that does not spell it correctly from the UK point of view. If my Gnome2 desktop knows how British people spell Colour, why doesn't XP?
From their page: NeTraverse technology supports a single user desktop environment, a multi-user server-computing environment, and a remote virtual network-computing environment. Win4Lin Terminal Server 2.0 is derived from proven technologies developed for Unix® based operating systems over the last 15 years, most notably those of SCO® (Caldera®), under the product name of Merge(tm). This is nothing but an invitation to SCO to sue them, looking the current trend of SCO lawsuits.
What's under yellowstone?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Similarly, there's even less point in 'enforcing' a Windows-only universe on people. Most people will have Windows at home. Letting them see another OS in school allows them to compare the to and honestly decide which will work better for them.
Linux does not imply Latex, either. I'd expect people to be using things like OpenOffice. Fact of the matter is that not that many people actually work with Windows directly either. They tend to use applications. Windows (or Linux) is really just the base used to start those applications. As long as people have access to the functionality that they need/want, the OS is almost irrelevant.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
Is to build, configure, test, and give them 1-2 machines running linux and offer to support it (the 1 machine) for them, as well as providing texts for their IT department.
Most schools need computers bad, and if you donate an internet computer or 2 to them on the basis they keep linux on it to setup on their network, they'll most likely be happy as hamsters to accept. Just make sure to give them boxes and lisencing, they like boxes and lisencing as most schools are paranoid about these things.
Candy-Coated Knowledge
"Enlightened"?
/.
Good job I don't expect unbiased news on
Hmmm.
Yeah. The last thing you'd think of doing would be right-clicking the drive icon and selecting 'properties'.
IT'S SO OBTUSE.
OK, lets try and install some software on this linux box... hm configure, make, fucking what switch is that, where the fuck is it, ahh bollocks, I'm obviously NOT SMART ENOUGH to use this alternative OS. That will guarantee it's growth in market share.
Hmmm.
When I as at school we used BBC micros, then Acorn Archimedes. 15 years ago this could have been described as the 'de facto' standard.
Children need to be learn general principles not how to use Microsoft Office 2000 SP2.
Quite right. Given that for most users one word processor is much the same as another, I'd love to see MSOffice dropped just because of it's enormous cost. Especially as the constantly changing file structures force schools into an expensive upgrade cycle.
Dunno about that. It is the de facto standard now, but I'm not going to bet my life either way on it staying that way over the next 20 years.
For those people, OpenOffice will give them enough familiarity to handle themselves with MS office. Not many people actually do the deep and wierd stuff where the differences between the MS and Open office suites become glaring, and those are ....
In contrast, those kids who end up as professional IT workers will always have the curiosity and skill to learn the more esoteric things like altenrative operating systems and other by themselves.
If a solution handles it for the mediocore kids, and still provides a platform for the future-IT types to do some real work at school, then why not go that path? Especially if you can do it for less (leftover money for other initiatives). Besides being the launch base for an office suite, Linux also provides a bunch of programming languages and development environments for free that would probably cost a few thousand dollars for the Microsoft equivalent.
I think that it's also important to realize that teaching kids how to program doesn't just train them to be IT workers. It also teaches them ways of thinking. Programming is a relatively unforgiving process. A program either works, or it doesn't. There's not a whole lot of room for hand-waving. At the same time, it encourages free thinking. There are many ways of doing even the most simple of tasks and once people realize that, they really do start themselves thinking about other ways of doing the things that they're used to.
In my world, open thinking is a good thingâ. trade copy
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
Did nobody notice that this post is an advertisement? It's a story about NeTraverse posted by NeTraverse.. And they weren't even smart enough to prepare to be slashdotted? Not sure I would take these guys too seriously.
....that are going to try and persuade me to ditch my NetWare servers for linux ones....Good software is worth paying for and besides NetWare and all the extras cost hardly anything if your a school - and you can't beet the uptime....200+ days no prob!
"And it will be placed in an environment where
its security-model will get thoroughly tested"
Erm, kinda like the internet, only better?
Oh, you children. In high school, we had to write our programs in Fortran on coding sheets, take them to the local community college, keypunch the code onto a card deck, and either take the deck to the guys in the glass room (when they'd let us have access at all) or load and run them ourselves on an already-elderly IBM 1620, which had less memory and capability than the cheapest of pocket calculators today. All the output was on greenbar paper from a TTY terminal. When we got to use a PDP-7 with a punched paper tape reader, we thought we were in heaven!
I can only speak for my county (in the top three for IT support in the country according to government figures released recently - we all have an extra day's leave this year as a performance bonus), but it is Windows all the way. I know of only one school in the county that has a Linux server and they are going to swap it for a Windows server because they can't get any support for it - it was installed by a parent of a child who has now left the school).
Using Linux on an admin system is just out of the question - most UK schools run SIMS: 'School Information Management System' and won't even consider buying a system that won't run this software. The curriculum software market is dominated by RM. Their SchoolShare and StoreBox" systems are very popular with primary schools due to the large amount of pre-installed educational software that is strongly tied into the National Curriculum and their Community Connect 3 systems are common in larger schools.
I can't see many schools choosing to go with Linux when Windows is so ubiquitous - it would mean giving up just about all local government IT support other than hardware repairs and going it alone and I just can't see that happening in more than a handful of schools.
Input error. Replace user and press any key to continue.
Why should money be wasted on Microsoft licenses when it could be spend on something more useful? Maybe even education.
Usually, the IT budget is seperate from the (non-IT) educational budget. Instead of funneling the money out of IT, most smart schools will use it in a more productive way.
Usually, this means that you end of having more up-to-date machines, perhaps some better peripherals, and (here's the one that surprises many) better support.
Think about this: If the hardware is more up-to-date, you have less hardware failures. Without windows, there are less viruses/etc attacking the systems. With linux, remote support can be nice and snappy (either SSH or a tunnelled X11 session), with sometimes almost immediate support. Thin clients or remote desktops can allow for nice "demos" of new programs, with a presenter showing to many different users from a centralized location.
And yes, this is all possible, and all being done in fact. I've seen it. Don't renew those MS licenses, you've got much better places to put your budget money!
This is an interesting idea. I have a few contacts in the local school system and I just don't have the time to demo some of the things that I suggest they look into... a roadshow seems like a great way to put this out there !
anyone know of anything like this in the USA (East Coast, Mid-Atlantic )? - TIA
"Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech."--Benjamin Franklin
I really don't get this product. It lets you run Windows 95, 98 or ME, none of which are great for a networking envirinment, over a network, and this is progress? The end result can't be any more stable than Windows 98, at least on a terminal to terminal basis.
Alternatively, they could run LTSP and rdesktop on one server, buy licences for W2K or 2003 server at a 90% educational discount to run on another server, and pay for the licences by selling their hard discs from the terminals to the school kids...
Virtually serving coffee
That's quite a nice touch. I bow to your skill, good sir.
http://www.netraverse.com/products/wts/technology. php
Wow. Now I'm scared. Really scared :-)
Useless, but very impressive-looking.
Actually, it's called Windows Script Host.
...and when going to the glass room, we had to walk uphill both ways! (you insensitive clod!) (PROFIT!!)