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Hawaii Puts Old Computers To Work in Linux Labs
johnp pastes "'As pressure mounts to meet state-mandated educational technology standards, some Hawai'i schools with limited budgets are getting updated computer labs at a fraction of the typical costs.'"
You mean someone realized that they could get a comprehensive solution for extremely little money by NOT buying windows? What a concept. I really hope more schools get Linux labs, even if they already have MS systems. I like the idea of kids getting their hands on something other than MS.
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heyyy
As the UoH basically invented computer communications by using a discarded satellite to create the ALOHA system, the basic mathematics of which govern Ethernet and the Internet.
Mumia Abu-Jamal is *laughably guilty*. Check the evidence.
there's also spyware and backdoorware. No wonder why they give acrobat binaries instead of xpdf. See who does this and figure out. He who has ears, listens.
A more interesting question is total cost of ownership; i.e. how much money this really saves over the long run (factoring in things like the fact that the PTA is probably giving the schools grief because the students are learning Office or similar skills that will help them get jobs... believe me, this happens). I'm sure someone has opinions (and hopefully data) related to that.
An even more interesting questions is why our schools aren't adequately funded...
Disclaimer: I work for a company, but I don't speak for them.
Apparently, he doesn't realize that other branches of the state gov't feel differently, and are putting out bids to convert from Windows to Linux
"He who throws mud, loses ground." - proverb
My l33t hax0r student just 0wn3d your honor student's Windoze boxen.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
huh?
Cause in 1991 when I was on "business computer" class in Kaneohe, HI (east side of Oahu) we were running some crusty old 386 machines w/ MS Works. We still had quite a few old Tandy comptuers with 8" floppy drives in the room too. Though nobody used them.
My first taste of the internet was in sept. 1990 on these NAPLS terminals w/ 1200bps modems they were brand new but right after 2400bps modems came out. But every school and state library had at least one. They connected to an X.25 PSDN called "Hawaii FYI". There was a taxpayer funded chat service on the system, as well as links to the state lib, U of H and some state info systems.
I met some uni students who then turned me on to MUDs, though you had to break out of the library system to get on the net cause there was no public ISP back then. Unless you counted the university system, but then you had to go to Keller hall in the middle of the night. I actually got to meet a member of LoD while messing around online who was at the time an admin for Santanfe.edu. Oh man this brings back memories!
For the use of Free Software and especially for this quote:
"In HOSEF labs, computers run Fedora, a GNU/Linux-based operating system."
(P.S. It's not because of Fedora.)
I'm afraid you lost me there. Are you saying a PTA wants students to gain MS Office skills, or that they don't? In any case, I agree with you, some data would be nice. At my son's public elementary, they're lucky enough that the Hawaii DOE pays to have a couple of staff members manage the computers and teach the computer labs. The TCO would all depend on whether said staff members purchase a clue about Linux or not. At the moment, the school's iMacs are all running MacOS 9.
Luke, help me take this mask off
Now that's out of the bag, Redmond will be on the phone by the end of their week with their Hawaiian office to offer "discounts" to the schools.
And they smegging well should too. ;-)
This not only stops certain groups of corporate facist pigs from getting that little bit fatter - using the older computers is good for the environment.
There's a crapload of toxic waste generated from every circuitboard and chip that is made.
How much toxic krud came from the crappy computer you are using now? huh? Huh? Go out and plant a tree.
Im off to run my super-cluster of older PC's in support of the environment, right after I install that 3-phase power circuit and breath in some more coal fumes...
Now I'm 42, and I still wear flip-flops, even though I live in Massachusetts.
Slashdoters, please convince whoever funds those schools to continue doing so because if things do not change, no one will be willing to donate these computers for use in the 3rd world. I also realize that no body owes the third world a living.
On the other hand, if there was a way to boot these machines the NoMachine way, http://www.nomachine.com/, that would be great.
Cb..
Disclaimer: I work for a company, but I don't speak for them.
...we just didn't tell anyone about it until about 1976.
Windows is only $500 if your time is worthless.
I am what most people would consider a highly trained technical professional. Unlike most people who spout off at this site, I have the certificates to prove this, and furthermore they're issued by the biggest software company in existence.
I know how to tell facts from marketing fluff. Now, here are the facts as they're found by SEVERAL INDEPENDENT RESEARCH INSTITUTES:
Expenses for file-server workloads under Windows, compared to LinuxOS:
They compared Microsofts IIS to the Linux 7.0 webserver. For Windows, the cost was only:
Application development and support costs for Windows compared to an opensores solution like J2EE:
A full Windows installation, compared to installing Linux, on an Enterprise Server boxen:
Compared to the best known opensores webserver "Red Hat", Microsoft IIS:
These are hard numbers and 100% FACTS! There are several more where these came from.
Who do you think we professionals trust more?
Reliable companies with tried and tested products, or that bedroom coder Thorwaldes who publicly admits that he is in fact A HACKER???
--
Copyright (c) 2004 Mike Bouma, MCSE, MCDST, MS Office Specialist, widely respected Amigan
Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2
or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation;
with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover
Texts. A copy of the license is included in the section entitled "GNU
Free Documentation License".
Copyright (c) 2006 Mike Bouma, MCSE, MCDST, MS Office Specialist, widely respected Amigan
I graduated from Moanaloa High School, Honolulu in the 70's. The only computer on the whole campus (besides calculators the size of paperback books with red LED displays and fixed decimal points) was an ASR-33 teletype with a 300bd modem that could talk to a UoH computer. The math teacher would demo some real simple COBOL-looking stuff and cover basic boolean. I remember being very under-whelmed and wondering what anybody outside of NASA wanted with one of those things.
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced. - Geek's corollary to Clarke's law
One of the points of TFA (related to TCO) is that the support costs of proprietary systems are deeply discounted for public schools.
Keeping ANY system running and in decent order requires expertise and time. Time may be less in a linux environment (though in a public school with very restrictive internet access, who knows) but the time component still exists.
With the deep discounts given to public schools by vendors such as microsoft, and the general economics of support (a glut of Microsoft Certified support guys, whereas Linux support is rare and therefore much more costly) the TCO for a school system is a different beast.
I'm definitely pleased with the article and it's a very innovative approach, but saying that the TCO is always always lower under any circumstances is a bit fallacious.
You better watch out, there may be dogs about . .
...that was horribly off-topic, but I just can't stand you blasted yanks taking all the credit for everything. [/nationalistic fervour]
Windows is only $500 if your time is worthless.
How could they resist the temptation to say .. "Notebook'em Danno!"
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
"The old computers work as well as new ones because they work off of open-source servers." What? How exactly does this work out? Could someone please clarify this. I just don't see the logic.
Poor old Naplips. That rebranded Telidon (from Canada) was always a solution looking for problem. A device-independent text and graphical display protocol. Who would ever need something like that eh?
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
HOSEF web site.
Details of some of the projects.
Some thank you letters.
Bad boys rape our young girls but Violet gives willingly.
"A volunteer organization made up of about 100 members, HOSEF has taken in most of its computers from Hickam Air Force Base. To install them in schools, the volunteers first pull out the obsolete computer hard-drives..."
Was I the only one that put those two sentence together? Maybe I'm just being overly cautious as is my nature most of the time but I would think the Air Force may want to consider removing the hard drives from those computers as a rule. I realize they could be wipped fairly well but I would bet a good amount of money they were not.
Thats allright. With the "laynetworks" and your logon of HoneyBunchesOfGoats, I was somewhat expecting a very nasty picture.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
You can learn concepts of point-and-click, copy-and-paste, desktop metaphor, and most importantly how to use a help system on any OS. Schools that take the perspective of "we have to teach them system X because that's what they'll use in the 'real world'" are thinking wrong. Teach kids how to think not just which widgets to click.
And if they weren't screwing around in HyperCard on a Mac they'd be screwing around in Solitaire on in Windows. HyperCard may not be an application used in business today, but the kids learned some skills that can be applied elsewhere. If the teachers stressed that aspect of it, the kids will be OK.
Constitutionally Correct
I'm at a high school in Toronto, and sometimes I help with computer maintenance and things like that, and the entire department agrees, computer labs like these, with recycled computers can't stay! We get mabey 15 times more requests for help from those labs than any other in the building! Open-source is great, but look into off-lease Dell's, in the long run, it is much easier to use, and easier to make sure they work, and if you're going open-source anyway, the price is quite reasonable.
That's not how they treated Philadelphia and other school systems they sued.
It's funny how the administrative people are afraid of free software because they are afraid someone is going to have to fix it. No vendor ever back software and all will charge you to fix it. Given M$'s terrible record with visuses worm and all that which has cost everone plenty, the case for reliability is firmly on the free software side and the costs of switching will probably be lower than the cost of continued upkeep, let along upgrade.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Sadly, it got pulled. The last I heard of the project was this (quoted from a private email, but it's relevant and I'm sure he won't mind):
Like tinyurl, but one letter less! http://qurl.co.uk/
Hey. I grew up in Kailua and finished HS in Kanohe. You didn't go to Hawaii Loa, did you? BTW: Who's LoD?
Put identity in the browser.
here: http://www.hosef.org/
But I don't see anyplace with more technical information on exactly how they did the fedora diskless workstations and server setup. I'd like to see something like that.
The old computers work as well as new ones because they work off of open-source servers.
... 8-year-old computers can run software just as quickly as newer ones using the open source servers.
Photo caption.
From body of article.
When the public learns that installing open source software on eight year old machines lets them work as well as new ones, Intel's business is gonna go down the toilet. Dell's gonna be circling the sewer with them.
Ever wonder what else the newspaper is getting wrong?
Although the article stresses the economic benefits of such a lab, there are other advantages too.
The Open Source systems are just that: Open Source. Children that are taught on such systems have a unique opportunity to view what goes on "under the hood". This is an advantge that you do not get with proprietary software. Rather than just graduating glorified button-pushers, they will probably be graduating a certain percentage of kids that have a real idea of the software it takes to make an OS and applications as well.
Twitter, you're a petulant cock-gobbling sycophant to Linux Torvaldyos! Quit taking DP from ESR and RMS's feculent cocks and why don't you try to stop sucking quite so much? Get out of your parents' basement and see the real world - maybe then you'll see how pathetic you sound, with your neverending stream of bullshit about how Microsoft is stalking you. Wasn't it you who said that Microsoft believes your insane ranting is actually a threat to them, so they PAY PEOPLE to reply to you on Slashdot? No sir, I don't get any money. I do it for the love. Someone has to go up against your paranoid whining. So get back in your cage and shut the fuck up already.
Yes, deep freeze is loaded at boot, so if you boot off of an alternate device it does nothing. To use it correctly you need to set the computer to boot off of the hard drive only, password protect the bios, and lock the case.
"Slippers"? Hah! They were called "robbah sleepah". There's no "schwa" sound in the Hawaiian creole language.
(Fockeen Haole.)
More details from an earlier report ....8 9.html
http://www.desktoplinux.com/news/NS62015429
Aloha!
K12LTSP.org
Contact centres (keep up, would you?) systems are something I have quite a *lot* of experience of, particularly with respect to agent desktops.
Believe me when I tell you: the agent has zero control over their desktop. Their apps are delivered to them and they don't have any good reason to change anything else, nor any rights to do so. 9 times out of 10, they won't even get to see the full desktop - just isolated icons for the front-end apps they use.
If the machine locks up, no matter what the cause, it's a straight call to the helpdesk. Meantime, they move to another machine. Anyone found trying to fix it themselves - even if they could - would be in severe hot water.
If your user is changing things, they're not answering contacts. If they break stuff, they're not answering contacts. They're *rewarded* (pay/evaluation/promotion) on a volume (and occasionally quality) basis - messing with stuff hits their stats so hits their personal success.
As long as the apps' interfaces are straightforward (and increasingly they're browser based, and delivered via APIs into the likes of WebSphere Portal Server), there's no OS-level scope for being user-friendly, or not. Having done Linux migration of agent desktops on a number of occasions, it's non-problematic.
The Legion of Doom... which back in the 80s/early 90s was the single greatest hacking crew out there. Before computers and script kiddies were ubiquitous. Here's a little hacking history http://www.streettech.com/bcp/BCPtext/StreetTech/S treetTech101.html
Anyway, I didn't go to Hawaii Loa.
Thankyou, Mr. or Ms coward, that ltsp page looks like the info I was after. I have a small stack of old boxes (pent 1's) with tiny ridiculous HDDs and only floppies, no Cd drives, which make them almost useless, but perhaps I can do a project with them using this info and one decent box added in as the server.
The real change is that now people don't believe they can do anything for their schools. They either move to an area with a good school, or turn to homeschooling/private schools.
Or they're too poor do do any of the above. Or they just plain don't care.
20 x Mandrake 9.1 computers, no special effort, "ghosting" done once only with a NetCat-and-dd one-liner, zero maintenance. Really should spend an hour URPMI'ing them all before 10.1 gets released.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
- of the three screens I saw, one had a frozen screen-saver (marquee), one was in use, one had a Norton anti-virus all-is-well report that the attendant couldn't make go away (clicking on yes, no or the little X blinked the dialog, and it was back pretty much instantly; she was trying the Task Manager as I walked out of sight); and
- they had no CD drives, USB or firewire sockets exposed (main box was sealed away somewhere)
- Despite the hardware costing (I guess) about double per station, the working machine still had odd hiccups and pauses in what it was doing (the guy using it was checking the RAM, presumably to see if it had enough for what he was doing).
I felt much better about my little Linux system after that.Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Please don't let users mess with systems! Install drivers? Yeeargh! How many times d'you think they'll install the right driver? Nothing like have a user update a working ATI driver to a version which is broken on your hardware, is there?
WRT killing tasks, have you not seen stuff like GNOME System Monitor? All GUI and shiny, and the worst they can do on Linux is shoot one of their own tasks in the head. If your X is prone to locking up, either fix the #### thing or leave them Ctrl-Alt-BackSpace to play with.
Installing software is easy, you just open RPMdrake, type the root password (which I wouldn't give the user in a pink fit), select the packages you want and click "Install". If you do want the user installing packages (ie, you like extra work and don't mind frustration when they uninstall XFree86 and all dependencies because they can't see a use for it) then run RPMdrake SUID. SuSE, Debian, Red Hat all have similar pointy-clicky things.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Hawaiian creole language
Pidgin you fockin pottagee. Oh, yeah, and say "We wen' call 'em sleepahs, fuckin' haole." It sounds less like you're one yourself. Haha.
Hang loose, braddah.
Put identity in the browser.
Ten-second job here, formatted for A4 and written in English.
Available in PS, PDF and SXW - so you can redo your own Letter or odd-sized verion. Uses font from LarabieFonts. Change "honour" to "honor" to get American instead of English.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Yeah, it's good that they finally reconize the Linux community in schools, but there is a problem to this.
Those users who don't understand, or fully grasp the concepts behind Linux may not feel that the Operating System or the Open Source community is well enough supported for the student.
Heck, they might scrub the labs all together; although it would be nice to see them.
-Steve