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Building a Linux Computer Lab for Schools?
joseamuniz asks: "After giving Linux classes to Secondary School Teachers, I got in touch with a non-profit organization called UNETE. This association has donated 1,523 computer labs to public schools in Mexico. I told them about Linux, and they are interested in equipping a beta computer lab with this Operating System, with Intel PIII, 256 MB RAM PCs. The more they like this lab, the higher chances to include Linux in the new labs donated by this institution." What hardware configurations and software packages would you install on such a machine to show off the real power of Linux in an educational environment?
How does the Slashdot Effect happen given that no slashdotters ever RTFA?
What educational software packages are available for Linux? Something tells me they haven't ported Oregon Trail to Linux yet.
Since many students will be playing with the machine, what about a semi-secure desktop that can be administrated easily?
I have been thinking for a few years now, that Knoppix and USB sticks would work so well in this type of environment. You can easilly roll your own distro, give every kid a 128MB stick, burn a bunch of CDs and never worry about configuration problems or viruses again. It's time to jump on that bus.
Like it or not, these machines will be rooted or get seriously fouled up at some point. This is actually one area where Linux really shines. You can set up a net boot environment (or live cd) that brings the box to a known good state. Don't keep any real data on these boxes. You don't even HAVE to keep a desktop image. You can NFS mount / if you really wanted too (though it's probably better to have an OS image local that can be over written easily).
This means you'll probably need a more beefey (at least in hard drive space) server that this lab will live off of, but I assume you already knew that.
Zapman
I'm a total newbie to linux, so I'm not qualified to give detailed advice. What I will say, however, is that after playing with lots and lots of different distros, I find Mandrakelinux to be the simplest and most user-friendly introduction to linux. So I would recommend installing Mandrake to give the teachers and students a good flavour for linux with an easy transition. It comes with just about everything you need to get up and working fast.
Freeduc is just excellent. I set up a temporary summer lab with recycled machines stateside and set the default language to Spanish. At the end of the summer the students were able to take the machines home. The families of these immigrant students were thrilled. I was thrilled with the cost, plus the fact that I don't have endless calls for help from virii, spyware, etc.
I can speak from some experience on this. At my university, they had very few Linux machines. The labs that did have them were for our calulus classes. The ran Maple under RedHat. The systems at the time were probably very close to the systems which you describe. They were a pleasure to use. I think Maple would serve to show the power of such a system.
Thomas Jefferson High School for Sci./Tech.- this school has an entire computer systems lab with running on Debian, complete with Cray SV1 and cluster of 386's. The lab is run largely by student system administrators who know and learn much about the Linux operating system during their stay at TJ, which helps to prepare them for entry into the business world and tech industry where UNIX based operating systems are the common standard. TJ is a public school located in Fairfax County, Virginia. It also has a Wikipedia entry that goes into more detail than my post here (Sorry for lack of link, but Wikipedia seems to be running slowly for me as of late and I couldn't get the page).
Ok, so, Gould Academy is where I went, and they use linux for everyday use, in the labs, classrooms and even faculty offices. Mostly what students learned to use was IceWM, Konqueror as a file manager, OpenOffice, Mozilla (although Firefox might be a better choice), gAIM (not in class!), the Gimp and xpdf. /home directories would be good.
They didn't have a big budget for the computers, so they used the old 386 (true, I've used them!) and a bunch of old machines, bought a dual Xeon 733 MHz server, and ran LTSP on the whole thing. They had a special file server with a quota of about 1 Gig for students in their home directory, which was plenty, and a separate mail server.
I think that if you install those PIII with LTSP you'll be missing out on responsiveness, so instead maybe install the same distro on all of them, and use a NIS domain for login (with gdm, or even better, Entrance, which is prettier than gdm to look at!) and getting one machine with several drives to use as NFS server for the
Then if you want to start a multimedia class, it turns out a lot of people are actually thrilled when using Blender. A whole bunch of people active on Blender forums right now are not much older than 13. I've basically taught my Linux professor at Gould to use blender, and the Advanced Linux class at the same time.
I think that's plenty of things to show eye-candy and the real horse-power you can get in the managing of such a lab with linux.
Also, most of these programs have spanish localizations, iirc.
---- I am certain of only one thing : I know nothing else.
I know that Michigan State has MS labs, Solaris labs, and Mac labs. Most of their CS research was done on Solaris. Same thing at University of Michigan.
Granted, not everyone has to use the non-MS labs. But people still do.
There are enough GUI environments that mirror Windows that they won't have to "relearn" the whole OS. And OpenOffice does a good job at being very similar to Word.
If they're learning to admin systems, however, yeah, there is a world of difference...
Parent was modded Troll, which while understandable is missing the point. He is absolutely correct. Mandrake is easily the most resource hungry distribution out there. I am still running Windows 2000 on a PII 350 with 160 MB RAM and for the most part it gets the job done fairly well. I tried Mandrake on there and it was just pathetic. I had good luck with Debian (Woody), though. Before Fedora came out I also gave Red Hat 9 a try; it was slightly less bloated than Mandrake. All the distributions which turn on all the eye candy are quite sluggish on older hardware. Windows 2000 is very responsive, even with all the features turned on. I haven't tried XP on this machine, but I find it hard to believe it would be worse than Mandrake. Even after turning many of the eye candy features off Mandrake still ran quite slow.
Don't mod somebody down because his opinion is different than yours.
Here is an experiment. Get a PC with specs similar to those in this article. Do a default install of Windows 2000 and Mandrake 10 or Windows XP and Fedora 3. Do some standard computing tasks like word processing (I guess you would need to install Office 2000 / XP for this), web browsing, file management, and maybe some light applications and games. Then come back and tell me which system was more responsive. I guarantee you that it will be Windows.
I know I will get flamed for this, but the truth speaks for itself. Try it for yourself.
In fact, every university lab that I have visited is a 100% Microsoft shop.
You havn't been to the College of Computing computer lab at the Georgia Institute of Technology then. It has about 75-100 computers and dual boots RedHat and Windows 2000. Interestingly, most of the time you will find that the students actually prefer RedHat, and if you want to boot into Windows you will have to restart. Granted, this lab is mostly used by CS majors since it is located in the College of Computing, but Linux obviously doesn't prohibit them from getting real work done at all. In fact, one of the indroductory courses (used to be called CS 2130, it has been morphed into something new now) requires the use of Linux in the lab.
http://almostsmart.com
Actually, even though my PC Lab is predominantly MS, I think teaching students to use just one OS is an injustice. When the kids in the early grades graduate, who knows what the predominant OS will be?
When I was in 6th Grade, TRS-80s were in my grade school. For 8th Grade "Graduation", I got my own C-64. In High School, I used TRS-80s at one school, and Apple II's at another. A friend had one of those IBM PCs; you know, a PC JR?
I know that architecture and OS's really aren't evolving as drastically as they did then, but I hope you get my point. I'm more concerned about my students learning concepts than specifics. If my goal is for them to be able to use a word processor, we use both Word and OpenOffice. If my goal is for them to be able to make a web page, we use DreamWeaver and Notepad.
It should be easy enough for non-geeks to look for a word processor or web browser icon on the desktop, if the flavor of Linux is set up properly. Taking the time to get 1 install right is worth it, when setting up a lab of identical machines. I only have 20 PCs in our biggest lab (we're a small private school), but I still make a recovery DVD that I can use to re-image a system and have it usable for a class.
Obviously, with OSS, the legal hassles that can occur with multiple PCs using the same image are minimal.
And if Windows/Office are that much easier to use, then it should be no big deal for them to learn to use them when they reach university.
Why do I use MS so much if I feel this way? Private schools are forced to choose between what is best and what the parents think is best for the students. I must balance cost-effectiveness with what parents will demand their children have access to.
What does LFS teach you other then ./configure && make && make install?
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
OK before anything, I'd ask the guys to forget all that bullshit about sombreros and guys wearing sandals.
I live in Mexico City and we're SURROUNDED by "ducky" schools teaching you to be a "computer technician bachelor", and they teach you Windows, Word, and all that crap.
You can find cybercafe's every 2 or 3 blocks.
People in here use MS Word to use their homeworks. Go to a cafe and you'll see thousands of "Learn Word" books, booklets, magazines, etc. You can buy the tutorials off the streets.
Children in elementary already use Word for their homeworks. Most kids I know already got a MSN account (just don't ask me about their grammar or *shudder* spelling).
In other words, no, we don't need any more Microsoft training, thank you.
And with the current trends, Linux will be much more popular 10 years from now. Want to prepare them for the future? Teach them Linux.
KStars would be a fine example of 'Edutainment' software that the kids may be interested in. Finding this fun/free desktop planetarium package installed after emerging KDE led me to a love for astronomy I had never before realized.
And of course nothing teaches wacky computer-land physics like a quality game of Scorched Earth.
Just for fun about a year ago I installed Linux on an old 486 SX my in-laws were throwing out. There is something surreal about combining software with up to the minute security and bug fixes with a ~10 year old computer and a ~6 year old network and sound card, and then turning around and using pretty much the same software to interface with digital video and still cameras and wireless network cards that weren't even conceived of when 486s were cutting edge.
If you haven't checked out Linux in a couple of years, look again. In my opinion, Linux is well beyond the catch up stage and is starting to lead the pack in some areas. As an example of free software being ahead of its time, one of my recent configuration frustrations has been trying to keep a handful of applications like mplayer from using IPv6 by default. Look at the hardened gentoo project for another example of Linux leading the pack.
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... anybody that gave a cluster user root access would be certifiable
;-)
Oh, I dunno; I remember back in the 90's, when MIT had these rooms full of "public" workstations. There was a sign up on the wall reminding people of the root password. They were all the same, of course. If you thought it was insecure, well, they invited you to try to use the password to damage anyone's stuff other than your own. (Every once in a long while, someone actually succeeded.
If you think this is "certifiable" behavior, well, I'd agree. It would certify you as knowing something about security.
Yeah, all sorts of spyware got installed on idle systems, especially keyloggers. That's why one of the first lessons for users was how to reboot, which would download a new kernel from a secure server. The boot sequence would verify the system directories, and download anything that showed signs of tampering. Not a big deal. Your home directory would be mounted from one of the servers, too, of course. The rest of the disk was scratch; anything you used there was your problem.
Not that I'd expect your typical high-school admin to understand any of this. But they could keep a lookout for the bright "hacker" type kids, and put them in charge of the system. That should pretty much take care of it.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
We have had some efforts in Mexico to bring computing rooms to every school, and a lot has been done by the government and universities. The project eMexico http://www.emexico.gob.mx/ states as its mission providing technological infrastructure and digital services to the whole population, and ITESM university is doing an important education effort on poor societies also.
Any way, Miguel de Icaza (surely the best mexican hacker) addressed last March the Mexican President and the Secretaria de Comunicaciones y Transporte (FCC equivalent) and told them about the advantages of open source software http://primates.ximian.com/~miguel/emexico2.html (in spanish). At the end, Bill Gates paid a visit to president Fox and the eMexico project was done on Windows machines.
I find it hard to really move the Linux initiative to Mexico. I told my film-mayoring roomate (I'm studying at the US) that I was installing another version of Linux and he told me "really, do you code and shit?", I told some bussiness-mayoring mexican friends who live here, and all I got was "what's that?". There's much more to be done than you think.
For what it's worth, I know of a elementary school that uses Linux on all it's computers. A friend of mine teaches there and says she likes it, "it's prettier".
Try linex for staters. It installs automatically in less than an hour, and comes fully bundled. I would contact those guys directly, to see if you can set up some sort of oficial partnership. 1500 comps is a lot, and may make a ripple. So get help from those who are already helping -- unlike most nerds over here :)
http://www.linex.org/index.php