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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.
Windows and Word on a second partition.
Since many students will be playing with the machine, what about a semi-secure desktop that can be administrated easily?
Only 256 megs of ram, so I'd stay away from the heavy guis. I'd probably use the litght weight knoppix (runs with xfce) and limit the number of applications on it. The only thing I'd add is OpenOffice. then I'd install it to the drive.
Either that or I'd run K-12 Linux terminal server project. which is a fine network absed distribution.
-- Who is the bigger fool? The fool or the fool who follows him? --
Firefox
Make absolutely sure that any software these schools really want to run either has a native Linux version, a practically-idential Linux version, or will run flawlessly under WINE. If the schools can't use the software they want to, it'll leave quite a bad taste in their mouths about Linux.
It doesn't show off the power, but remember the KDE has a set of "Edutainment" programs of varying quality.
I've personally used some of these for school, and they are quite good. For example, "Logo" is replaced with KTurtle, and there are a few maths programs (KPlot for graphs and Kig for geometry, among others). There are quite a few language tools too. There is an impressive chemistry program which lists the periodic table and information about each element, too.
So KDE includes a great base. More schools should use it (especially when combined with KOffice)
- Jax
Have you looked at the K-12 Linux Project yet? Seems like that would be a good place to start.
"Attitude, not aptitude, determines altitude." - Jesse Jackson
Just to preach the common trend, I would suggest Ubuntu for the distro. The base desktop install is exactly what you would need. You get Firefox, Evolution, Gaim and OpenOffice.org. It's a no hassle install, it's Debian and you can get support for it if you want. I wouldn't suggest holding off on Ubuntu until their next release, because it's pretty slick and comes out in about 2 months.
Also, you can get free CD's from them. Just request 100 or so and have them shipped to where ever that organization is. Technically you only need one, but you can give them out to the students if they like it. It comes with a livecd, so they don't have to destroy their home PC.
"brxref
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.
Im afraid most of the educational software taught at the school level is built for windows and wont support other OS's very well. So the primary thing is find out which software is needed by them and get those working on Linux. Not many school children are going to start out running command line programs, or coding in perl and C++. Most likely, they will browse, use rich text editors/spreadsheets, chat apart form educational software. Unless of course, we are talking higer grades, even then, not all of them are going to be computer professionals. -imho
~never play leapfrog with unicorns
Don't go any farther than http://www.k12ltsp.org/. They have the best all around linux solution for k-12 schools. Period.
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.
Nonsense. Computer skills taught in schools should be just that: computer skills. Not 'keyboard shortcuts for Word 97', but skills that can be applied to any computer. Let's face it, any specifics you learn in secondary school are going to be obsolete by the time you get your first job.
An example: My secondary school had a lab full of Apple IIs. By the time I needed my own computer, I bought a Macintosh. % of specifics that weren't obsolete: zero.
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...
Those who use only windows at home and at school learn just that, how to use windows.
Force them them to use something else, and they no longer just know how to use windows, but how to use a *computer*.
I've heard it said that the best way to learn how to learn language is to learn many of them. This is why we teach spanish, or why a good CS program should involve several different programming languages.
The concepts for using any OS are the same, and that's what should be taught in school, not exactly where to find what button in Word. You wouldn't say that kids should skip reading Shakespeare because every newspaper in the country is a 100% modern English shop, would you?
In a certain sense I agree with you. I want more people to use linux, and it is a disservice to those students if we force them to use linux to further our own personal opinions or political goals. Ultimately, for them to succeed in the world (at least the current world), they will need to learn MS Windows.
On the other hand, let's give students the credit they deserve. If you provide students with learning both on Windows and linux, they will have a greater skill set when they go onto university and workplace. Since linux can dual-boot, I don't see any problem with teaching them how to use different operating systems. And once they've learned two different OS+GUIs, it won't be hard for them to adapt to new technology (e.g.: they won't be intimidated by a Mac).
I agree with the SuSE sentiment. SuSE + KDE is absoloutely perfect and looks enough like Windows not to scare away students/teachers used to Windows-looking GUIs. It has issues with package management (HATE HATE HATE YaST -cough-) and compiling is a pain in anything but Pro but these shouldn't be issues at all in most school environments. Also, AFAIK, SuSE still comes with a complete WINE software suite that _should_ allow them to set up whatever Windows programs they might need.
:)
Speaking from experience here, my high school and middle school both went from Windows 3.x/95 boxes right to a bunch of Sun computers complete with Solaris (and all the usual programs like OpenOffice.org). Many/most of the students hated the drastic change from Windows to Solaris and resented using the computers from then on. They just weren't used to that kind of environment. The rule of thumb is to avoid drastic environment changes at all costs (which is why KDE is a good idea) while showing them what Linux has to offer in the way of programs, which is plenty
"He does look a bit Oompa like, even if his Loompa is a bit off-kilter."
Hi,
We've been sucessfully using Linux in our computer lab for over 3 years now, and while it was a "gamble" when we first decided to go with Linux, I'm proud to say that in looking back we made the right decision.
Our lab and our staff computers run on Mandrake Linux (currently 9.1), though I am entertaining the thought of upgrading to Gentoo in the future (mainly due to the ease of updating our software via emerge).
We saved a bundle of money not only in the initial install of the new computers, but also over the years each time we've upgraded any software. The kids love Linux and I've yet seen a kid that could not use Windows because they were taught using Linux (kids are usually much brighter than we give them credit).
To look at our computer lab, swing by http://www.ghca.com/computers
Mike
I'll recap, 00squirrel's SOLE basis to use Windows versus Linux was because everyone eles uses it. That's NOT a good reason. If everyone one else uses a knife instead of a screw driver, should I stop using a screw driver too?
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
This is a joke right? Giving students kernel access? Maybe in a small lab or on a special "development" lan or something, but in general this is a bad idea. Students (hell anyone new to this) have a tendency to jack things up without realizing what they've done. If that isn't recoverable, you've doomed at least one computer in the lab, possibly more. Yes it can be fixed with a backup, but why go to the effort for a standard computer lab used for word processing, email, and internet "research"?
Let's not even consider the few students who are actually involved in hacking or programming who might decide to use the school lab (instead of their home boxes) to develop malicious code.
bkr
"Growing old is inevitable; growing up is optional."
Okay, here we go.
s clone?
Libranet Linux, stripped down from install.
Install KDE and Gnome. Run the system with one of the 2, your choice.
Then, install:
KDE's educational packages
Gnome's educational packages
Abiword, Openoffice, Gnucash, Gnumeric.
Kstars also works.
Also include some games, like:
Tuxracer (if their 3d will support it)
TuxPaint
Pingus
FrozenBubble
Tetris/Tetri
whatever else seems appropriate.
Also find out from the school what kind of educational software they use and find some decent clones of what they have. Then make 1 machine, image it, and push the images to the other ones.
You like your new Mac more than you like me, don't you, Dave? Dave? I asked...She said Yes.
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
There is in fact a debian-based linux distro being developed which is targeted directly at schools.
Take a look at the Skolelinux project at http://www.skolelinux.org/portal/index_html
Look! No sig!
This is not news. This is a posting for a Linux help forum. There is so much going on in the technology world that I can not believe that this is the best story you could find. Intel is killing Tukwila http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/02/24/intel_nick s_tukwila/ and we are reading about what software we think they should load on a Linux box for an educational computer lab. The odd thing is that the people involved are not even reading this!
My sigs offend the max # of people all over the world, regardless of race, religion, color, sex or creed. It's a gift.
Forget about distro arguments, forget about how cool kdeedu is, forget about how amazing (whatever, I don't use gnome, but I'm sure there is something).
Concentrate on the fact that you have slow machines running undocumented software that are being demonstrated by people who do not know the software. Every one of those issues needs to be resolved, and if you want the lab to be a real success then aim for the goal of making everything run smoothly every time.
The machines will feel slow, so you will have to work around this somehow or choose a light wm and cope with the added complexity it brings. The software is mimimally documented, and what documentation exists will need to be rewritten for your target level and language. Think howtos with step by step screenshots -- the reason cheesy computer courses use those is because they work... And the teachers need more than just a training course if you expect things to go well, they need a depth of experience.
So to start with the hardware. Linspire does not run well on a typical 500MHz machine because it needs more ram. Decide for each major choice (distro, window manager) how slow it is, and if it will feel better if you choose the fast but hard option or the slow but easy option. Generally, people who haven't used 3GHz computers cope with slowness more, so decide based on their experience rather than yours. If the machines have high ram I would go with KDE, low ram and I'd go with enlightenment or similar.
Next, concentrate on making sure every single thing these people want to do will work flawlessly first time. Make the documentation perfect. In many ways, the docs will be more important than the software.
Now you have the computer side working, concentrate on teaching the teachers to the point that they feel 100% comfortable. It is important at this point that no changes happen to the software. If the teachers just know how to do their lesson but don't feel comfortable then that discomfort will show strongly.
I hate to say it, but this sort of project is a lot of work even with awesome software running on blazingly fast machines. You're not targetting geeks who will overlook details such as user interface or docs because a program is cool. Of course, if you drop your standards and just deliver something that will appeal to geeks, well that's pretty easy with linux.
If you do manage to get the software, training materials and educators all working smoothly, then don't change a thing. Say openoffice 2.0 comes out and would fix a number of issues, ignore it! You can only retrain geeks fast, not people. You'd break your howto with items shifting menus or even just icons being tweaked. You'd upset your educators who don't have the depth of experience in software to cope.
Oh, and please publush everything at this point -- collaborative development doesn't just apply to software.
Good luck.
Software for a school lab installation's pretty similar to what you'd want in a normal business.
I used to help admin a high school windows lab, and let me say this:
1) Most edutainment software, while entertaining, is really kind of a silly use for the systems. The only place it really helps is to get little kids used to using a mouse.
2) You almost never find specialty software useful after elementary school.
A good high school workstation needs:
1) A web browser - Firefox or Konqueror
2) An office suite - OpenOffice.org
3) A graphics editor - The Gimp
4) A code editor - Take your pick. I'd say something a bit easier to use for a beginning coder/HTML writer, though
Moreover, there should be a few systems in the school with
1) A dv movie editor - no idea on linux
2) An audio editor - ditto
3) Science tools for conducting lab experiments
If someone else wants to fill in those gaps, go ahead.
These obviously go where you'd need that specialization.
That's about it. What's *more* important for a lab is a system to deal with the fact that KIDS LIKE TO MESS WITH COMPUTERS.
They will change the desktop, delete important files, install crap, put keyloggers on just to play around, etc, etc.
There are a few ways to fix this:
1) Use restricted users or special software to keep them from doing any of it.
2) Have a script to re-image the machine every night.
I strongly recommend a combination of the two, leaning toward the second one. It works a lot better, and doesn't constantly annoy the students either.
I'll leave it to the linux gurus to suggest how you actually do this in linux, but I know that it can be done reasonably, and that these are the most important aspects of a high school computer lab. I think that any install recommended for this purpose doesn't need to show any flashy about linux, or how the students can compile their own kernels (although that is fun), but how it can set up an easy to use and maintainable lab much cheaper and simpler than doing the same thing in windows.
Especially push the "no MS Audits" thing. We used to waste *SO* much time worrying about those. According to my teacher, if we got caught with one unlicensed copy of anything on a system, they were legally allowed to confiscate the entire lab (although I was never entirely clear on who "they" were). Not having to keep track of MS serials sounds like plenty of reason for a switch to me, especially since you never use any of the special capabilities of Word or excel in high school that make OpenOffice migration difficult in the business world.
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.
Anyone who thinks that Linux can somehow get around the physical limitations of older hardware is deluded.
However, Linux is indeed a great solution for breathing life into outdated equipment, provided the equipment is up to the task.
As an example, at school I had to use an old P166 for my programming class. It was running some version of Windows (2000, I think), but it was frustratingly slow. Windows 2000 was probably designed to run on computers manufactured somewhere around the year 2000, and not 1995.
To get around this, I loaded Linux on the machine. Now, of course, since Linux can't make the hardware faster, I had to change something else to get the performance I wanted. The simplest solution was to not install X and just run everything from the console. The hardware could easily handle Bash, Screen, Links (text-mode web browser), and Vim, so I was able to use very outdated hardware to complete my project.
If I had one complaint, it would probably be that compiling my application took roughly 45 minutes (this was a one hour class), compared to less than one minute on modern hardware (undoubtedly due to a lack of RAM).
Basically what I'm saying is that Mozilla is a huge and rather bloated piece of software and it will never run well on very old hardware. On the other hand, Mozilla is not the only option with Linux and a decent system can be setup on old hardware.
As a preemptive response, I'd like to point out that other browsers based on the Mozilla rendering engine are much faster. If that lab had been set up with IceWM (or XFCE) and Epiphany or Firefox, I think the results would have been much better. I am in no way suggesting that you should have used text-mode web browsers.
True story.
Check out Skolelinux (Distrowatch page) (Linux for schools, Norwegian name). Made to work perfectly with LTSP, and based on debian stable. On the install cd you can choose to install the Skolelinux server or thin clients, or a standalone install. Plenty of educational software availible. The thin client install runs fine on older hardware. Give it a try.
Second, the best distro would likely be Fedora Core or SuSE, as these are "friendly" and geared towards the non-technical folk. Maintenance is relatively easy, stability is generally good and security seems to be fairly well taken care of.
Third, you absolutely, definitely, without question need software that can interact with Windows software and systems. That means you want Samba installed (probably as server as well as client), Open Office, Terminal Services, Evolution and readers for the various Microsoft codecs. If you want a lot of web-based activity, you'll want to make sure browsers support PDF, Flash, Shockwave and preferaby JScript.
Depending on the age-range of the student, and the activities they'll be wanting to use the computer for, you will likely want to install software developed by a variety of Universities, research laboratories and scientific institutions. What you ideally want to do is ensure the students come away with the feeling that Real Stuff can be done on any home computer, even if it is slower than NASA's latest supercomputer.
(This is vital. The biggest single turn-off in education is to come across as irrelevent factoid-pumping or useless trivia. It doesn't matter if the students end up using the programs in class or afterwards, what matters is that they don't feel they're wasting their time learning about - or with - computers.)
If you get the chance, I'd suggest installing either grid software or clustering software, plus a demo that wanders from screen to screen. That is likely to hold the attention of brighter students, who will likely want to learn how that's done so that they can do better. Again, it's all to do with interest levels.
The key with students is that you need to make a subject or a technology a drug of choice. They must want to get hooked on it and must want more so badly they can taste it. That is how you get them engaged and that is how you get them to do more than sit around like stuffed dummies.
Of course, you COULD treat them like stuffed dummies. At that point, you could save yourself time and effort by installing empty boxes rather than computers. They won't notice the difference, in that state.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Unless its for a class about Linux, or your plan on teaching the kids Linux its best to stick with Mac for elemantary students and Windows for secondary ones. One problem Linux does have is that its written fro geeks by geeks and although some Microsoft programs are buggy and what not the reason they cost $ is because MS researches the best way to buid a interface. If you sit a kid in from of a Linux workstation and expect him to know how to use it then your wrong
K12Linux
The question you pose has been brought up many times before. There are many good answers, and this is really a place that Linux shines. The people who know most of the answers are the people on the mailing lists. You will really be able to find some kindred souls there.
r ge.net/
Useful links:
http://www.seul.org/edu/
http://schoolfo
http://k12ltsp.org/
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.
Or Squeak, which already has tons of educational content (the primary objective of the language).
So, negative moderators of the parent post, please explain to me how Mexican students are served by being force-fed a marginally-used OS in favor of one that is used by almost everybody in the business world?
So I think I have answered your original question. Do you agree?
I would have to agree with that one.
I have done this sort of thing before, and have had the same results. Something that most people seem to miss is that, while we all prefer Linux, it is a resource hog.
Mandrake and a few others are now taking up more the 200 MB of physical RAM. Windows and it's GUI only use about 60 MB. There is a major difference in the usage here as well. Older computers can benefit from Windows, or it could benefit from Linux.
It all depends on the distro used.
My $0.02 worth. For what it's worth.
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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