Indiana Schools May Purchase 300K Linux Computers

GuitarNeophyte writes "According to an article at PC Magazine, Indiana School systems may soon be purchasing around 300,000 Linpire desktop computers. Linspire, via its Education Program has a straight $500-per-school (not per-seat) cost, providing an incredibly-alluring price incentive for this to happen." From the article: "Many schools across the state have already had the chance to try out desktop Linux, and everyone seems excited to get this program going...This groundbreaking initiative makes it possible for schools to afford computers for every student, something that makes a huge impact on their overall educations."

Comments

I hope this works for them

[jascat]

I know most schools don't operate in class computers and labs in a traditional Windows Domain environment, most of the time running as stand alone workstations. Provided the right setup of these systems, it could be great for them. Not only can they lock the systems down from students, they also remove most of the chance for spyware and other malware. Best of luck to them.

$20,000 per hour

[goombah99]

oops, dropped a decimal point! make that $20,000 per hour to operate.

500K cheap linux boxes. This is going to be a massive number of hard drive crashes and system rebuilds per day.

Why the heck dont schools use thin clients to servers. Or at least use some of those multi-headed configurations that can seat four students per box. Even the power bill makes this attractive.

500K * 200 watts = 100 Megawatts of power at 10 cents a kilowatt hour is $10,000 dollars per hour to operate. In winter time this might offset the cost of heating if they can distribute the heat, but the rest of the year the cooling costs to offset this heat load will double the operating cost. (since it usually takes one watt of cooling to offset 1 watt of heat generation)

so $20,000 per hour of operation.

Now imagine you had a four headed system. it would cut this cost by half to a third.

Will Linspire Netboot. If not they are going to have a lot of corrupt systems to fix every day. yikes!

Re:$20,000 per hour

[Vellmont]

500K * 200 watts = 100 Megawatts of power at 10 cents a kilowatt hour is $10,000 dollars per hour to operate. In winter time this might offset the cost of heating if they can distribute the heat, but the rest of the year the cooling costs to offset this heat load will double the operating cost. (since it usually takes one watt of cooling to offset 1 watt of heat generation)

You're off on your estimates of every single number. It's 300,000 machines, not 500,000. A PC uses about 60 watts of power, and LCD monitor uses maybe 40 watts. Power costs about 6-7 cents per kilowatt hour.

So that's
((300,000 * 100) / 1000) * .065 = $1950. You're only off by a factor of 5.

but the rest of the year the cooling costs to offset this heat load will double the operating cost. (since it usually takes one watt of cooling to offset 1 watt of heat generation)

I don't know where you got this figure, but the cooling efficiency of a typical air conditioner is far greater than 1/1. Air conditioners made since 1990 are required to have an efficiency of 8/1. That means you can move 8 units of energy at a cost of 1 unit. A central AC has an efficiency of at least 9.7. Central AC can be had with efficiencies approaching 17.

Since school usually isn't in session during the summer the cooling costs are going to be even less. In all you're only off by another factor of 10. Perhaps you should consider that you're not too good at estimating costs.

Re:And this means...

[Anonymous Coward]

300K == Three hundred Thousand K == Thousand || K(DE)

Re:A hard disk failure every hour, $200,000 per ho

[canuck57]

Will Linspire Netboot.

It is Linux, yes. See below.

If not they are going to have a lot of corrupt systems to fix every day. yikes!

As if the other OS would not? I think they are on the right track, make the PCs cheap and get an easy to load OS for when it happens recovery is cheap, simple and fast. If it is stolen, cheaper to replace.

BTW, booting Linux over the net is simple, start with a customized install CD, store a reference image on a server using cpio or tool of choice via NFS. Then with a Linux boot/install CD that simply partitions, downloads and cpio's the data bask to disk. Finally writing the MBR. With a moderate amout of shell scripting install for a school situation could be 100% automated except for putting the CD in the coffee cup holder.

For mail, pop3/imap/sendmail/spamasassin. OpenLDAP for entity management. NFS for file sharing.

If the above does not make sense, change incompetant or underskilled administrator. If an NT admin, send them back to McDonnalds. It is actually faster, easier and cheaper than Windows alternatives as the registry issues don't exist and the tools and protocols are tested.

Re:MS already $5 at universities

[Trelane]

Microsoft has had deals for years with IU, IUPUI, Purdue, Ball State, et al. for their products. Basically, you get all their products in a few different packs for $5 each.

My school has this sweet deal too. Just a few niggling details:

If you follow the money trail, my school takes somewhere between USD30 and USD70 (or maybe more) from my fees (not tuition; the campus usage fees) per semester for the campus student licenses. So we're actually paying somewhere between USD240 and USD560 before the up-front costs (USD5 for Windows XP upgrade; USD6 or 10 for Office full version). The campus tour guides never seem to mention this point when they're talking about the program, and all the students and parents I've talked to about it had no idea these funds were being taken and sent straight to Microsoft for the software.

Additionally, your Windows is an upgrade copy of Windows only. That means that you must already have a Windows license (though it doesn't seme to check for this in any way; nice if MSFT is gonna come back and audit you to push you to License 7.0). This makes the Windows side of the license practically useless--the version of Windows you have likely works just fine for what you use it, and chances are pretty good you already have XP home, if not pro! Luckily, the MS Office and VStudio, tmk, are full versions, so it's not as useless. But whatever you got with your computer is probably just fine and works for you (nice for Microsoft if you have a competitor of theirs!) Finally, the academic prices are already dirt-cheap (relatively speaking). I don't think the MS site license is really very useful in terms of cheapening software acquisition costs!

Finally, you cannot keep the license if you don't graduate. That's right; if you quit for a while or if you're kicked out, you lose your license. Not nearly as sweet a deal as the academic price, now is it?

There are other problems with it from the university side, including problems if they ever want to stop paying Microsoft because maybe they want to standardize on Keynote or OpenOffice or something (long, expensive audit there!), but these are most of the immediately visible student-side problems.

Bootable distros

[KMSelf]

While it's true that a full GUI boot of Knoppix won't happen in < 96 MB, and isn't particularly happy in less than ~128 MB, your comment promulgates several fallacies:

• You need that much memory to run a bootable distro. False. There are floppy and CD bootable distros which will run in 16-32 MB.
• The distro loads to RAM. False Most bootable CDs actually use the "cloop" driver. This is a compressed loopback device, which reads data directly off the CD, decompressing it on access. The CD itself is NOT loaded into RAM, by default, although it can be. Rather the overhead of, say, Knoppix, is that of the applications and X session.

Knoppix and kin offer the analytics necessary to profile a system, what they lack are the heuristics to make a sane statement of what improvements would be useful for a system. The idea of a bootable distro which simply runs an analyzer and produces a report (to be saved to file, printed, etc.) is reasonably straightforward.

Yes, you can run Knoppix entirely in RAM (800+ MB are recommended), and yes, performance of a bootable CD isn't what you'd see from a HD install (in part because of the overhead of reading from CD and performing the on-the-fly decompression). But tests of system speed (memory, CPU, hdparm) should give a pretty good sense of performance characteristics.

There are also floppy-based distros which run entirely in RAM (eg: Tom's Root Boot, Trinux), but they have pretty minimal system requirements.