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

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.