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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."
For a Linux box?? How much does SCO get?
What?
Possible 300K KDE deployments ... Those K just goes fine ;-)
Never learn by your mistakes, if you do you may never dare to try again
does it run Linux?
Oh, wait...
I enjoy large posteriors and I cannot prevaricate.
A whole crop of sudents entered the workforce at a time when the move to CAD was in it's infancy, all familiar with, and able to use AutoCad. They were put in charge of the move to automation, and they all purchased AutoCad when they entered industry.
A very effective marketing strategy for a company looking beyond the next quarter.
... when it actually happens. A PR release from the company trying to sell their stuff isn't exactly news; it's marketing.
I don't respond to AC's.
...ubuntu or such would free, even cheaper no?
take it easy, but take it.
Way to go. Good to know there are smart people other than Munich's officials.
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.
...MS provided steep discounts to Indiana schools for their purchase of Microsoft software
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 $100,000 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 $200,000 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!
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
There are tons of discarded machines out there that can still run a good linux.
What would be nice is a distro meant to make it as easy as possible for relatively unskilled people to turn them into a desktop linux. Linspire may have a lot of that, but here's the elements I see.
A simple program, on a floppy and/or CD, which analyses the hardware in the machine, and gives an estimate of how suitable the machine is to the task. Ie. how well supported the components (chipsets, cards etc.) are, and how much performance one can expect from it.
It could also estimate what you would have to buy to bring the performance to your specs. "This machine is great but by just adding 128MB of ram -- just $20 -- it would be super." and "The machine is good but the ethernet card is one known to have problems. Cheap solid ethernet cards include these..."
And so on. School boards, not wanting to do a lot of fussing, might insist on a certain "easy to convert" rating from this program before taking donations.
Stage 2 is a distro which does a super-simple install on machines that make the cut. It knows the hardware is approved, so it's a hassle-free install, with ideally no questions asked, or barely any.
Then you would get a lot of computers converted and ready to be linux boxes.
Has it been over a year since you last donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation
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!
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Having a computer for every student is not a good thing, in my opinion. Actually, I believe that any computers in classrooms are for the most part a bad idea - and this is coming from a former computer programming student.
With computers in every classroom, it really requires each teacher to become a system admin and I think it really distracts the students from their work. I have a friend from Vietnam, who never had computers in his classrooms growing up, and he was way more skillful in math then the rest of us students that grew up with computers in the class in Canada.
And, it's not just the cost of software that's expensive for schools. It's the hardware, maintenance, and electricity costs too! The Ontario teachers union is always bitching about not having enough resources, but any good teacher should do just fine with a box of pencils, some paper, a chalkboard, and some chalk.
Offtopic:
Now with the standardised curriculum, many of the teachers are basically just babysitters that hand out material written by someone else. It must be hard working 6 hours a day, 9 months a year.
Religion for nerds. Stuff that really matters
Remember kids, buying a computer without an operating system is the first step towards piracy. Act now and call BSA and report anyone who offers you a computers without a licensed operating system. Say No to Piracy.
Offer not valid outside the USA especially Finland.
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
Because if it was free, they wouldn't want it.
As a student in the Indiana Public Education program, I can't wait for this. I have long helped teachers out with computer problems and have even used knoppix to fix problems deemed 'unfixable' by our support staff. Now I can't wait to see how much more stable my life will be when people can't fsck everything up. But, however nice this is, the main problem in my school, as I see it, isn't the number of computers, but how they are used. Constantly broken machines that won't let you print to certain printers and teachers who barely know how to turn the computer on are a humongous drawback. On top of that, our school corporation is just NOW getting on track with Windows, teaching everyone how to do simple things like delete programs (my mother is a 3rd grade school teacher and even her kids install programs on the computers without her knowledge). I simply hope they spend much more money teaching the teachers how to use the computers.... But hey, now instead of getting people calling me about Blue Screens of Death, I get to answer questions about Kernel Panic!
What will Dell and windows do? Give out Dell computers for about 300$. And windows might get on them for free or something? I know it sounds crazy but maybe they can make a loss to turn around the market. ( Investment for the future ). I don't know about Linspire but there has been great improvements in Linux desktops in the last couple of years. But for basic stuff it works, just wondering what will happen to all the apps the schools use to teach their students are there Linux ports or wine or vmware solutions that they are implementing ? One thing that will be great is that they will be able to manage these systems and have cleaner networks for there students. With the HALD and usb lot of students can bring in inexpensive memory sticks to save there work, web pages, documents etc ...
I wonder how all this work out, will the school departments hire coders to write applications which will teach these new students. Or use 100s of highschool geeks to write GPL'ed educational tools :). Lot of cool things are happening and let's see what happens.
-A
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.
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.
--
Given enough personal experience, all stereotypes are shallow.
Really? I thought it had been shown over and over again that computers do not contribute to the overall quality of education for children. And in some cases, relying on comptuters can actually reduce the quality because the basics get ignored.
Seriously, what IS the value of having computers in schools besides computer literacy? Sure, kids should have *a* computer class. Maybe a few computer labs for research. But why one computer per student? What is the value? So kids can skip lunch and IM their friends in another room?
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
wordprocessor=wordprocessor spreadsheet=spreadsheet web browser=web browser email client=email client Which skills in particular are you concerned about? They will learn how to waste countless company hours on personal web browsing, IM, and email using Linux just as easy as they will on Windows. Except with Linux I wouldn't have to waste time clearing off spyware/adware/viruses/worms. The Windows "Real World" isn't a pretty one from my perspective, and the Linux one is a dream. Let's hope it comes true some day.
--dingletec--
My kids' school is not air conditioned, you insensitive clod!
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:
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.
What part of "gestalt" don't you understand?
Great. It figures that when the schools decide to switch to Linux they would choose the worst distribution available.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Anything's better than having to force security with Windows. Took me only a few weeks to crack the programs my high school used. Got a week's suspension for that 'cause someone ratted me out. Hopefully using a more secure O/S will prevent other kids from making that mistake.