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22,000 Indiana Students Using Linux Desktops
Anonymous writes "Indiana's Department of Education has moved 22,000 students onto Linux desktops, and it's looking like that's only going to accelerate with SLED 10, Linspire, and other distributions getting better."
After growing up and going to high school in Indiana, this is a surprise to me because our school was VERY outdated =S... of course this was a few years ago and it was in a town of about 7k people.
The article is about high schools, not colleges.
What?
All that to say that 22,000 students using Linux probably translates into ~150 Linux desktops in the better funded schools.
But maybe Indiana has a better public school system than California. Wouldn't be surprised.
The heavens do not fall for such a trifle.
The article mentions SLED and RedHat. They also mention Ubuntu being used successfully by a different school district, I presume because of the edubuntu project. No sane admin is going to roll out 10 distros, "apt-get emerge rpm, Oh sod it install the bloody thing yourself!". However what's happening here is that different school districts are approving A distro for use on their systems, not some poor support tech trying to work out what distro is being used in a given instance.
If my experience is anything to go by students who are introduced to linux early find Windows is broken if they are asked to move over. Employers of Indianna, prepare to be swamped with demands for cheaper OS installs in 6 years!!
"Linux is for noobs"-The new MS fud strategy
How much are they going to save in licensing costs, does anyone know? (not just over Windows, but Office, Photoshop, etc.)
And how much are they going to need to spend on training up the competent tech support?
I remember MS claiming the TCO total cost of ownership is lower for Windows than for linux because of training...
Obama likes poor people so much, he wants to make more of them.
That's not a good argument. Why should every student in the college use Windows, just because some courses require Photoshop/AutoCAD?
If the students require it, just run it using a terminal service.
At my University I can just type "windows" at the Linux command prompt, and up pops a connection to a Windows server (Citrix based software I think). Then the colleges can also just pay licences per usage, so that they don't have to have multiple installations just in case someone needs it.
For heavy use, perhaps VMWare is required, but the terminal experience is very fast for me at least. It can't compare with VNC etc.
I was also wondering about that, more specific: The API-part, what does he mean? Does he want a stable Linux-api? KDE? GNOME? X? OpenGL? From my point of view, it looks like he just hasn't completely understood what he's talking about. And common? They all share the Linux-kernels, and a lot of them uses the same graphical user interface(Red Hat, SUSE and Ubuntu have sort of standardized on GNOME)
-- Linux user #369862
I have been running SUSE on my desktop at work since v8 and just tried the latest.
Luckily I installed another harddisk in my pc before trying to install.
It looked great but I ran into some installation problems very unlike other SUSE installs I have tried. Even on my notebook it has worked perfect, even WiFi and Bluetooth.
Although the install itself ran fine. Getting the right drivers for my nVidia (6200) card failed. I got a trial key and went on to install the drivers in hope of running XGL. But it failed to make use of the card so I ended up installing my own drivers and forced XGL to enable. I did get that to run but then I had another problem, which was a show stopper.
I was happy to see the Citrix client included, but it seems to have problems with multiple desktops on this SLED 10. When I change to another desktop, all the Citrix applications vanishes. I can see in the process list that they still are there, I just can't see them. That worked great on the others.
So now I am installing it again from scratch, with KDE instead of Gnome, without XGL to see if it works then. Interesting to see what happens when I try to register the same license again. I hope that it was just XGL that broke Citrix.
We use Linux at the U of Calgary engineering dept., and all it did was ADD to the stigma. Before I thought all the 31337 people used Linux to hax people and did generally c00l things with it. Then I grew up a bit and started using Linux only to realize that to do something so little like write a report just sucked (using OpenOffice), writing code sucked (using xemacs *barf*), and surfing the web sucked (using a restrictive, buggy, and old version of firefox). I'm not trying to dis Linux here (to it's credit we had gaim msnger, which I now use on my win comp at home :), I'm just saying that it seemed a bit anti-productive, and this is mostly due to crappy programs and the time spent trying to do *anything* was too great to really get into it. Of course I don't have the privileges to load my own programs, but damn, those high school students are really up against a wall if they are facing the same thing (most likely). Anyways, I'm going to try loading ubuntu on my lappy and see how that goes, also have a 'media center' version of knoppix that I should try on my hacked together media comp. I'm not giving up *yet* but I'm still skeptical...
Har?
They're using two distributions, Linspire and SLED. And if you want them to standardize on one distro, best get used to the thought of it being SLED.
"I think within five years, we'll see a huge market shift," Huffman said. "But the Linux community really has to come together. They do have to have a common API; they've got to have a common installer. If those things don't exist, it will not be a competitive market again. If they do exist, I think it will."
Like libc? I mean, seriously, I want some of the stuff that guy's smoking. First they go to great length explaining how they diversify on Red Hat, SUSE, Ubuntu and (sigh) Linspire and then he asks for a common API and installer? Like one kid stated when asked which system it preferres, either Linux or Windows the reply was:"Who cares?" Same thing here: who cares for a "common installer" (technically impossible) or a "common API" (it's there: libc, GTK, Qt, etc.). As a user you either see a Gnome or a KDE desktop anyway.
"Mike Huffman, special assistant for technology at the Indiana Department of Education", gimme a break!
My 0.02 cents
Apparently you missed the part where the student stated that he "Didn't care" whether it was Windows or not. Do you really think he's going to be concerned about which Linux distro is installed?
I think he's talking about Microsofts COM and DCOM, and probably OPENGL and DirectX or something..
.. but then there's Gnomes Bononbo for a COM layer and the directx alternative SDL, so I think hes just sounding off.
"So there he is, risen from the dead. Like that fella, E. T." - Father Ted Crilly
One of the largest drains on IT school budgets is the cost of licenses. From the article it appears they are focused not on "wow we use Linux" but we can put laptops in the hand of the students for substantially reduced cost. What needs to happen next is true integration of the laptop into the curriculum. I believe the algebra, geometry and calculus curriculum is ripe for improvement using laptops in the classroom to learn advanced concepts such as three dimensional coordinate systems , graphing, integration, integration etc. It is easier to understand if you can see it. The TI graphing calculators in use today are improvements on pen and pencil calculations but don't really represent a step change in the teaching methods. Unfortunately (or fortunately depending on viewpoint) the TI calculators have cool games which get alot of use during monotonous lectures. Has the teaching of advanced math changed at all in the last 50 years? Hopefully low cost laptops will inspire development of tools to bring about fundamental changes . The ultimate goal is to have the laptop and its underlying software transparent to the user. Any discussion of distros in the classroom defeats the purpose.
But, what IT department manager in their right mind, when having the option NOT to install any Flash plugins for Linux, is going to do so willingly, knowing what everyone knows about Flash?
If you ask me, it is a perfect way to say, "Sorry, no Flash for you." No more annoying Flash adverts, or other exploits.
Also, this is a perfect time for them to prevent alot of things - remove the CD/DVD-ROM drives from the cases (or alternatively, setup the optical drive access to be ROOT-only), disable installation of P2P apps, etc. This will prevent students from wasting alot of educational resources playing around with crap like Limewire or Diablo II, and frankly, it's been needed for a long time now.
I admin on a few online games, and let me tell you, the amount of students that are on there during school hours never ceases to amaze me and piss me off at the same time, as I know they are wasting valuable school resources and educational opportunities to play games, instead of doing something useful like learning how to administer a web server, etc. There is a time and place for games, and during class is not one of them IMHO. We have, in fact, as administrators, turned in students to their school principals for precisely this reason. As a staff, we believe in education first, socializing and leisure time second when it comes to our games.
@Mindless Drivel: 100% of Twitter posts ever Tweeted.
Thirty years ago Bavaria (southern part of Germany) was a somewhat backwards, conservative, agricultural state of Germany, whereas the northers states were highly industrialized and rich. Then the Bavarians started high tech business and have passed the north by far in the mean time.
... we'll see what comes out of that.
Now the smart and educated come to Bavaria to find a decent job...
From what you tell Indiana tries exactly the same
Well the techs involved in the install process are competent and actually come from school districts in Indiana. They are also the ones that are supporting the current environment. For the most part from what I understand it is almost like a cyber-cafe install where if something goes wrong ( Software wise ) they will have an image to just re-install the machine with the kids data on a network drive so they won't lose it. Who knows if this may change or not but if they get most of their schools on Linux it will be important for School Information systems (SIS) to start working in the platform as well because after the kids they may move over the teachers/faculty as well.
"Imagination is more important than knowledge" -- Albert Einstein
I don't know how many people have noticed this, but the only people who complain about incompatibilities (e.g. library versions, paths, etc.) between distros (and/or support the LSB) are the ones who want to sell closed-source software.
If they'd just make a GNU Autoconf script and let the sysadmin/user install the program himself as the parent just described, there would be no problem!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
That is probably right but it is even easier to have have your new hardware arrive with the software pre-installed. Linux will always be in a distant second place until it is pre-installed.
The bright side is that Linux does not need a reinstaller
Be sure to check whether those are running OS X or Linux. I had an Ibook for a few years that ran OS X for only a few hours every few months (when I wanted to try it out). The hardware is sometimes worth it (Of course, now I have a Dell laptop which came with free 3 year next business day warranty support for higher education. I don't need reliable hardware if I can have someone come replace everything every few months. I'm already on my third motherboard, third keyboard, and second hinge, and the new motherboard is defective too.)
I had thought you were talking about autoconf only from the context. This is a problem. The hope is that most home users won't need those niche applications. But there is definitely room for improvement there.
I doubt that that is going to be solved unless one distribution gains significant marketshare, unfortunately.
That is quite interesting. It should be possible with some work to set up a system in Ubuntu that would act like that using deb packages and a modified file manager. It would also probably not be a bad idea to have themes set up that way, as opposed to the current, very inflexible theme manager. I will have to discuss it with some others. Unfortunately, it would only work with Ubuntu...
A standardised system for updates for third-party programs would be great. Ubuntu is already able to update automatically at set times, if I recall, but only for software in the repositories. As for standardised registration, do you mean registration as in network-based licensing, or registration as in registering with a server? A standard for the latter would be nice, but I doubt that developers requiring the former would be willing to use a standard system.