Setting up Linux in an Inner City Public School?

Richard Finney asks: "I have a friend who is retired. He was the chief scientist on the Landsat program. Instead of just belting down scotch and cashing social security checks, he is volunteering at Samuel Coleridge Taylor Elementary School #122, in Baltimore. He's trying to set up some old donated computers from the Windows 95 era. Rather than fight with Windows, he's decided to install Linux. How would you set up these systems for these little kids to use and learn about computers using Linux?"

Comments

trade in some of those machines!

[yagu]

If he is looking at donated computers truly of the Windows 95 era, he may not be doing the students, nor linux any service. Consider the standard requirements for a Windows 95 "era" machine: (from the Microsoft knowledge base article)

System requirements for installing Windows 95:

• Personal computer with a 386DX or higher processor (486 recommended)
• 4 megabytes (MB) of memory (8 MB recommended)
• Typical hard disk space required to upgrade to Windows 95: 35-40 MB The actual requirement varies depending on the features you choose to install.
• Typical hard disk space required to install Windows 95 on a clean system: 50-55 MB The actual requirement varies depending on the features you choose to install.
• One 3.5-inch high-density floppy disk drive
• VGA or higher resolution (256-color SVGA recommended)

Not saying it can't be done with Linux, but this person is choosing Linux to avoid the hassles of Windows? With machines as lean as these, and today's Linux, he may be getting more hassle with Linux than the old Windows.

Even by Linux (assuming 2.4 or higher kernel, with associated standard Gnu distro packages) standards, these are pretty stripped down machines, and would be likely to be balky even running Linux. There may be some instructional "stuff" you could do with Linux and these machines, but I'd be inclined to steer clear... there's a reason a lot of these machines are donated.

An alternative would be to look for some kind of community "donation", or a grant, where half decent computers could be drummed up -- a decent computer today can be obtained for much less than before -- why not order a bunch of components from Newegg, or somewhere similar, and build computers as part of the education exercise?

Re:trade in some of those machines!

[huckda]

checkout http://k12ltsp.org/

Linux terminal server...slick, easy to roll out, and free!

Re:trade in some of those machines!

[Meshach]

Only pre-8.2 slacks I believe

But you are right. It may be better to go for one of the distros like TinyLinux intended for small footprint installs

Re:trade in some of those machines!

[Technician]

Don't forget to look up the designed for schools on a budget solution ready to roll. Edubuntu set up with thin clients and a server may be a turn key solution for the school on a budget.

Re:trade in some of those machines!

[Anonymous Coward]

You only need machines with 32-48 MB system memory for LTSP, machines with 4-8 MB are a bit stuck although they could be purposed with SVGALIB VNCviewer or SVGALIB rdesktop. It should be possible to acquire suitable machines for under $100 used, or $150 new.

To minimize the hardware needed and improve administration you might want to try running Edubuntu (a Linux terminal server specialised for education) diskless, and use a directory to store all account information in. There is a directory server project dedicated for small Linux terminal server environments to act as a boot manager for LTSP clients and servers, and account store for users. Team this up with m0n0wall and FreeNAS and you have a complete solution.

Try this live cd

[kcurtis]

Freeduc Live CD for primary schools

Re:Don't bother.

[Orrin Bloquy]

Factor in, also, that most liveCDs *require* 192Mb RAM to run but won't tell you this.

Ubuntu Breezy's install CD (curses, not GUI) spent three hours attempting to install itself to a G3 PowerBook, and left it in an unusable state upon reboot. The Win9x kernel is not wonderful, but like OS 9 it *is* designed to run inside a frighteningly small amount of memory. Gnome/KDE based distros fail this miserably.