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Linux Taking Over Schools in India
slashchris84 writes to mention a BusinessWeek article about the growing role of Linux in the classrooms of India. In a country with a long history of corporate problems and financial issues, the inexpensive and flexible nature of open source software is gaining a lot of ground. From the article: "Two years ago, New Delhi said the best way to improve computer literacy in India was to adopt open source software in schools. Although Kerala is the first to introduce such a program statewide, 18 of India's 28 states either are using Linux or have pilot projects for its use in various government departments and schools. The education ministries in most states, and in Delhi the federal ministries of defense, transport, communication, and health, are all using the software on server computers"
...one claimed that Free Software wouldn't be cheaper to use because they would need to change their procedures and way of running (which would have a cost)
...MS sells them pretty cheap licences
...they couldn't roll out updates through out the network with free software in the same way that they could MS and they couldn't control it with the same level of precision that they could with MS products
Sure, but wouldn't upgrading to Vista as well? The fruit is worth the work of the harvest.
Cheap in relation to...? I met with the principal and director of technology for a pretty big school district yesterday and one of his main motivations for moving to Linux and LTSP was because Microsoft has decided to start charging them anually for licenses.
LTSP updates the terminal server. The terminal server is what all thin clients run off of, so they are "automatically" updated when the server is (with a couple of rare occasions when you must update the chroot environment, but that is a one-stop simple procedure as well). Also, control is done through the terminal server. If you have multiple terminal servers for multiple sites and you're worried about updating them all at once, then there are things like Zenworks (though I'm not sure how it works with LTSP servers) and others I'm sure.
I administrate a ~13 node LTSP setup for a non-profit after school hangout for kids. Before I came around (about a year ago), their hardware was running with Windows 95/98, and was riddled with illegal software, viruses and spyware. The machines were unusable and they were begging me to help.
So, I sold them a cheap dual processor server and a bunch of PXE bootable NICs for their computers, and had an Edubuntu network running for them in a few weeks.
They haven't had any major problems since. It just works. Now tell me that THIS kind of thing costs more than administrating Windows boxes.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.