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A School District's Education in Free Software
david.jonathan.russe writes "The school district in Kamloops, BC, Canada has been working on a linux-based terminal infrastructure for several years. They now have a system in place district wide and they can not keep up with all of the requests for info. They have a great hybrid system, using diskless workstations all booting from local servers. 'The second-generation system cost the Kamloops district about $47,000 to implement, as well as the cost of training and the release time for personal study and taking exams. However, Ferrie has no doubt of the savings overall. License costs are disappearing as the district phases out its Novell NetWare licenses, and the district no longer needs to purchase productivity software. Ferrie also figures that the increased reliability represents a substantial savings, although he admits that it is hard to quantify. However, perhaps the greatest benefit of switching to free software is that the reliability of the new system frees up technical staff to do more than routine support.'" Linux.com and Slashdot are both owned by SourceForge.
I live in a mainly rural school district 64 in the same province, and we're starting to undergo a similar process. The local principal is interested, and I've given him a copy of Edubuntu to evaluate the upcoming changes--though I'm not so sure the district is going that direction, I think they're emulating Kamloops (thin client etc.). The comment in the article about the staff having more time for things like a help desk and hardware support is understated, it's absolutely huge in making a difference for teachers, especially at isolated schools. It's important to me, because I want to start a computer club at my kids' (40 student rural) elementary, and I've been giving away old boxes with puppy linux on them for a while now, with some success.
Nice thing about successful changeovers like this is that they're infectious.
Damn those pesky terrorists
I have a similar story.
My name is Josh Beck, and I'm the IT coordinator at a magnet middle school within the Northeast Independent School District.(San Antonio, TX) Last year I piloted about 9 classroom Ubuntu computers in my lab. As the year went on, I modified the default setup so that I have an image that is secure and hopefully %100 percent functional. I've spent the last week exporting this image to 5 computer labs, approximately 150 computers. When the teachers and kids come back next year , they'll have the option to boot Windows or Linux. (The Linux side is sporting the fancy Beryl desktop. It won a lot of the kids over last year, and I'm thinking it will do the same next year.)
If you are in Education, and you want to migrate your school's computers so that open-source is at least an option, be warned. There really can be a whole lot of resistance. I have to agree with what I read here in that respect. I really did put my job on the line when I wiped out my first 9 licensed computers to replace them with open-source alternatives. The district-level IT coordinators put up a bit of a fight.
Although I'm in agreement that Novel can easily be phased out, I do use the Linux client. It isn't easy to bring online, and if your primary net device is listed as anything other that 'ETH0' you have to reprogram and recompile the thing, but Novel access through Linux works. Here's a more detailed look if you are interested:
Novel on Linux How To
At this point in time my feeling is that it's probably more realistic to offer teachers and students a choice, and then educate them about what's involved with that choice. If they want to use Windows, and your school district has a healthy tax-base, by all means purchase the license and allow them to do so. I can tell you this. When I offered the choice last year, the Linux seats were hot real estate. The kids love it.
Here's a video with one of my students:
Eject!
Josh Beck
IT Coordinator
Interactive Media Applications at Krueger Middle School
Northeast ISD
San Antonio, Texas
Yes, congratulations. However, they are building on years of effort by the Kindergarten to 12th grade Linux project, and other such projects. The K12Linux Project was originally started for the Multnomah County Education Service District, using hardware donated by Intel. (Intel does some of its processor design in a big facility which is also in Portland, Oregon, USA.)
Perhaps 8 years ago, one of the founders of the K12Linux project told me that the total cost of maintenance of Linux was less than half that of Windows. (He gave a figure much less than half, but I don't remember the actual figure.)
My experience with Windows is that it is sloppily coded, and lots of things cause Windows to need maintenance. For example, the CPU hogging bug in Firefox, which seems to be worse in Firefox version 2.0.0.4, sometimes causes Windows XP Professional SP2 to become unstable and require re-starting the computer. When Firefox hogs the CPU under Linux, it is only necessary to kill Firefox. Linux remains stable.
If Microsoft paid schools $100 per copy to take Windows, the cost of Windows would still be far higher than K12Linux.
The K12Linux Project home page gives links to other Linux-in-schools projects, also.
A side benefit of Linux is that it is much more secure, partly because of its design, and partly because students are less likely to know how to tinker with it, I was told.
It is far easier to maintain a terminal server with numerous simple terminals, than separate stand-alone computers, too, and Linux is fast enough to be used that way.
I feel a little uncomfortable with what I said above, because I am vastly understating the savings of using Linux rather than Windows. Microsoft can't even make "Microsoft Genuine Advantage" work correctly; that is a GENUINE disadvantage of Windows. (I am using the word "genuine" in its honest sense, not in its abusive public relations spin sense.)
Another problem with a Windows system is hiring people who are willing to work with products from a company such as Microsoft that is so abusive. It's tiring to work with abusiveness.
Again, I still feel uncomfortable because I am understating the case. My company has had considerable trouble with error messages from Windows Update, for example. We've had about 8 different kinds of problems, some of which have required hours to solve. Judging from the many, many complaints on the newsgroup, there seem to be many other kinds of Windows Update problems we haven't had.
People who work in IT sometimes like Microsoft because the sloppy Microsoft products give them more work.
I'm a Network Analyst for a school district in Nor Cal, and having just DUMPED a terminal server type installation, I'll give you my perspective of terminals in a school environment.
1) Terminal Servers suck using presentation software. Two or three people on one machine is enough to bring it to its knees. Adding Servers to the farm is not really a viable option for every three people doing "Powerpoints".
2) Using Web based applications can bring the server to its knees with about 10-15 users. Combine with #1 and you are toast.
3) Teachers want to use whatever software they want to use. Telling them that they can't run X because it is 1) Windows and we're Linux, 2) wasn't designed for Term Servers, 3) will bring the Term Servers to their knees with minimal users, IS NOT AN OPTION to them. They don't care, and will run whining to the site admin, or to the District Office about how unsupportive IT is to teaching etc.
4) Flash/Shockwave Nuff said.
So, we've pulled out the client server environment and replace it with stand alone computers. With modern imaging software and RIS/Windows Deployment Services I don't care if Little Johnny Rotten has just installed malware, I just re-image the machine and it is only down for less than 1/2 hour, and comes back fully patched and ready do go.
No longer am I required to spend countless hours trying to defend why some piece of software doesn't run right, and won't be supported. Nor am I spending weeks trying to figure out a work around for application X that doesn't work right on Term Servers. Now I tell them to install whatever they want, they are responsible, and if it fubars the computer it will be reset. I can reset 40 / 50 computers a day if necissary, and it is mostly brain dead work.
Which frees me to be more productive with my time. It is much better for IT when a Network Analyst can help teachers with technology rather than being a stumbling block of "not possible", "no", "we can't". It is all fine and good to try Term Services with the latest Linux distro, but in the long run, it wasn't feasible considering the requirements/desires of the Teaching staff.
I wish them well, and hope they have better luck than I did. I just know that Terminal Servers didn't work for us.
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I am a level one tech support volunteer who has gotten some assistance building a 33-seat thin client network in a public school in San Francisco. We could use the help of a one or two higher-level network admins on a few issues. We have been up and running nicely for two years. We could just use some help occasionally. It's a public school, so there is almost no budget. We are doing almost all of this on legacy hardware. If you are in the San Francisco Bay Area, and would like to help with a few issues, please email me at einfeldt at digitaltippingpoint dot com. Thanks either way! Christian Einfeldt
My first reaction was that it may be TraitorousWhore-StickItUptheCommunityAss-Linux since it appears on the a Microvell blog, but I found an article on the school website that may suggest otherwise:
(from Linux in Education Project link, on right column)
"Here is a list of some of the free software technologies that we use: Debian, Free BSD, RedHat, MySQL, PHP, OpenOffice, Linux Terminal Server Project, Diskless Clients, Dansguardian, Squid, Cyrus, Squirrelmail, Scribus, Qcad, Cycus, and more..."
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Not sure why this guy was modded as a troll. In this case, rolling their own may have been a win, but it is still a worthwhile question.
I have watched companies invest man-years to solve a problem quite poorly that they could have solved excellently with third party software costing much less. Programmers always gloss over use cases and overlook the cost of all the "little things" that crop up. Meanwhile, management indulges them because they look more important when they hire more people.
When I read:
Sadly, my first thought was "fire a few of them." While this is a brilliant success story, I'm left wondering why on earth there wasn't an out of the box Linux solution they could have used... Why is a high-school doing this independently instead of paying into a centralized development model?
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FWIW..I spent the last 3 years working as the (only full time) IT admin/tech for a K-12 school district. (approx 5 schools,.. total when I left of about 700 workstations.) What they did right (in the article) was (seemingly) they had good management who understood what they were doing and put an organized effort into re-training the staff and valuing the "soft" side of the equation (human factors) as much as the technical side. (Although I would also like to see specifications on exactly how many systems they migrated, and what distros they used) From my experience, having spent the last 3 years in a K-12 IT position.. I'm of the opinion that success stories like this are (and will continue to be) few and far between. School districts are full of politics and "resistance" and very little money. (as shown by the fact that this "project" took them 10 years to implement) In all the school districts I've been in (and worked in) the employees, staff and students didnt care whether it was FOSS or Windows or Mac or whatever. All they cared about was that it worked reliably. If you took the time to care about their issues, AND you were skilled enough to make it work.. then you were a hero. I'm an advocate for having as much variety as possible ( In the high school library lab I built, I wanted to include several Ubuntu machines and some Macs.. but the school had standardized on HP/Compaq and XP... so it didnt happen.
Nice to see that. Better have the money going to local business than licensing fees that go outside the country.
...etc., and disks are cheap anyway).
/etc/nsswitch.conf to give precedence to NIS over local files). /etc/fstab has the NFS shares and what they map to.
I did something similar for the home network.
Completely diskless PCs are less practical in a home environment (need to source the cards, the Boot ROMs,
For the home network, I don't want to chase viruses and malware. So except for one dual boot machine, everything is Linux (5 workstations, and one server).
A server at home stores all the user data. NFS handles file sharing, and NIS handles authentication (do not forget to configure
All this is on on kubuntu for the workstations and ubuntu server on the server. I think I started doing this with Dapper, and moved on to Breezy, Edgy then now it is on Feisty.
For general computing, kubuntu is very usable. OpenOffice, FireFox and Gaim/Kopete for the basics. Skype works well, and so does Opera.
I used to have autofs too so all home directories were mounted automatically from the server, but stopped doing that several months ago. I can't remember what it was, but it was an upgrade that caused some issues (maybe around Edgy).
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Because the graphical libraries weren't designed for it. Peeps are working on a new graphical library that will handle it. See http://www.gegl.org/ for further information.
Nope, no SuSE here ... I'm the John Cuzzola mentioned in the article who implemented the first generation thin client back in 2001 till 2005 (Dean Montgomery deployed the second generation). Without question we owe our deepest thanks to the LTSP project and to the ideals of the free software community without which we wouldn't have gotten this far. Our 'thin' clients are actually AMD2 sempron machines with 512MB ram (no hard drive of course) that PXE boot into linux (cost under $280 CAN). Because these units have some horse power to them we run 99% of the software locally instead of on the server (we still have the option of running selected software remotely). This gives all the benefits of thin client administration but with none of the drawbacks such as multimedia apps over the LAN, and remote sound support - those applications run locally. Our desktop is KDE with Beryl taking advantage of the hardware's nVidia graphics chipset (the kids love the effects). No you won't find any SuSE linux here (we use debian/ubuntu/gentoo as well as FreeBSD) - throughout the years the school district has bought together a group of techies that really do believe in free software and we're more than excited to get the chance to deploy it (I recall working on the first generation at 1:00 am at a school trying to get it 'just right'). So thanks again to the free software community looking forward to seeing what other fantastic software becomes available!