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Australian State May Give Students Linux Laptops
Whiteox writes "The Australian Prime Minister's plan to equip high schools with 'one laptop per child' may go open source. Kevin Rudd's $56 million digital revolution will include 'laptops [that will] run on an open source operating system with a suite of open source applications like those packaged under Edubuntu. This would include Open Office for productivity software, Gimp for picture editing and the Firefox internet browser.' So far this has been considered for New South Wales and I think other states may follow."
To bad they won't be able to surf websites such as Slashdot, Fark, or whatever else might be considered offensive to the government.
http://www.infoworld.com/news/feeds/08/10/13/No-opt-out-of-filtered-Internet.html?source=gs
Sorry for going off-topic.
The greatest revenge in life is massive success.
Too bad the same government is also giving us a Chinese style censored Internet connection to 'protect the children'.
It has also been recently revealed that the connection can no longer be opted out from, you can only switch from one that blocks all 'child unfriendly' sites to one that only blocks 'illegal material'. No clear definition on what is considered 'illegal' (does the piratebay count?).
They also lied and claimed that Internet speeds would not be slowed dispute their reports claiming otherwise.
I just hope its a basic DNS block and I can switch to OpenDNS.
Anyway I voted green, mainly because both other governments sucked to much.
cat
It's more of it doesn't seem to consume as much power as XP and thus doesn't overheat. I've had Ubuntu running in the same CPU position as XP overheating did, and it stayed up all the time.
I'm not bashing XP, just his statement that XP DOESN'T crash.
1 + 1 = 3?
The assumption your making here is that the only way to be creative and successful at it is to use a mac that is simply not true. Why should the eeepc have to run OSX why cant it run Linux or Windows? both have available programs that do the same things as a Macbook but are going to be allot cheaper.
I really like FOSS, but I doubt a 7 year old nor the folks who work at the school would be of much help finding or using those tools.
Teacher gives out Mac specific instructions. All the other kids follow those. The kid with the eeePC spends a couple hours tracking down a similar program and figuring out how to use it. Then proceeds to attempt to translate the instructions into the new program.
I don't really know if it is the right environment to introduce the kid to linux. Enough of the staff would probably be familiar with Windows to help the kid out a bit. They do know how to use OSX. I really just don't see the support being there for linux, and I doubt most 7 year olds have the wherewithal to deal with the extra headaches without getting frustrated and discouraged before he even get to what they want to do.
I suppose it would depend on how you see it being used, but if it is going to be mainly at school and being directed by a teacher, I just don't know how well Linux would work. It would be less of an issue if much of the work and set up would be done at home, with help from a parent familiar with linux.
It really might be a better idea to wait a bit for the money or to looking around for a good price on some refurbished hardware(though honestly a quick look in Google doesn't seem hugely encouraging, and it seems a used macbook that's a couple years old is still going to set you back far more than an eeePC).