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NZ School Goes Open Source Amid Microsoft Mandate
Dan Jones writes "Kiwis have built an entire school IT system out of open source software, in less than two months, despite a deal between the New Zealand government and Microsoft that effectively mandates the use of Microsoft products in the country's schools. Albany Senior High School in the northern suburbs of Auckland has been running an entirely open source infrastructure since it opened in 2009. It's using a range of applications like OpenOffice, Moodle for education content, Mahara for student portfolios, and Koha for the library catalogue. Ubuntu Linux is on the desktop and Mandriva provides the server. Interestingly, the school will move into new purpose-built premises this year, which include a dedicated server room design based on standard New Zealand school requirements, including four racks each capable of holding 48 servers for its main systems. The main infrastructure at Albany Senior High only requires four servers, suggesting an almost 50-fold saving on hardware requirements."
i'd be pissed off if my kid was being taught to use applications 99% of the business world don't use.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
swapping a school to free software to save few buckets and satisfy some nerds linux fetish = failing at education.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Mod parent up! I agree fully apart from the 2xDL380s, we use a couple more servers than that for extras like Terminal Services (to run god aweful school managment software - MUSAC) and one for all the internet/email filtering and security. Everything else like email, av control, centralized video library, library software, centralized applications etc are virtualized. Every school that I have encountered using a non-windows/mac system for both clients and servers is filled with unhappy teachers and students with half functional IT that they can't figure out how to use or has other issues that make it more work than it should be. These schools usually with some media savy attention seeker at the helm who usually appear to care far more about their social position than providing a learning environment. Have seen plenty happy with linux server side even though they are stuck using XP because of incompatibilities in the way the preffered supported dist is made.
Not to mention the additional costs in teaching the teachers the systems and the inherently hidden wasted costs of teaching the kids the system. When that is taken into consideration, I would expect the savings to rapidly dissipate.