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Creating a School Computer Lab With Ubuntu For $0
An anonymous reader writes "Here is an interesting story of a school in Oakland that used old computers running Ubuntu and OpenOffice.org to provide a school computer lab for students."
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Where are you going to find that many computers for $0?
Shock! ....
I never knew I could download linux for free and get it to run a a decent rate on old hardware
what have I been doing with my life.
who passed this one line summery !!
who where what when now?
If Ubuntu / Linux gets well entrenched in education it is a serious threat to Microsofts business, hence the heavy discounts provided to students and Universities.
Yes the above statement may come across as a Linux zealot (ooh evil Microsoft), but if students are happy using Linux and Open Office, when they move into the work place they will bring that knowledge and understanding with them.
LXDE - Lubuntu or Linux Mint, is faster, uses less RAM.
Ubuntu - with Unity, is to be avoided at all costs.
I would rather use KDE than Unity.
Keyboards in the article picture look a lot like old mechanical keyboards. They could probably make a bit of cash by selling them on e-bay and buying some cheap disposable ones... It would probably make the computer lab a lot quieter, too :)
An old idea in action is refreshingly inspirational. It humbly reminds us that newer is not always better, it's what you make of it that counts.
it even got the attention of Stallmann which replied in the blog post.
Can't tell if RMS in comments or troll.
True they keep Windows or MacOSX on their laptops, but Anchorage School district and a few others buys dell 9 mini netbooks and uses a cart to store them and charge that can hold 30 at a time.
They love it because they are $199 with Ubuntu and when students are done they just put them back in. It is great as teachers may have a few computers in the classroom but rarely enough for everyone.
My posts get modded down as I am cynical for linux for users still at this point due to the lack of codecs that come with it and a stable abi where an update in my experience can kill a platform. However, Dell's branded distro of Ubuntu only uses its own repositories so nothing bad will happen in an update and the price comes with the codecs like h.264, mp3, and quicktime. All the teacher has to do is plug it in and they come with OpenOffice to boot!
A netbook might be better than older computers and cheaper because someone has to test each one to see if its compatible iwth all the hardware and if things still work on it etc. $199 for an Asus netbook or Dell with Ubuntu is perfect and something a school can look into.
http://saveie6.com/
I already know what Redmond propaganda operatives will claim:
- there is no Ribbon, so it is not "professional"
- students will learn the "wrong" office flavour, which is of absolutely no use in the real world
- students will suffer badly later on, because they won't know exactly the "industry standard" Windows
- their precious little, vulnerable brains will be damaged forever by the Cryptic Hackorz Commands
- Linux is a keystone of communism and only the Maoists of Google, Facebook and Deutsche Börse use it to promote Communism
- your kid will become a child molester if you subject it to Linux. Or at least a terrrrorrrrist.
In my (thankfully limited) encounters with formal disposal rules, public and private, 'just flog the stuff on ebay' is frequently far more trouble than it ends up being worth.
One major factor is that a successful institution needs to be set up so as not to be easy meat for dishonest functionaries(at least before they've worked their way to the top). Common result? Low level cogs selling things, especially things with unclear value, is not encouraged. This goes double if the said low-level cog has some degree of purchasing authority. It's just too easy to use official funds to pay at the front door, then flog gear out the back door for direct personal profit and/or kickbacks of some flavor. This does cramp a lot of perfectly legitimate plans by honest people; but tends to remain in force because nobody has a better idea about how to discourage the entrepreneurial tendencies of the chronically dishonest.
..to teach programming. I was taught programming on a 286 machine, 1MB RAM, MSDOS and TurboPascal. It laid the foundations of my career as a software developer and now that I know C++, Smalltalk, Java, C# and Perl, I am even more a fan of Pascal. Clean, fast compilation, efficient runtime, strong typing. This language clearly lays proper foundations for a programming career. To make money you have to use cruft, but it is essential to remember the basics you learned on a well-done programming enviroment.
I would go so far to say that a good teacher (who actually knows some computer science) and a 1MB PC running TurboPascal and MSDOS is still much better than a medicore teacher and the lastest hardware and C#.
Just get the right distro. fvwm instead of Gnome. LaTeX instead of OpenOffice. I was running it on a 48MB RAM Machine in the early ninetees and it runs on tiny (16MB RAM) DSL routers to the present day.
I set up and maintained my own computer lab when I taught high school. It took a lot of time.
The thought of maintaining several labs, containing a mishmash of different computers, fills me with terror.
The guy is a saint, and it's good that he gets relief time to do the job, but I wonder how long he can keep it up.
I think that today, in any OECD city of a moderate size, if you post an info saying "Technomancy next Tuesday at the mall ! Bring old computers, we help you install linux. Get back with a functioning, if slow, computer. Hardware donations accepted." you will have a lot, and I mean A LOT of donated hardware.
Within a few week we had to refuse too old hardware, because our usable volume was full.
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
The whole posting is the standard RMS message, so I assume it is actually from RMS. He should have cryptographically signed it using GnuPG.
If Ubuntu / Linux gets well entrenched in education it is a serious threat to Microsofts business, hence the heavy discounts provided to students and Universities.
Yes the above statement may come across as a Linux zealot (ooh evil Microsoft), but if students are happy using Linux and Open Office, when they move into the work place they will bring that knowledge and understanding with them.
Sigh. In the old days ... 10 years ago Unix was Computer Science! All universities standardized on it except for labs set up for english students that ran Windows. All servers were Netware and Solaris. Everyone ran Sun workstations and Irix in all the labs while the students had to run Linux because they couldn't afford it. True some assignments you could use XP as well. That used to be the case for decades ...
I am surprised Linux survived the geek mindset today with a newer generation. Engineering students were the first to switch to NT. These labs were shared by computer science students so they started to migrate as well. Then professors didn't want to support students learning Linux as universities started to drop Unix 101 for science and engineering majors so know students didn't know the commands, so they started focusing on Windows too.
I can assure you that the best schools still teach their students Unixoid operating systems, including using the command line. The most successful corporations on the globe are running on Unix - Apple, Facebook, Google, Deutsche Börse. Only Dumboids think that Windows is "modern".
The Unix command line is the most accurate and efficient way to operate a computer for any IT professional. Nothing can beat a good ASCII command line.
I despise articles like this.
Can you get hardware and software for free? Yes. You need to do a lot of hustling though to get the components, assemble the network and keep it running. Additional, electricity and internet access are never free. Someone has to maintain the network, install software and answer user questions.
You can't whip a linux network on a bunch of teachers and expected it to be useful. I can't even do that with IT professionals.
With the onslaught of Apple, it's touching to read a Linux success story, like in the old days of Slashdot.
The story of these 6th graders gives lie to the claim of TCO, training and so on. If kids can figure it out, what's wrong with you (talking to you dumb office workers).
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
Don't look at fecking videos during school time; they are a stupid distraction. Read text, write text, debug programs, plot graphs. For that purpose, all you need is 128MB of RAM.
Only Dumboids think that Windows is "modern".
Clearly uninformed! Get the facts (Yeap! they are still on the Internets)
(grin)
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
(one common flavor: There will be two separate processes for asset disposal: If an institutional asset is judged to have no internal use and no value, it can be disposed of, subject only to any hazmat/environmental restrictions(in practice, any outfit slinging a lot of IT gear has some recycler who will at least lie credibly enough about responsible disposal, so this isn't hard). If, however, the asset has no internal use; but is judged to have value, it is kicked to an entirely different 'Surplus property auction" process, usually designed decades ago to keep malfeasance about quite pricey bits of state, federal, and local gear from being quietly flogged out the back door, and magnificently ill-suited to selling off individual model M's on ebay.)
You install it once and then run Linux machines forever. They don't contract viruses and they don't mess up their registry, because there is none. They don't run in superuser mode by default.
Modern distros are also much easier to install on most hardware than Windows, because they automatically download drivers and configure everything properly. No licensing crapola, either. There is some effort, yes. But it is much smaller than with Windows and the hardware requirements are very, very moderate. So moderate you can simply run it on hardware you get for free.
A license to run the latest Microsoft OS and Office tools, along with a long list ofother minor MS software applications costs between $30-40/year per desktop, Add in Active Directory and System Center Management Suite and you have a very powerful infrastructure (akin to most in private industry). Severe discounts in server licenses are also offered, but I don't have those numbers handy.
In my school district we have Mac & WIndows systems (about 1 Mac for every 5 Win PCs), and our MS license agreement for the entire district is less than one fully-loaded headcount (around $60K/year, including a fair number of Windows Servers).
MS software is quite reasonably priced, and it makes most parents happy that their children are using the tools some 98%+ of computer users use.
If you like, go ahead and try and convince some 4,000 families that Linux/OpenOffice is technically comparable to Windows/Office, but there is this fantasy in most parent's minds that they want their school age children to use the tools found in industry NOW, no matter their age. Why a fifth grader needs to use PowerPoint 2010 now, and PowerPoint 2013 next year as a sixth grader (lest they fall behind!) is beyond me personally (very few fifth or sixth graders drop out of school and embark on a career in corporate), but that is where most parent's heads are right now.
Ken
Methinks you just want them ;).
Your precious...
Why don't schools use older Intel x86 computers running a terminals connected to a Linux Terminal Server Project server that offers command-line only interface? The student can edit their reports using vi and formatting those reports using LaTeX. The student will develop superior typing skills (keyboarding skills) and learn to separare content from format. Teachers and students could collaboratively design and implement curriculum-specific applications which run at the command prompt or even within a tect-based web browser. All subject areas would benefit from a return to basic research skills, reading comprehension skills, critical thinking skills, problem-solving skills, teamwork and independent work styles. Additionally, this would reduce distractions. Forget teaching office suites and other such vendor-specific applications. A school would only need 1 medium-class server to support 256+ terminals. With a CD provided to each student with a bootable GNU/Linux environment it is possible for every student to access the school-student network whether at school, at home, at the library, or at grandma's house using what many people consider out-dated, underpowered computers.
School as a distraction ?
I would venture to say that a very good teacher without any computer will provide a better education to pupils than the lazy guy who plays videos to kids. I didn't touch computers until age 13, but I know all of basic physics, chemistry and biology. Teachers make the difference.
Use LTSP on older or very old machines... take out power hungry drive, and run just on RAM.
Saves a ton on the power bill.
Here is why this is Annoying, in grade 8 back in 2000 I got in trouble for asking that Linux be installed on a school computer. Apparently asking for something the "board certified" computer tech didn't understand was against the rules. I'm glad Linux is finally making its way into the class room but it's about 12 years to late. If school funding is always a key topic for debate then why the hell are we spending money on bloated under featured operating systems and office suites when everything exists for the big cost of 0.
You really got something mixed up there. It is either 54% of land tax (which is not much compared to income tax) or you have something wrong. Truthfully, nearly 50% of all tax revenue collected is used to pay for Interest on Federal and State debt so if the other 50% is spent on education then that would leave nothing left over....
Does it really matter if they are not exactly the same? The purpose is education, not training. MS Word was probably about the fifth or sixth word processing program I used but of course I didn't have to learn from scratch five or six times since all that software worked in a similar way. We want kids to know how to type a letter and not how to navigate a specific maze of menu items that's been replaced by a ribbon and will morph again in the next version.
I've been volunteering at the Boys and Girls Club while I transition careers from web developer to high school math teacher and they have many old computers and brand new ones. The reason the brand new ones run horribly slow is because of all the "protection" software that's one them. A cleaned up P4 they have in stacks runs really well after I clean installed Windows XP. Their dual core 2+ Ghz systems the kids use now are tedious to work with. Windows spends more time preventing kids from breaking the computers or visiting the wrong sites than just doing what you tell it to do.
I'm teaching a week long class there now that involves tearing down and putting together old computers and seeing how much parts cost. I'll be having them put Ubuntu and LibreOffice on them to make them useful. There are about 12 donated systems that claim to be Windows XP ready. I'm holding off on the P4 ThinkCentre's until I get more enthusiasm for what I'm doing. That will be more of an investment since they really need new hard drives which are the biggest cause of slowness in them. The kids will get to take the computers home so they can do homework and what not.
Work Safe Porn
nobody has a better idea about how to discourage the entrepreneurial tendencies of the chronically dishonest.
Discourage them? Hell, we make them executives.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Just start with something like Xubuntu. Then even "old" harddrives will be more than suffcient. Boycott the bloat, regardless whether it comes from Redmond or from the the Gnome people.
I have friends at Missouri S&T and they do all of their CS assignments through SSH in vim on the school's linux servers.
Yes, it does matter if they're exactly the same. If that student doesn't go on to college (at least right away), and wants to get a job in the community that requires computer literacy, they won't be able to say that they have multi-year experience working in a Windows environment. Or, if they get sat in front of a computer as part of the interview, and the HR drone sees that they don't know where anything is, that is that.
Is it right? Probably not. Fair? No, but nobody said life was fair. Does this happen? Yes.
It saddens me that this is the case, but most workplaces don't know Linux from Lima beans. They almost certainly don't know there are other operating systems other than Windows (if, by some miracle, they even know what an operating system IS), so when the HR drone asks them to describe the computer classes that they took in high school, saying that they used LibreOffice on Ubuntu is about the same as saying they didn't take any computer classes at all. The HR drone can't tick that checkbox. Consequently, they don't get the job.
So, unfortunately, as far as making someone viably employable is concerned, a lab running anything other than Windows (or, MAYBE, OS X) may as well not exist.
Colleges are guilty of this as well. You could be the most talented programmer in your entire class, but if you don't develop on Windows, you have no marketable skills. Most software/development companies aren't this thick, and will probably have heard of Linux, but the odds are that that company 1) won't hire someone straight out of college (somehow, you're supposed to graduate with two years of full-time paid experience), and 2) writes software that runs on Windows.
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
I use Unity in Ubuntu 12.04.
I don't understand why Slashdot hates Unity.
Unity saves screen real state, is beautiful, convenient and fun to use.
Unity has 3 stars in the Ubuntu Software Center, but the most recent reviews average 4 stars.
My friends accept Unity.
So why does Slashdot hate it?
I spent a school year interning at a public school in the South Bronx in 2008-09. They had a basement full of PowerPC vintage iMacs that were just gathering dust. I spent HOURS trying to get a decent build of Ubuntu (actually Edubuntu) working on just one of them, but never could. Like the article says, picking up old computers was a breeze, by simply tell people on craigslist that you are picking up their old computers for underprivileged kids and they will carry the equipment to your car. Eventually, I had to cave to the pressures of the job and purchased an external hard drive and taught the lab manager how to ghost the computers using the Windows XP that was already installed on the computers. She was thrilled, and would run from computer to computer, ghosting them at least once a week. Sigh.
..but yes, most posters here do not like bloat. Making Linux as bloated as Windows just to get a better point-and-click GUI is the wrong approach. People should learn how to properly command a computer - via the command line. XFCE is all you need.
I mean this 100 % serious - GUIs dumb down computer use to the point where stupidly inefficient, imprecise and wasteful business processes are created. GUI-based computing has done more damage than good. Because you cannot automate, you cannot repeat a GUI-based process with high precision, you cannot document it properly.
Also, unneeded bloat, we don't like it.
> If that student doesn't go on to college (at least right away), and wants to get a job in the community that requires computer literacy, they won't be able to say that they have multi-year experience working in a Windows environment.
So?
"I can use any computer you put in front of me" is a hell of a lot better than "I'm a robot that only learned one way to do things"
>but if you don't develop on Windows, you have no marketable skills.
This is the biggest load of bullshit you've said.
There is more to computing than office documents. There is more to computing than the desktop. Indeed, it seems that anywhere *real work* is done like science and engineering, Windows is nowhere to be found.
Out of the Top 500 supercomputers in the world, you know, where the real big problems are solved, there are a token *two* Windows clusters.
Linux owns 92 percent. Proprietary Unix, Mixed, and BSD the rest.
Linux runs embedded devices
Linux runs smartphones
Linux runs the databases
Linux trades your stocks
Linux probably runs your car's computer and if Google gets its way, you'll be sharing the road with Linux automatically driven cars.
Linux runs the computers that found Higgs and got us to Mars.
Yeah, no marketable skills if you write for Linux.
Troll.
--
BMO
Yes, but then they'll have to buy new keyboards a couple times a year or so, whereas those keyboards (not withstanding the kids stealing/breaking/etc. the key caps) will last until their grandchildren go to school. :)
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Your School district is also responsible for compliance.
You can't just open up a lab with free hardware. You can only take donations of equipment that will run the software well. That $50 a year covers Windows 7 with Office 2010. Then the school has to track how many computers. 50 more "free computers" may mean you have add to your IT budegt if you don't have extra licneses. If evey grade school in your district added 10 donated PC's the District would shut the program down. 10 pc's times 20 elementry schools is 200 computers. I am sure at $50 a year your district is not bying an exta 200 licneses to cover machines that don't exist.
Pretty much means this whole "donated equipment" thing is shut down from the get-go.
vi +
But those are *universities.* Schools don't teach computer science, certainly not here. They teach word processing, or how to make a website (badly) in dreamweaver.
You've never worked in a school. I have. I've seen students cut the cable with scissors. Even the best keyboard will be destroyed.
Problems here:
1. I doubt Top 500 puts on "token" machines.
2. You've selected a very small niche of computing. Probably because it best represents the demographics that you want to make a point of. That, in and of itself, is misleading.
3. Both NASA and CERN also use Windows.
4. There are tons and tons and tons of OSs that run on embedded systems. Linux doesn't have a majority there.
5. Windows also trades stocks, runs databases, smartphones, embedded devices as well.
Aside from head units, please cite me a car that actually runs Linux that isn't listed as custom or experimental? Please?
6. The skills you learn coding for one system can be useful on the next. Learning to code on a Linux machine puts you no closer to being a developer of an embedded system than coding on a Windows machine puts you any closer to being game designer.
Get over it, fanboi.
Lack of codecs is not the distro's fault, it is the US gov obeying corporations and their laws about patenting software such as codecs, which is a problem mainly in 4 countries of the world.
You deserve getting modded down because you blame it on "Linux", when the actual culprit is software patents. Distros sometimes leave this mess to the user, so you can get the codecs on your own, and you are supposed to pay for the licenses yourself or ignore the issue if you live elsewhere.
Some other distros are not based in one of those 4 oppressed countries and don't care, which is why they include the codecs.
Dell is probably paying the annual fees so they can bundle the codecs in the machines they sell.
To avoid painful updates you can get a stable distro such as Debian, or Ubuntu LTS, and stick to official repositories. You should investigate things before attempting upgrades. For instance, if using gnome2/kde3, switch to xfce/lxde before upgrade to avoid the unholy gnome3/kde4 nightmare.
Older computers are easier to service but they are bulkier, you might actually want it to be bulkier in some cases such as when you don't want them being moved around (ie. dedicated lab).
I'm seeing too many perfectly working p4s being thrown away these days. With CRTs it's even worse, many of these would last far more years than the lcds they get replaced with. A crt can last something from 15 to 30 years, where a flat screen can easily die before 5 years. Yet far too many perfectly working CRTs get dumped because they are "out of fashion".
Not to mention the absurd e-waste this causes, are the still many schools and other institutions without a single computer, even in your own country, to not mention others... Reusing machines about to be dumped is a good thing.
Artix
Your Linux, your init.
Honestly this comes as no surprise to me, I pursued my undergrad from a school in India which adopted to Linux (Fedora) in all its computer labs with an intention to 'increase awareness/skill levels' among Comp sci students and of course, to save 100% on the software licensing. And this was in the year 2005.
The more people recycle old computers, the less likely a child in some third world country will have to take it apart.
http://vimeo.com/4607004
We had a "keyboarding" class as a prerequisite for high school graduation. An entire class over an entire semester spent running "Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing." I learned "keyboarding" by navigating DOS to find Doom, Comanche Maximum Overkill, and the Sierra Collection. Just aggravating.
A Public school education is only free if you don't value your time. To put it another way, the time spent is wasted if you don't value learning.
That's what we're talking about. Migrating to Linux was difficult, painful, and time consuming for me, because I had to learn some stuff. I learned the stuff, and now it's all awesome all the time. What is the point of a computer lab if it isn't for kids to learn stuff about computers?
You generally don't need to use the command line to use linux at the desktop, but let's talk about the command line for a minute. it's my favorite example of investing in learning. People tale about the command line being hard, but it's not harder to use than the GUI. Often, it's easier to use. LOTS easier! But it's hard to learn. The thing is, learning is a one time thing. You learn something, and if it's useful, you don't have to learn it agian. The time wasted clickclickclicking through menus is ongoing.
People need to understand that "hard to use" and "hard to learn" are two different things.
And to get back to the command line for just a second, I'm not saying that the command line is better than the GUI. That's a false choice. In linux the command line is part of the Desktop. I'm saying that two tools are better than one.
I've seen that, too. They're malicious little fucks, particularly in blighted urban areas.
Have you owned an IBM Model M keyboard? :) Not only do they have easily replaceable (and thick, difficult to cut) cables, but it would require a significant amount of force to actually damage the keyboard itself. The hammer impacts would probably be noticed and stopped before the keyboard suffered any significant damage.
The school has the keyboards still - likely from older school computers, not donated equipment. They've lasted this long, I don't see why they wouldn't keep lasting.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
I'll bite.
> 1. I doubt Top 500 puts on "token" machines.
Perhaps, but there are only two systems on that list that run Windows, and one of them is a mix of Windows and Linux. That's less than 0.4% of the entire list. That's incredibly insignificant.
> 2. You've selected a very small niche of computing... That, in and of itself, is misleading.
Science (including science in education) and engineering are huge sectors in the I.T. industry, and it even goes beyond that. Banks, Stock Markets, Healthcare, Education, and various large commercial enterprises typically run a lot more non-Wintel systems on their server and network infrastructure. There is a lot of work here and not just in development. System administration, role and security administration, auditing, and much more.
> 4. There are tons and tons and tons of OSs that run on embedded systems.
Statements like this is what most people consider talking out of one's own ass. There is, of course, a large variety of software platforms in embedded computing, and even if Linux doesn't have a majority of this market Windows is no where near it.
> 5. Windows also trades stocks, runs databases, smartphones, embedded devices as well.
Okay.
> 6. The skills you learn coding for one system can be useful on the next.
Yes.
> Learning to code on a Linux machine puts you no closer to being a developer of an embedded system than coding on a Windows machine puts you any closer to being game designer
No.
You are contradicting yourself from one sentence to the next. You just said that the skills you learn on one system can be applied to a different one. Which one is it?
> Get over it, fanboi.
The adoption of Linux in various I.T. sectors has grown immensely in the last two decades and it's only going to continue to grow. If you can't accept this you're either a moron or a troll.
A truly nice way to get use out of old computers as long as the user just are "users". If any one thinks Ubuntu is a good way to learn Linux for a pro Linux job -- think again.
Signed,
Not a Red Hat Employee
So, unfortunately, as far as making someone viably employable is concerned, a lab running anything other than Windows (or, MAYBE, OS X) may as well not exist.
Facepalmed so hard, I may have to be treated for a concussion. Linux made Google possible. I mean that literally. No Linux, no Google. Can you imagine if all those thousands of networked PCs all required a separate license? Because of the free as in beer aspect (and the friendliness to old hardware) Knowledge of Linux is a valuable resource for entrepreneurs and start-ups.
>>Yes, it does matter if they're exactly the same. If that student doesn't go on to college (at least right away), and wants to get a job in the community that requires computer literacy, they won't be able to say that they have multi-year experience working in a Windows environment.
And if he does, that means that he gets to compete with every other fucking kid in the world.
>Or, if they get sat in front of a computer as part of the interview, and the HR drone sees that they don't know where anything is, that is that.
Well, sure. No one should show up for a Windows-based job interview without familiarizing themselves with the interface. Are you suggesting that requires a computer lab? Couldn't someone who needed it get a look at a Windows-based computer somewhere? I hear they're actually pretty common.
Edubuntu itself comes w/ Unity, but I suppose one could use GNOME fallback option, or install KDE or LXDE or XFCE. Edubuntu includes items from the KDE Education project. I'm not sure whether one could automatically get edubuntu packaged w/ Lubuntu/Xubuntu/Kubuntu, but that would be really welcome if it were.
This is not new. An old high school buddy of mine did this six years ago.
http://www.linuxclassroom.com/
Any lower and it would be a clincher.