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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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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.
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/
He patiently negotiated various donations.
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.
He brings up a good point: in practice, free software matters to most people because of the low cost as in beer, not in speech.
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.
Very easily, I'd imagine. You've got a whole bunch of pupils, every pupil has parents, many parents have either old computers and/or contacts with old computers they want rid of.
Every parent wants their kids to have the best resources possible, but acknowledges the school may not have the money to go out and buy 100 brand-new computers.
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.
- 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
The irony is that MS keeps on changing the UI of both Office and Windows so much it doesn't matter if they learn one UI in school. By the time they get into the work place, the UI for both will have gone through several iterations.
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
Where are you going to find that much labor for $0? Or are teachers - and their time - really as worthless as some people claim?
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.
No, how about the included system management tools that come along when a school deploys Windows on their student desktops?
To deploy a system management tool that is similar to Active Directory in a large Linux environment is anon-trivial exercise.
Also, don't forget parental predjudice - if you deploy Linux in the inner-city, you run the risk of being branded "racist" by fobbing off inferior tools the kids in the suburbs wouldn't adopt, and they are not the tools used in the corporate world. Try and roll out Linux in a large suburban school district and the wailing and gnashing of teeth regarding perceived inferior tools being used instead of industry standard MS tools.
I absolutely understand this to be a perception/marketing issue, but is it a real issue that school districts have to deal with.
And of course, there is also the issue of teacher training. While a technical user can quickly adapt to a new OS, many, many teachers are very slow to pick up new things.
Ken
(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.)
- your kid will become a child molester if you subject it to Linux. Or at least a terrrrorrrrist.
She'll become a college drop out!
(I like the idea of the first comment on this clip).
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
From a company that takes its social responsibility. Companies discard computers a lot sooner than normal consumers. And they will discard dozens of the same computers (nice for the school's admin)... But alternatively, they can use their HUGE network in the local community. Seriously, the parents will happily bring their old computers to school if that might improve their kids' education...
If they do not care that the computers aren't uniform, and if they only set a sort of minimum system requirement, they'll find plenty. And if they're lucky, they even get a whole room full of the exact same leftovers from some company.
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
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.
Pretty hard as many edutainment programs for children integrate sound and audio. They use flash and javaFX and are probably switching to h.264. The codecs include flash.
http://saveie6.com/
There is a hard reality facing this school district - this teacher is leaving and someone will have to take this on for no extra money, a little extra time (4 hours/week), and no budget.
How many union teachers in California will take on such a role "for the chidren"?
This school was very lucky they had this fellow on staff - his moving on leaves a much bigger hole than some might suspect.
Ken
Yeah, budgets are so tight, because only about 54% of tax dollars (at least in the city I live in in Colorado and where I lived in Portland, before) go toward education. Gosh, how can they possibly survive on such a paltry sum of MORE THAN HALF OF ALL REVENUE? Why, they'll have to make the teachers start living on bread and water, the poor dears!
One salaried teacher working extra hours costs the district the same as if he was not working extra hours. Not until he got 4 hours a week to get donations could you argue there was cost even then they may have exchanged his planning period for the teaching leave to find more computers.
Knowledge = Power
P= W/t
t=Money
Money = Work/Knowledge so the less you know the more you make
You could repost a cryptographically signed message still not be the original poster, unless the message was rewritten to include a declaration of where you were posting it.
It also depends on what industry you are going into. I'm a physics undergrad and quite a few professors and students in the department (including myself) use OO and avoid Microsoft Office like the plague. This might actually show the students that there are viable alternatives.
The story centres around the problem of not having a budget, OK the 4hrs/week are not free but a relatively minor burden.
So switching to a proprietary system is simply out of the question. Further we read there are some 70 computers set up, you can't tell me this man is the only teacher involved, by now others will have started to understand the system.
But then Evil(tm) might read this story and make an offer the school can't refuse...
Right now they are independent and the kids learn how to use a computer instead of doing tricks in a locked in environment.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
What if it's a video instructing you how to debug programs or plot graphs..?
Hopefully, he'll have inspired at least one of his colleagues to carry on his work. If he didn't actually reach a single other teacher, then it really is a sad world out there.
The student can edit their reports using vi
vi doesn't have facebook in it, and latex would be considered inappropriate in a classroom.
Can I light a sig ?
With Ubuntu/Linux/GNU and the local advocates the teacher found, I suspect that this program will be self-sustaining. Other teachers will learn about the system hands on. Free software is like a disease; the more you learn about it, the more you want it.
My biggest fear is that the in-fighting of the various free software groups could kill all of this with too much 'love'. "This is better." "That sucks." "Use xxxbuntu, instead." That in-fighting is a bigger threat than MS or Apple.
Part of a good teacher is to keep students limited attention span engaged. It is not a video but rather Lexia Lab includes rewards using audio and visual ques. For example if the student selects certain phoenix vowels a basketball heads towards a hoop. If he or she gets another one right it scores and more points or gained.
Lexia lab uses JavaFX if I recall and is an excellent tool to test students as I think it is cruel to have someone study for 6.5 hours straight. I mean come on? Were your lectures in college that long? At least this gets a student interested in learning.
If you want to play a video you go get a dvd and a TV from the library. That is lazy but can be interesting for a few things too teach history or science while the student gets a break from busy work.
http://saveie6.com/
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.
your talking about the ideal case! I think students should be using older computer to do everything. Lets teach the "leaders" of tomorrow how everything really works. As a better experiment take a "software engineer" ( if they really exist ) and put them on a computer from the 1980's, I'm going to venture a reserved guess that 90% of the current students graduating couldn't write a program which could run. Same idea with the students, before you can have the pleasure of using Libre Office Writer you need to demonstrate that you can script in LaTex and produce the results you want. We could teach kids a lot about how computer actually work by letting them experience the truth behind the scenes.
The first RMS post has him spelling out his whole name, and linking it. The latter just has him post as RMS. Any guess which one, if either, is the real one?
The claim that the cost is less important than the 'freedom' of the computer users, while standard about RMS, is lame. Since this school district's computer budget is $0.00, it's the biggest thing. To flip the issue, had Windows or OS-X cost $0.00 and 'GNU+Linux' cost, say, $20, the school would have gone w/ the unliberated software.
The rest of it is just the usual RMS trolling.
How much of that goes to building utility's, buses, food, sports programs, etc?
Don't get me wrong, I think most school systems are top heavy with admin, but public schools provide a lot of first line social services and that shit isn't free.
"You can see I know very little about pimp policy." George McGovern.
Many teachers, union or otherwise, would gladly do it but they won't because they know that as soon as they volunteer the administration will make it a "voluntold" position that will simply be another duty that person is expected to work for no additional pay. Once that happens the altruistic nature goes out the window.
Some teachers are bad and some teachers are in unions. The overlap of these circles is unfortunate because bad teachers are defended from the administration by a union just like good teachers are. Unions are not about money. They are about job security. A teacher risks their job by going above and beyond like this. Suddenly an administrator sees 4 hours being worked for free and the situation becomes "if you can do A for free then why can't you do B for free?". When the union defends the teacher getting paid to do B the administration publicly paints the unions as money grubbing anachronisms that served their purpose and need to go away, when paradoxically the fact the the union needed to step in at all proves they are not yet done serving their purpose.
Teaching, much like police work, fire fighting, is a "share the burden" profession where workers help one another often times at personal expense, financial or otherwise, to achieve a common goal. The mindset of "help others" that these workers possess however is easily abused. Administrators seek to pay themselves as much as possible, because they're the chief executives of the district, while paying the "working class" as little as possible and often times asking for volunteer labor that could be paid labor if the administration paid itself less greedily.
In that case, they could set it up so that those old computers run something like Tiny Core Linux, or Minix (which they can study, since it's mainly there as an educational tool) and host emacs on it, and do all their work on that. They will learn how a versatile system is made.
It's free if you don't value your time
I despise articles like this.
And I despise posts like this. It's basically a disingenuous lie wrapped up in a tink kernel of truth, making it the worst kind of lie.
Everything takes time. Absoloutely everything. Which means that according to you nothing is ever free. Well done. You've successfully removed a useful word from the english language. You are also strongly implying that other options are cheaper because they take less time, again, something which isn't true.
Yes. You need to do a lot of hustling though to get the components, assemble the network and keep it running.
Basically what you've said is completely vapid since it applies to every network ever. New machines will require hustling (infant mortality, wrangling with vendors over bulk contracts and school purchasing systems) and to assemble the network.
But it sounds like it was done by a teacher for the school, so actually, it was free. As in, cost the school nothing.
Which is, you know, kind of the definition of free,
Additional, electricity and internet access are never free. Someone maintain the network, install software and answer user questions.
Well no shit! This applies to basically every school ever. Basically, computers don't actually draw that much power and electricity is quite cheap. The payoff time for more efficient CPUs is actually quite a long time if you can get the computers for free. Running 8 hours per day, 180 days per year and old P4 will cost about £200 in electricity after about 5 years at current domestic rates. You're looking at about 7 years payoff time for buying new hardware.
But this doesn't affect the fact that the guy built the network of computers for free.
Noone tried to claim that it was not only free but zero cost to run as well.
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.
Well, then perhaps you should find a new job better aligned to your skills, because a completely unqualified self taught teacher did, in fact, manage to whip up a linux network that was useful to him (a teacher).
So basically, you've managed to claim that you're less use than a self-taught guy working in his spare time (and then moving to 4 hours paid time per week), while you are a fully paid up, full-time prefessional. Well done.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Hey, even lawyers, traditionally the lowest of the low, do pro bono work. Most people I know who use computers for a living (myself included) do free work for good causes. I help out high school and college students working on projects that catch my eye, the web design place down the road has adopted a couple of charities and provide free design/hosting, there are all sorts.
Please consider this account deleted, I just can't be bothered with the spam anymore.
To deploy a system management tool that is similar to Active Directory in a large Linux environment is anon-trivial exercise.
Why on earth would you need such "enterprise" features in a classroom.
What does it provide?
Well, it authentication, which can easily be managed by LDAP or even ssh pushing passwd files around on a network of this size.
It gives networked filesystem access. If only Linux had a Network File System as either userlend or kernel modules since basically forever...
NFS is perfectly scalable for a network of this size.
It provides group policies, something which is basically completely unnecessary. All the kids have the same requirements. If you don't want something available, don't install it.
etc.
Basically, it contains all sorts of features for large businesses which are of little use to a network which can never grow beyond the size of the school.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
I predict that within two years this school will switch to either a Mac or PCs, sinceudget item they will not find another teacher willing to simply take this on,
Out of interest, where do you predice the money will come from?
and then when they hire a computer person to manage the infrastructure that person will be the justification for actually making computer costs a budget line-item, and then Linux is toast.
So, you claim that since they will have to hire someone to wrangle the computers (which they would have to do either way, of course) the cheaper system will be toast because they ahve had to hire someone to look after computers so obviously increasing the costs by going for more expensive systems will be cheaper?
SJW n. One who posts facts.
In my high school (yes I am not a dinasaur) I took the QNX challenge; (bootable 1.44MB floppy anyone with OS and Broswer and nifty vector graphics?); Impressed the Hell out of the Computers Teacher; I later learned he was an EX IBM senior VP whom had consulted for a number of years and teaching was just what he enjoyed in his retirement. That was on "Donated" Pentium 75's from Digital with a whopping 16MB of ram. In my hometown we have a charity called "Computers for Schools" all government hardware at end of lease / lifecycle is donated. Microsoft also donates licenses; it's really up to the school to determine what to run on the hardware; that decision lies with the Board / Teachers here.
You forgot that this is California we're talking about. Most everything gets 50% of the revenue, and total spend is around %4500 of revenue ;)
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
Hey, even lawyers, traditionally the lowest of the low, do pro bono work. Most people I know who use computers for a living (myself included) do free work for good causes. I help out high school and college students working on projects that catch my eye, the web design place down the road has adopted a couple of charities and provide free design/hosting, there are all sorts.
Small mismatch on meanings, that's all. Even "pro-bono" work is worth something (possibly a tax deduction). You're counting their absolute cost, I'm counting what it would cost for someone else to do the same thing, minus donations. Which is to say, value versus tangible cost.
Active directory is not trivial either, but I doubt the issue is relevant since why would anyone bother to set up some sort of LDAP environment for a school computer lab? By the way it's not a large environment by any any stretch of the imagination. Do they even need unique logins for each child? I've seen plenty of MS Windows based university computer labs that don't.
You could have done that just as easily with Windows computers. Hell, I know because I did it once myself. I once got a local company to agree to donate their old computers to my school for nothing. They already came with Windows licenses too (even had a nice sticker with the activation code right on them). Total cost $0.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
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!
Agreed. Clearly, Debian is the only choice. Anyone who says otherwise is insane and I refuse to work with them.
Part of a good teacher is to keep students limited attention span engaged.
Yes, and they managed to do that without video and audio 100 years ago. Why can't we do the same now?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Probably in the same place as the article. You should go look there.
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 don't think the phrase "just as easily" means what you think it does. Furthermore, if you have hardware with a Windows license you have still not achieved the equivalent. In that case you have an OS and hardware, but you still need applications. Yes many applications are cross platform, but in the end you are far more limited with regard to what you can and cannot do with the Windows system without additional expenditures. With Windows there is no code repository. You have to manage updates for each application seperately, whereas with Linux you can use a cron job to automate updates to the OS and the vast majority of applications. You can use Open Source substitutes for pdf and flash support as well. The advantages go on, but the point is that Windows is more prevalent due solely to ignorance, and not due to any mis-perceived advantage it has over Linux.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
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?
Most of the 'free' (as in speech) application programs available for Linux are also available for Windows. Things like Open (Libre) Office, the Gimp, etc, can be downloaded for use on Windows. Thank MicroSoft for making available a 'free' (as in beer) version of Visual Studio for C,C++,C# and VB that you can use to build applications for Windows XP and Win7 (but NOT windows 8!).
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.
And why can't you use Visual Studio to build applications for Windows 8 exactly? News to me, cause I am.
There is a HUGE amount of ports of Open Source Apps for windows.
With windows you allowing yourself to purchase if needed that closed source tool that will really help (whatever class) that there isn't an open source (or Linux Port) software version. Also schools have a library of old software that they can run on Windows too.
Windows does have tools to automatically update itself. Also for a lot of software you can use a Schedule Task to update other software... But really today what are kids going to be using the computer for.
Browsing the Internet.
and nothing else.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
The GOP seems to think so. Tech workers can be outsourced to China, Unions should be busted so it's an at-will work state.
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
> 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
More to the point. How easy for citizens in the school district to volunteer their time to help teach children in these schools?
I would love to take my lunch hour off, and teach a math, or computer programming class, or lead an after school activity...
But for a Non-Union person to work for free. I am just opening a can of worms. I mean just imagine a Teachers strike where the learned citizens come in and educate the kids during this time. Journalists teaching English and History, Engineers teaching Math and Science, MD's and Nurses teaching Health and Fitness, Graphic Designers and Local Musicians teaching Art and Music... Madness I tell you Madness, the would will just go to hell, during this strike if that was allowed to happen.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
No, you couldn't. Or rather, this gentleman couldn't have, and it'd have been much more time consuming for anyone else to approach.
I installed Windows 7 on a new 128GB Crucial M4 SSD last night (in an i7 tower). Not latest-greatest, but by no means a slow machine! I suppose I should be more precise, in saying that I finished performing the task last night. I actually started several days ago. The process involved:
* The initial installation. This took maybe 30 minutes (as I wondered around the house getting other things done, waiting).
* Configuration of the machine. So far, it's pretty identical to a Linux install in what's done.
* First boot. I now spend an hour or two hunting for and downloading the appropriate drivers for things which aren't quiet working fully. This may or may not be similar with Linux, depending on hardware.
* Oops! Looks like there are updates to perform. Over the next two days, I ran updates, downloading everything that's been released as an update, rebooting, then re-downloading essentially the same fileset for the next update. This would've taken significantly longer if I hadn't been actively doing it. I think I went through over a dozen reboots, and obviously didn't use the computer for much during this time as a result.
* Antivirus, useful utilities, and applications - thankfully, there's Ninite, otherwise this would've taken much longer than it did, all told. Three or four hours, maybe? And I knew what I was doing.
* Oh, look. Now you've got a Windows machine with Administrator access - fine for me, but for an 8th grader? You're going to have to try to figure out how to get them to not break it.
I only spent $7 or so for the AV and had my Windows key already, and everything else was 'free software'. But between the bandwidth and monkey-like setup procedure, doing the same thing with a lab full of old Windows machines would have literally taken months. Many of the machines he was likely receiving wouldn't have even worked (presumably he had at least some with 512MB of RAM, and many with small drives). On those old systems, W7 took the better part of a full 'work day' to just get installed. If he used XP, just forget it.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
To flip the issue, had Windows or OS-X cost $0.00 and 'GNU+Linux' cost, say, $20, the school would have gone w/ the unliberated software.
As if that would ever happen. I agree with RMS: The fact, that a mature OS like GNU/Linux, which runs on about every old hardware you throw it on, and a complete set of tools and application running on the OS, can be had for $0 is a direct result of "free as in speech". Only because the code is free and it is secured that all subsequent development stays free to, there is such a large and vibrant developer community constantly improving upon GNU/Linux and the whole chain of tools, applications and distributions.
So if you care for "free as in beer", you should support "free as in speech".
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
How many schools measure in details their expenditures and success based on expenditures.
A school will keep the Math textbooks for an other 5 years, Algebra hasn't changed much, new books is just wasting money, just so kids have a shiny new textbook.
How much of the school bus seats are utilized when transporting kids, could you adjust your routs to pick up more kids with less buses.
Which classes can be taught with more kids and what classes are really more successful with smaller class sizes.
Unfortunately these improvements get spit out to the media like the following.
Not giving our kids the latest text books. (We are only holding off on textbooks on material that isn't that different from year to year)
Reducing the transportation (We are still picking up your kids, we are just making them fill up the buses.)
Increasing Class sizes (We are increasing class sizes in classes that don't effect their education, as they tend not to need as much one on one in those topics)
How much money can we save and put towards people who do good work, if we stop getting these political groups twisting the facts around, and actually work towards more efficient schools, where we get optimal education per dollar.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
It's not often the choice of the teacher. If the district or state/federal government mandate a curriculum, there's not much the individual teacher can do.
Ummm, this is for a classroom - why would he want games??
You would have had to do all that with a Linux install as well. I've installed both Windows and Ubuntu and found them roughly equivalent, time wise. Drivers are the biggest PITA on both OS's.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
Usually, it is the graphics or WiFi drivers that give issues in Linux. Everything else usually works right out of the box. That said, I haven't had any driver issues in Linux in a while. Assuming no driver problems, Linux is usually faster in both install and updates.
I don't think most politicians learned how percentages work. It would explain our national debt.
Free software is like a disease; the more you learn about it, the more you want it.
It's like a terminal disease, that you will never cure, and will eventually be the cause of your death....
Open source software is like AIDS, but with less sex!!!
Windows is NOT just as easy.
Issue One: License compliance. You have to make sure you each machine has a legit copy of windows. Making the assumption these systems have an OEM copy of Windows and knowing what it takes to pass a BSA audit they should have the following: A copy of the invoice for the hardware which shows what verion of Windows is on it. Not just "Windows XP", but "Windows XP SP2". Then they need the Original Windows install media. They should also have a bill of sale or something to document the donation. Plus the maching should have the Windows Licence Key Sticker on it. I know no one crosses all the T's and dots all the I's, but that is what it takes to be in compliance.
Issue Two: Software compliance. You have to make sure you are legit on the software on the computer. MS Office, WordPerfect, PhotoShop, etc. So now you have to do a software audit on the computer. Or you can skip ahead to Issue Three and just wipe the drive and reinsatll the OS.
Issue Three: Cleanly installing the OS to bring the computer back into compliance or to kill the spyware , Cant have a pirate copy of Windows 7 installed on there. If the machine came with XP S2, You have to install that from the original media. Many times people don't even bother to make a set of backeup media. If the system is old enough to use original media instaed of a backup set. then you need drivers for the computer. You may or may not have been given the driver CDs/DVDs. Even if you have, those drvivers are buggy. That means you need to get drivers. So off to to Dell. or HP, or whoever to get the drivers.
Issue Four: Installing the same software on all systems. And again, if any of this is nonfree software, pay attention to license compliance.
And I am not joking. Anyone can phone in and ask for a BSA audit. The school system can decide they don't want to sign on to another 3 years of "MS Software Advantage" at which point the friendly MS rep will remind them that they will be audited for compliance. This is serious stuff.
With Linux all they have to do is toss all the paperwork and CDs. Install from a CD and then check off a list of packages in Synaptic/Software Center. If they partner together with a local linux group/guru they can get an install image with everything already set up. They can even mass blast intalls over the network out to multiple machine. With widnows that takes you to
Issue Five: Purchasing additional licenses if you desire to reimage systems.
I am not saying Widnows is NOT the way to go. There is a lot of great commerceal educationl software. But the license compliance and routine audits are time consuming. You need to have written polices in place about installing and copying software. You need to pay for this software. You have to update a variety of programs with different updaters.
It is NOT as easy as Linux is. It you use a .deb based sytem and only install software from repos. You can image machines, and use batch updates
Issue Six: Heterogeneous computing environment. Windows XP home, Windows XP Professional, Windows Vista Home Basic, etc. Complex environment. The Home machines can't join a domian, cant be administered with group policy. XP using Documents and Settings, Vista using Users. This adds complexity to taking care of these machines.
Then there are other advantages. I can patch, update, modity and work with all of the Ubutnu systems from cli even when there are users logged into the desktop. Even if I have to install an app with a gui I can always do a "vncserver :5" and start up a new desktop that does not interfere with user desktop.
Please do not tell me that it is as easy setting up a computer lab ruinng widows with random donated hardware as it is with Linux. Unless you have a lot of manpower, experince and finances. At that point you could more eaisly create a Widnows Lab with all new Hardware.
vi +
Yes, or to use slashdot as an example, I would put the message ID in the crypto message, something like (reply to 40982861).
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
But really today what are kids going to be using the computer for.
Browsing the Internet.
and nothing else.
These are students. They may be kids, but they are in a computer lab to learn.
Stick a windows OS with IE in-front of them, and you'll get kids browsing the internet. However put a GNU/Linux distribution in front of them, and you could have students that are interested and focused on learning logical and open-source, free Operating systems and software.
With open source we can teach kids that if something isn't there, if something isn't available, we have a few options. One option is to throw money at a corporation like Microsoft. Other options such as creating something yourself, finding multiple technologies or techniques to solve the problem are perhaps a little more constructive. Problem solving, creativity, fairness, team work.... just a few of the many things using and developing free, open-source software teaches us.
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 +
I've heard different versions, but apparently tne newest free VS (You can still use an older edition) removes the ability to produce non-metro apps. It's an effort by Microsoft to push developers towards the new interface-formerly-known-as-metro style and APIs.
We have used the terms liar and lie so much that they are losing their meaning.
Liar.... I mean...um.....I disagree!
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.
Unique logins are a requirement for accountability. When you find someone's collection of porn or something dodgy in the filter logs, there needs to be some way to determine who must be punished to appease the angry mob of parents. At the school I wok at, we make sure there is no writeable shared area for students, and emails from one student to another are blocked - there is no way for them to transfer data to each other short of using USB stick, otherwise they'd fill it with games.
You haven't heard? Age of Empires and World of Warcraft are used for advanced instruction these days--at the good schools.
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
Another half-cocked comment......
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
They already came with Windows licenses too (even had a nice sticker with the activation code right on them). Total cost $0.
Even if the licenses were donated and legally transferable (MS may not agree), that would still not enable installs of a recent and common version of Windows on all donated PCs. The teacher accepted donations of PCs from 2002 and onwards - that means some of the donated machines would've likely been running unsupported operating systems like Windows 2000, which now completely unsupported. Using Linux means he could use the same modern distribution across every donated PC.
Oakland is a pretty poor city, I doubt many of its residents just have spare computers lying around
More to the point. How easy for citizens in the school district to volunteer their time to help teach children in these schools?
From TFA: "He came upon a local Linux user’s group, a friendly group of people dedicated to helping people get started with free software. With the help of his local LUG, he got Linux up and running on his 18 donated machines."
So, go join your local LUG and offer to help out...
But really today what are kids going to be using the computer for.
Browsing the Internet.
and nothing else.
These are students. They may be kids, but they are in a computer lab to learn.
Stick a windows OS with IE in-front of them, and you'll get kids browsing the internet. However put a GNU/Linux distribution in front of them, and you could have students that are interested and focused on learning logical and open-source, free Operating systems and software.
Are you joking? 99% of those kids are not going to care about the open source nature of the OS. Some might, but most will just want to browse/finish the assignment
Protip: Get rid of bus service. Parents should have to drop their kids off at the babysitter.
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
Looks you are replying to an AC.
But, the reason I said that is not because I disagree, but because I believe that the post was designed intentionally to deceive.
The OP states a number of generalities about networks in general, then uses it to draw conclusions about Linux in particular, with the implication therefore that linux is inferior.
I believe this was done with the intention to decieve. Therefore it's a lie.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
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.
You are correct. The newest version of Ubuntu has great driver support built in. You do a normal install, and if the drivers have issues, and since the machines are free, you throw that machine back and get another one.
A few revisions ago, Windows may have been easier/faster. That is no longer the case.
"He's lost in a 'floyd hole"
Never run into those issues.
Every system got a new OEM-ish sticker from Microsoft. Which caused a problem when XP was finally aged out because it was what most of the systems originally came with and in some cases all they could run (due to drivers and whatnot). Microsoft refused to provide any more replacement keys for a province-wide charity on the grounds that they weren't large enough. They eventually reversed the decision and did another run of keys, but not until the charity was starting to ditch stuff that wasn't Vista/7 compatible because they were out of XP keys.
You're incorrect, of course. Possibly because you didn't read what I said, or because you don't pay attention to what you do yourself.
You failed to miss the 'update circle of life' I had to go through: it lasted roughly a day and a half of downloading, installing, rebooting, downloading, installing, rebooting - all the while making making the system functionally unusable due to the frequency of reboots. The alternatives would've been:
* disable automatic updates and run the system out of date/insecure
* just let Windows 'handle it' and have my system reboot on me 'in 10 minutes', randomly for the next several weeks (like when I'm on lunch or in a meeting).
* like the previous option, but disable the automatic installation while keeping the downloading. Routinely remember to 'install updates and shutdown' at the end of the night, saving all my open documents.
Do you do one of the above?
I've run/owned a small computer repair shop. I have donated many an old computer to people to use. The only problems I've had with Linux installs in years are:
* Debian's 'non-free' firmware, which often prevent installation if doing a network install
* esoteric, crap wifi, eg. anything from Broadcom
Usually, these problems are fixed by either installing a non-free package or pulling a ppa with an appropriate wireless driver, or something relatively quick and trivial. I don't have to wade through a jungle of links on crappy sites reading "where do I find driver xyz for my HP/Dell/USB/etc?" questions (which usually go unanswered).
I then also still have to install Office and whatever other applications I want. Not everything in Windows has 'package management' like what Ninite offers, and not everyone uses Windows almost exclusively to play games. Even for my home system, this usually means a dozen different things I've got to install to get it functional: wincdemu, vmware vclient, Office, XenCenter, and so on. Some of them can be installed concurrently these days (thank God), but often they'll still require/request a reboot.
Heaven help me if there are new versions or I need to reinstall or use the same system as the basis for an image. That, too, is an arduously long task compared to the Linux equivalent, even with the sparse and hard to find documentation on the Linux side of things.
(Speaking of which, even Valve does software installation on Windows better than Microsoft allows through via MSIs. There was a rumour of "Windows apt-get like functionality", using a different packaging system, some years ago (like, 5 at this point), with Microsoft's full support, but I don't believe anything ever came of it.)
On Debian or Ubuntu, I can run the basic install, do a single aptitude upgrade operation, and then install my selected packages in a single fell swoop (either using apt-get/itude or synaptic or whatever). If I know what the package names are, I can either simply copy/paste the ppas into the config from the vendor's site and/or just copy and paste the full list of packages.
Hell, even deployment of identical systems is easier (in terms of 'less time spent learning how to do it and less time spent maintaining it') with something like puppet than just one or two packagings for AD deployment. Yes, part of this argument is "CLI vs GUI". I mean, seriously: my fucking phone is easier and less time consuming to maintain and update with the latest and greatest ROMs than Windows desktop packages are.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
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.
Popular Linux distributions have been easier to install and get up to speed since at least Christmas 2003. I remember this because I brought my (still in the box new) IBM Thinkpad X31 laptop with me with a freshly burned Mandrake Linux 9 with me to the hospital to have something to do until my wife was discharged. The system was fully operational within about 20 minutes. I got to "I burned the installation media, drove the 5 blocks to the hospital, went to my wife's room, and got fully installed while she was using the restroom" in the time it would've taken me to install Office Professional and Photoshop, and probably had time to spare.
Remember 'installfests'? They've been around for at least 15 years now. Part of their appeal was that it could be done in a fraction of the time it took to even install Windows, nevermind the application stack. I believe a 'typical' installfest distro competition (eg. get to a working desktop with full driver support and load your distro's web page or the like) could be accomplished in about 30-40 minutes near the end of the millennium without much of a headache. There was also Stormix Storm Linux 2000 (release: Rain), a slickly packaged precursor to what we know as Debian today, which would get you to a fully working, functional desktop in something like 20 minutes - on old hardware.
Over the years, Windows has been easier/quicker to install and update for short periods of time, shortly after their initial releases. I believe this started with Windows 2000, but didn't really become markedly significant until Vista (they fixed the "keyboard does not work" issues and it graduated to "I only have VGA resolution and crude generic drivers for everything" at Vista). So there's been roughly a period of 2.5-3 years in the past 14 where Windows has been 'easier' and 'quicker'. But then they start releasing non-accumulative updates, patch sets to patch sets, and so on, and it's a fucking nightmare after a year or two.
I keep "old version of windows" installs around in VM just to avoid having to reinstall them for one reason or another, ever again. I've also got a pxe/tftp deployment system set up for Cent, Debian, and Ubuntu, should I need them.
With enough infrastructure - deployment systems like system center, AD GPO package deployment, etc. Windows can all be improved upon. But cost of the OS alone has not been the only reason why Windows has never gotten a significant preferential deployment in, for instance, public web services. It's still massively more time consuming for these simple things.
The crux of the issue is the useless 'package management' found on Windows. There is no such thing. You have been able to do full system updates over the Internet (or from CD) since around '98 in Linux on pretty much every distribution (via yum and apt-get). That's 14 years! I believe FreeBSD's ports and OpenBSD's pkgsrc have had similar things working (albeit with more overhead, since they're source based and the binaries aren't actually maintained regularly) since the early 1990s.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
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
That simply isn't true, first of all. Second of all, if it were true, you would still have to hunt down and install the hundreds of applications by hand, since - as I already pointed out - there is no code repository.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
A school will keep the Math textbooks for an other 5 years, Algebra hasn't changed much, new books is just wasting money, just so kids have a shiny new textbook.
If only it were that simple.
Schools change the materials according to the latest fads and brain farts from the educational establishment. In San Francisco, the primary schools recently changed to Everyday Mathematics, created by the University of Chicago. The schools are getting better at teaching it, now that they've been using it for a few years, but it's still a horrible curriculum. The best teachers provide their own materials, or hang on to older textbooks.
Have a nice time.
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.
The first pre-release of Visual Studio Express for Windows 8 only did Metro apps. Perhaps because of pressure from the developer community, Microsoft backed down and enabled development of non-Metro applications in the free version.