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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?
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 ;)
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
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?
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!
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
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!).
> 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
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
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.
Ummm, this is for a classroom - why would he want games??
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.
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 +
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.
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.
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...