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High School Students Develop Linux Imaging and Help Desk Software
An anonymous reader writes "A Pennsylvania school district is going Linux and building an open source high school with the help of student technology apprentices. As part of a 1:1 laptop learning program, 1725 high school students at Penn Manor School District are receiving new laptops running Ubuntu and open source software exclusively. Central to the program is a student help desk where student programmers created a Linux multicast imaging system titled Fast Linux Deployment Toolkit. The district posted pictures of the imaging process in action. Working alongside school IT staff, students also developed help desk software and other programs in support of the 1:1 student laptop program. The student tech apprentices also provide peer support for fellow students."
Somewhere in an office in Redmond, chairs are being thrown.
The correct link is https://github.com/pennmanor/F...
/. admin to hopefully have them resolve this.
This is a typo in the story posting and I contacted
In schools there is quite a bit of windows only stuff (part why macs are not as big in schools as they used to be) but the big part is lack of office on Linux and open office does not fully work with office files.
Does this image system do UEFI? Clonezilla does
Clonezilla also can do Multicast as well as PXE and Wake-on-LAN
For me the problem is always the other way around. Microsoft Office doesn't work well with .od? files.
I look at it the other way. Microsoft products do not fully work with open formats. Public institutions really should be using open formats.
Link to a document that does not open correctly in up to date Open/Libreoffice.
It is harder than you think. It has been on par for a while now.
And if the entire school uses it then there is no Office anyway.
Refreshing to see a HS teach something tech related that's actually useful, and will teach these kids to find work later in life. .. technical chops being conferred.
so often it seems the answer is just "throw some money at it, give the little shits an iPad" with no real
any idiot can use a computer for lowly office grunt work. Basically, that is to technology what working at McDonald's is to culinary training.
Kudos to that school's admin staff. This is a real educational experience. You can't beat hands-on. Plus the students are engaged in the operation of their school; IOW they have some ownership or at least a partnership.
I agree with the comments re compatibility. MS is the odd-man-out. They've been forcing their proprietary stuff on the world for too long. And innovation has been stunted as a result of their dominance. My peers and I witnessed time and again in the 80's when someone would come out with a great idea and then MS would buy them and the great idea would disappear so there would be no competition in the marketplace.
Re...
open office does not fully work with office files
To be more specific, that comment must be with re to macros because I've never had any problems and I still don't.
I did a lot of support work for a one of the divisions of a large, world-wide corporation. One of the things I did was edit/fix Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files. I pulled the files into OpenOffice, fixed all the formatting, spelling, grammar, calculation, and punctuation mistakes and then exported the files back to the appropriate MS Office file format. Nobody knew and I always received compliments re how nice everything looked. As a matter of fact, I did most of that work on a Mac and later on Linux. And, of course, that corporation was Windows only.
It still brings a smile to my face. They were paying huge sums of money for their licenses and here I was using an open-source solution to fix all their problems.
An effective "democracy" creates the illusion the people have a say in their government.
There has been a powerful infrastructure almost ready to do this (plus much more) available for ages : A GUI + LDAP based web interface called GOsa and a more active fork called FusionDirectory. It does almost everything, but noone has pulled the trigger on an important piece to allow imaging and/or OS installation - this requires a plugin for their messaging daemon. This messaging daemon is either called GOsa-si, or Argonaut in the two projects respectively). This has worked in the past... though bitrot and lack of interest has broken that particular piece.
Right now it allows GUI administration of DNS, DHCP, Samba, your choice of SMTP and POP/IMAP daemons, multiple groupware, Squid, rSyslog, Asterisk, Nagios and much more... with the ability to extend the interface via plugins. If/when the messaging daemon bits get completed it will be able to deploy clients and servers... using FAI/puppet for Linux and OPSI for MS. This HAS worked in the past, and I even believe the Munich Linux project may have had this working for years - but they've only packaged it for their own distro.
What about viruses, anti viruses, malware and antimalware? Novell network compatibility? Flash and Silverlight, IE and Exchange compatibility - and persistent mutual incompatibility? Patch Tuesday and its need to intercept updates, test against your set of mission critical apps before rolling them out and then triage and treat the inevitable undiscovered issues? Recurrent planned obsolescence? SharePoint and pirated Photoshop? Landsharks? Goblin invasion?
It appears they have chosen to operate in a domain where these problems don't exist. Good on 'em.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Finally, someone is getting it right. Students have access to run great programs, the source code, the ability to modify the programs AND share. This is how it should be, in public schools and the rest of the public domain. Now kindly extend this policy to the rest of the schools throughout North America. This is far more empowering than either of the proprietary routes.
"SO we bide our time, waiting for a purer kick to bloom and the future is still bleak, uncertain and beautiful" -GSYBE
If you're going to be summing up to A1195756262959999287362, then you shouldn't be using Calc. Or Excel. Learn a proper programming language for data analysis --- there are great tools in everything from Python to C, plus specialized mathematical/statistical environments like R, Octave, or Maxima. Spreadsheets of any variety are a poor choice for serious work; once you go beyond adding a couple dozen numbers, you'll be wasting more time fighting against the inherent shortcomings of spreadsheets than the learning curve of a proper data analysis framework.
Verily the sound of whooshing overhead doth bespeak the heart of the matter escaping thee. 'Twere better thou mind thy muttons and leave these heathens to their devilish ways.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
It works well enough. I work for a city that has been using Linux exclusively for many years and between WordPerfect, OpenOffice, and LibreOffice shit gets done just fine. Sure we have the occasional formatting problem but it's better to rack up some small help desk charges here and there than shell out for a ton of M$ Office licenses (and Windows licenses....and Windows Server licenses....)
The people that point out existing technologically superior software solutions are being unforgivably obtuse.
Of course there are existing open source and commercial options out there, that make this high school student implemented project technologically obsolete; there are also existing craftspeople and professionally run woodworking shops that make the products in wood shop class obsolete, as well as many tailors, restaurants, fashion schools, and culinary schools that crush what home-ec classes teach... Not to mention the many science-oriented-businesses with technology and products that dwarf the technology that you would find at a high school science fair. See it for what it is: a learning experience!!
If there was some alternate dimension where I had had a chance to work on a project like this in high school, I probably would not have gotten kicked out for boredom fueled truancy, and would have worked my way into a decent comp-sci program at a college rather than working my way up in my 20s through shitty tech support and lower level IT positions... I Would have been making my current, totally decent software dev salary YEARS before I actually earned it in this dimension.
And you think Word does that? If you are going to write a doctoral thesis in Word, then you have my pity starting out. With LaTeX, you have a formatting area at the front, your references in a nice separate bibliography file, and most of your document is just the text you have written. Setting up a master document that includes separate documents for each chapter, allowing cross-referencing, a single bibliography, and a table of contents is possible in Word, but it's dead simple in LaTeX.
Setting it up in the first place may take a little looking into, but building a master document in Word isn't intuitive either. If it takes more than a day to get your basic file structure sorted, then you aren't trying. It's three or four years of your life that you will be writing this thing. If the format guidelines change during that time, you can fix it in one place (in fact, some procrastinating student will probably build a fresh style file to share so you don't even need to fix it yourself). How long would it take you in Word to change the margins or line-spacing for a multi-chapter document? What about copying formatted text from a research paper you just finished, keeping all the figure references and citations, but in your university format instead of the journal publisher's?
I'm in business now, and use Word and Excel regularly because that's the de facto standard. Every time I need to re-format anything in Word I wish I just had to edit LaTeX instead. It's just simpler. In the long run, it will save you time and agony.
I graduated from grad school recently (PhD in physics), also without touching Microsoft Office. I did use Microsoft Word on Mac a tiny bit, in versions that pre-dated Windows; but, by the time I was doing anything sophisticated enough to need more than a plain .txt editor, I was using LaTeX (via LyX).
Really? Which particular versions are you referring to? Anyway, Office != Word, and as much as I hate storing data in Excel files, a lot of basic things are just much easier in Excel ("real" data and complex manipulation are a different thing, obviously). Then there's Powerpoint, which is actually pretty good for group presentations, teaching, etc, as well as OneNote, another fantastic tool (the enterprise features of office, such as Outlook/Exchange, I'm not particularly impressed with, but I can see many scenarios in which they make perfect sense). Yes, you have alternatives for all these tools, some of which may work better, but you sacrifice compatibility, and that is a really big deal for collaboration, administrivia, etc. I'd gladly replace Windows with Linux on my personal computer (I worked as a Linux/Unix sysadmin for over a decade before starting grad school), but the truth is that I just can't afford to use something that's incompatible with the formats co-authors, administrative staff, etc use. Besides, most open-source tools are available for Windows now. It really is a shame, but what can you do? Using a Mac is not an option for me because, although I do like the OS and some aspects of their hardware, I strongly dislike Apple's attitude.
And the landsharks?
Lawyers are supported like normal people, yes
Trolling is a art!
Well I engineer enterprise grade software, and this wouldn't be at all possible if there was no MS-Office, and hence no VBA.
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
Which is why they teach LaTeX.
If you want to spend 20% of your effort on formatting my school suggests using Word.
If you want to spend 5% on your formatting and 95% on your content you use LaTeX.
I prefer Free Software, Excel has been able to do that since 1994 on Windows 3.1. I should haven't to switch to a Mac or Linux to be able to print "Fit to page" or "Fit to width". Besides, I can't --- this is at work and most of the software is Windows only.
And please don't say something like "I should switch employers" or something unhelpful like that.
Priest: "Universe from nothing, no laws of physics, sped up time"+ huge discrepancies. Creationism? No. Big Bang Theory