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Ask Slashdot: Switching To a GNU/Linux Distribution For a Webdesign School

Posted by samzenpus on from the making-the-switch dept.

spadadot writes: I manage a rapidly growing webdesign school in France with 90 computers for our students, dispatched across several locations. By the end on the year it will amount to 200. Currently, they all run Windows 8 but we would love to switch to a GNU/Linux distribution (free software, easier to deploy/maintain and less licensing costs). The only thing preventing us is Adobe Photoshop which is only needed for a small amount of work. The curriculum is highly focused on coding skills (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP/MySQL) but we still need to teach our students how to extract images from a PSD template. The industry format for graphic designs is PSD so The Gimp (XCF) is not really an option. Running a Windows VM on every workstation would be hard to setup (we redeploy all our PCs every 3 months) and just as costly as the current setup. Every classroom has at least 20Mbit/s — 1Mbit/s ADSL connection so maybe setting up a centralized virtualization server would work? How many Windows/Photoshop licenses would we need then? Anything else Slashdot would recommend?

3 of 233 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Windows VMs by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Licensing, for one. They'd need a license for each VM, which kind of defeats the purpose of switching to Linux for the sake of lower costs.

  2. WINE for Photosohp by Stealth+Dave · · Score: 5, Informative

    Not sure why this hasn't been mentioned yet, but depending on what version you want to run, Photoshop runs quite well on Linux under WINE depending on what version you need to use, including CS6 and Creative Cloud versions. If you require support, Code Weavers packages a popular and easy-to-use version of WINE with varying levels of technical support available for purchase. (No affiliation with Code Weavers, just a happy customer.)

    If you want to get fancy (i.e. complicated), you can probably set up some sort of application server that will allow you to limit the number of Photoshop licenses you need to purchase, but that's a bit out of scope for a simple Slashdot comment. :)

    - Dave

    --
    Evil is as eval("does");
  3. Re:VirtualBox?? why not KVM-qemu? by Eyeballs · · Score: 5, Informative

    You would also need a different server license for each old version of IE to emulate

    Nope, IE VMs for testing are free....

    Official VM's for testing IE versions are available from Microsoft:
    http://dev.modern.ie/tools/vms/windows/

    From the webpage:
    "Download virtual machines: Test versions of IE from 6 through 11 using virtual machines you download and manage locally"