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Ask Slashdot: Switching To a GNU/Linux Distribution For a Webdesign School
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?
Get mostly linux machines for the mainstream work, and get a few windows systems for the jobs that really need windows. People will have to learn the nuts and bolts of data transfer between the systems, but that is actually a pretty useful professional skill.
Why exactly would running Windows VMs be so difficult? In actuality it would be quite a bit easier, if all of the workstations are running the same configuration. You setup the Windows VM as needed and then deploy it out to each machine. Or heck, you get the students to do the work for you. I've found knowing how to find your way around Virtual Box to be a very useful skill as a developer and this is something the students should really learn about. It's so easy to do work on a variety of different projects with vastly different system requirements by using VMs. I do work on VMs ranging from Windows 7 to Windows Server 2012 and almost everything between at work with very little difficulty in setting up the VMs (both with VirtualBox and RDC in Windows to a cloud based VM). A lot of it boils down to knowing how to manage and deploy your VMs, or hiring a company to help if this is not your expertise.
It's been a lot of years since I've dealt with either Photo Shop or GIMP, but I'm pretty sure it used to (at least open) PSD files with no problems.
Am I remembering wrong, or is this no longer the case?
Wanting to teach people Photo Shop is fine, but if it's just about PSD compatibility, I'm not sure that makes sense.
Lets make this all legal. Contact me, your friendly Adobe and Windows licencing representative.
Are you sure it's easier to deploy and maintain linux? Do you have someone who can maintain a linux installation of that size? Not a hobbyist.... for God's sake, don't trust this to a hobbyist. Do you have an actual professional? They might be a bit scarcer than Windows IT guys... and that's the first thing I would check: that you have someone who can reliably maintain this....someone certified, not certifiable. Also, ask legitimate IT guys in your area about your specifics. It may or may not be the way to go, but it's better to spend a little money up front on a consultant, than a lot of money trying to get someone to fix what you messed up later.
App means application. Maya and Angry Birds are equally apps.
Circumcision is child abuse.
It's free and you don't need to install on each system. Just have windows server in a VM that is acting as a app server over RDP.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
Handling .PSD files in gimp.
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");
Amazon has Windows / Office apps as a service that could be used only when your having class / study time. No paying for time unused. You got the high speed connection, why not explore the option?
yes, he really needs PSD!
they're trying to teach vocational skills-- when the students get to the job interview (and/or skills test), the question will be "can you drive photoshop"-- not "do you know how to drive something that kinda/sorta works like photoshop?"
Slicing PSDs is crude, antiquated (even though most shops still do it), and reinforces the fallacy that web design begins in Photoshop.
Modernize your curriculum to teach progressive enhancement of wireframe layouts in the browser. At some point you teach about creating the individual image assets for what they are (backgrounds, icons, etc) rather than treating a PSD as a giant slab of source material. For this, you can use GIMP, Inkscape, or anything else Free.
You are perpetuating Adobe's dominance by furthering a bad workflow that benefits them. Your course isn't about Photoshop, that shouldn't be the keystone of it.
Slicing PSDs is the equivalent of beginning a construction project from a child's crayon drawing of the not-yet-existing building.
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
Really? Sure i'd chose photoshop over gimp, but i'd choose nether for web design... manipulating rasters for anything more than tweaking images should not be part of modern web design, slicing up images is 1990, don't teach this, design with grid systems, use pen and paper or a wireframing tool, teach typography, the rest is code.
As a long term user and supported of Linux, I can and do separate my business from it.
Why on earth would you make such a change when you are obviously being successful with the setup you have now.
You should setup maybe 5 PC's with linux and dip your toe into new delivery strategies. Gauge reaction, adjust, gauge reaction etc.
Don't let your personal like get in the way of a working business without risk mitigation strategies.
This.
And for testing with IE, the occasional *real* photoshop need, etc. look into a Terminal Server setup for the Windows stuff.
Or remove your costs completely - you are teaching students who will then need to go out and get jobs, from what I've seen from our graphic design track is a LOT of folks do freelance work, and occasionally one of them gets lucky and lands a full time gig. So why not just provide connectivity, and have students supply their own machines and own software. Much less admin issues to worry about, much less cost, the students will have the tools they need to start making money.
If you feel sorry for the students, set up a student centered help desk, or if there is a PC tech certificate track or similar set them up with internships (that is what we do for our CompTIA certificates track).
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
Serious question since I've not touched GIMP in years (or any other Linux graphics utilities), but one of the primary reasons why I've stuck with Windows/Photoshop is simply for color management. Does GIMP+Linux support proper color management, ICC profiles, 10/12-bit displays, 16/32-bit per channel within images, CMYK color, Adobe RGB color space, and ProPhoto RGB color space? These are all tools used in various aspects of professional graphics design. Also, designers love to hand me AI files instead of PSDs, can GIMP open and render these too? Photoshop can at least import and rasterize AI files, as well as PDF documents.
His class is focused on HTML/CSS/JS/etc. which means it's not Web design. Design is artwork and layout, for which yes PS is one of the standard tools (and maybe not the best one if, for instance, you're doing Material design for Android access or responsive design where fixed layouts to fit artwork are a no-no). But Web development, using HTML/CSS/JS/etc. to build the mechanics of the site and make it work, generally doesn't require any particular set of tools. In fact Photoshop's a bad fit here because the file formats you're going to need (mostly PNG, especially if you're going to do any sort of transparency) aren't it's native formats and it doesn't really "get" the more exotic technical tricks you'll need the way say the GIMP does.
You should use an OS that can run most modern IDEs, specifically IDEs that are commonly used and (sometimes) mandated in the workplace. Ask some recruiters, I bet they'll have a pretty good idea.
FWIW, from my experience of 10+ years in the industry, most tech-focused places use OSX as their primary OS.
yea, I was pretty bothered that he was calling it a web design class when it quite clearly is not. A little disconcerting that he doesn't know the difference considering he's going to be teaching people this stuff. Not hard to imagine a number of the students having a bad time when they try to get design jobs, and are completely unprepared for it.
Since you are in education, you should be able to get a Windows Server with the required CALs fairly cheap. Run an Application Server and run Photoshop under it. Your main issues are going to be bandwidth, perceived speed (I've never tried doing a room-full of computers running remote-hosted copies of Photoshop over sub-100Mbps aggregate bandwidth), and the potential loss of everyone's ability to use Photoshop if there is a communications or server-side glitch. There's also the issue of getting a beefy-enough server and a big enough Internet pipe to the server so your server doesn't become a bottleneck.
If you can bypass Photoshop or get it to run under Linux somehow, that might be the better approach. At least then you won't have to worry about paying Microsoft and you won't have yet another single-point-of-failure.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Any Distro and VIM, that's all you need :-). I'm a web developer and I write LARGE web systems, in excess of a couple hundred thousand lines of code, you don't need anything else.
...except MySQL supports and encourages crapulence out of the box. It does simple fundemental things poorly. It will allow developers to do stupid things that won't be tolerated by any RDBMS. Even it's SQL support is crippled.
It's a quick and easy product for developers that don't know any better and don't want to know any better.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
No it doesn't (anymore), a standard setup comes relatively ACID compliant. Developers doing stupid things will happen regardless of the stack you use. Looking at modern web stacks (nginx, Node.js, NoSQL, ...) more stupid things are only going to be easier.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
From experience (i.e. failure) with switching people over, you get the best results if you introduce people to the free software first then change the operating system. Use Inkscape, Krita, GIMP, or Scribus on Windows, rather than switching two things at once.
Ask me about repetitive DNA
Why set up Windows VM at all? It seems less wasteful to run one Windows OS for all students, well you would need one per site (Windows Server with RDS). One ûber-PC such as with 24 Haswell cores and 128GB RAM and a PCIe SSD (Intel 750 400GB or 1.2TB is cheap) would likely serve about 20 users or more very well. The Windows OS may run either bare metal or on a VM, that actually becomes an unimportant (or less important) technical detail.
Would be interesting if you get a discount on CAL and RDS licenses though.
W3C is still not implemented yet thanks to corporate apps, China, and ignorant users who refuse to let XP behind
As far as XP, if it ain't broke and still works great then why upgrade?
If you were being perfectly honest then you would have to admit that the problem is not really XP, it is IE.
Firefox and Chrome run perfectly fine on XP, people that insist on using IE must be the ignorant users you speak of.
A man who wants nothing is invincible
Walk into any coding academy in NYC or SF and you'll see a line-up of Apple Macbooks. Strange that most noob coders use PCs in France.
Fast Federal Court and I.T.C. updates
You really don't need it. In fact as webdesign work a huge amount of production should be done in Inkscape. Even if you need to create/edit a raster image GIMP is fine. Students don't need Photoshop. Hell you can do most work in mspaint.
If the students move on to various gigs and workplaces, they might be in trouble if they don't know Photoshop.
If you have never asked anybody for help and advice, maybe thats why you are such a tosspot
Time for bed, said Zebedee - boing
I'm a seasoned pro webdev and havent touched Windows or PS in years. Gimp does most of the gfx work just fine, especially with the modern flatty designs. As does Inkscape for the vector work.
I do use a mac though - less hassle with the gui and some neat tools unavailable on Linux (SourceTree, Kaleidoscope, Transmit, etc.) but those are tools you definitely don't need for learning.
My advice: ... Train your students on Atom or Brackets and learn and teach Grunt, Gulp or both and build a webdev pipeline with those. Build a pipeline that your students can take with them on their career. Way more worth than learning Adobe crap.
Move to Ubuntu LTS right now and set up one Mac Mini in every classroom if you must teach your students PS filters and the Adobe Suite. Although I wouldn't.
The one thing desperately missing on Linux is a FOSS Git gui that doesn't suck. You'll have to get a bundle licence for SmartGit - it's Java, but it's OK. As a full blow IDE Netbeans and the Netbeans Chrome extension + perhaps FF WebDev Edition are are the tools of the trade. All FOSS, all perfectly at home on Ubuntu.
For testing set up VBox on every PC and pull the official Windows Browser Webdev Testing VMs. They only run an hour before needing a virtual restart, but they're perfect for Testing IE and Spartan.
What ever you do, spare yourself and you Students the hassle with remote desktop.
Good luck with your business.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Many offices are using also open source tools. Anyway, the problem of teaching tools instead of methods is that by the time they reach the market, people have moved to other tools. And anyhow, if one is only using tools at school and not investigating alternatives and doing small gigs at home...he is doing it wrong.
>"The industry format for graphic designs is PSD so The Gimp (XCF) is not really an option."
That has to be the stupidest statement I have read in a week. Who cares what the "industry format" is for "graphic design"? That has nothing to do with a web coding school. And GIMP opens PSD files just fine. Did you even TRY this before posting?
There are cases where it is difficult to replace an MS-Windows environment. Web development is certainly not one of them.
Let the graphics design industry use what it wishes. They can export to web formats, which is what you need.
I spent over thirty years in the computer industry, working on many projects with user interface and graphical elements, and not once did the graphics designers deliver what we needed in Photoshop-specific formats.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Maybe in ponyland it's your way, but here in the real world school time is short and we have to make the most of it. Schools must churn out people ready to enter the workforce. Teaching them concepts sounds noble and all that but you can't put "I learned concepts" on a resume. HR looks at specific skill sets. Either you have them or you're unemployable. And here the debate ends.
So? It's about learning to draw not steer through the menu of a GUI on an expensive program that's going to have a different GUI in a year or two anyway. It's not for glossy magazine images - the niche gold plated features do not matter when you want a small image that will download quickly.
I have never encountered any bug using my old version of photoshop with wine. The main issue is to configure the desktop (gnome in my case) to not hijack the alt key.
If the students are creating original content instead of playing with an image that has been through photoshop it is not going to matter.
For teaching purposes you only have to mention that it's a good idea to have at least one windows system for testing so you can see what your web app is gonna look like on it.
Because you have to keep track of all the licences and make sure they are paid for. Why bother when the entire point is to teach people to do things that can be done without the trouble and without encouraging software piracy (ok then - copyright infringement)?
The software licencing is going to cost as much or more than that nice hardware unless you can get some sort of discount on CAL and RDS licenses.
The 1999 solution for the requirements above is a bunch of desktops with linux on them and it's far more compelling, far more capable with an even larger price difference now.
Remember folks - it's teaching not training. If it's in a workplace that already has a pile of people using photoshop in production and you have somebody already taught to draw that's one thing, but this is about teaching people concepts not a production workflow. They can learn about layers etc via any of dozens of programs.
It got renamed and an extra digit added to the end of the costs per seat.
That's only going to work at the top end of the market at which point they probably expect the school to supply a lot as well and would not like the idea, so there goes a pile of potential students from that constraint. It's all very libertarian of you but reality bites.
FFS I could do it with a pile of knoppix CDROMS. In the year 2000 or any time later. Give it a couple of weekends and you could too if you can't already.
It's about providing a suite of applications, a machine to run them on, and somewhere to save them. Something like knoppix is ideal for that because they can take it home and run it on other stuff without changing the base OS.
Hire a consultant instead of lookin' for free shit here
Why? Is it a crime against The American Way Of Life (TM) to invite free suggestions from people who are willing to offer them? I thought it was only the IRS that insisted we should pay hard dollars (and get receipts) for everything good in life - possibly including each breath we inhale.
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
It seems that designers use macs most of the time. They used them even before Apple was considered cool and are the prime target for the Mac pro.
So I think that for students, it should be the platform of choice rather than Windows or Linux. So don't be so cheap and buy at least a few iMacs as they may encounter them when they start working. The coding and other parts that don't need Photoshop can be done on Linux.
If Photoshop skills are only a small part of the class, Amazon/Microsoft/Google cloud compute instances with Adobe creative suite and remote desktop could be the easiest/cheapest way to go. You just need a pool of licenses to accommodate simultaneous logins and all the instances can be torn down except when that specific part of the class is in session.
Most of the world uses Windows, unless they use Mac. Also many employers use Adobe. It would be of benefit to NOT eliminate Windows and Mac entirely. Maintain a class size lab of these different platforms, while switching everything else to Linux and Linux based software.
Laugh, it's good for you!
Compared to tools like Autodesks' Flame (linux native) Adobe©®'s programs are amateur; GIMP and Inkscape even more so. When you can't provide an AI or PSD clients will simply turn elsewhere. Unfortunately, not learning these tools is a career killer. Balsimiq, Inkscape and GIMP are not currently the industry standard and Adobe©® skills remain a must-have in a Web Devs toolkit. Sure you can design directly in the browser, but sometimes having a rough mock-up will help save your most precious resource-- time. I work with a dual monitor setup, one running ubuntu the other OS X.
Ubuntu would be my answer for pretty much any desktop use including this.
No, I'm not really a fan of Ubuntu. No, Unity is not necessarily the best interface. No, I don't think going their own way with Mir is a good idea.
But...
Ubuntu has the most people out there already doing this kind of thing. That means the most liklihood things will 'just work' and the most online community support when it doesn't. Since you have a whole lab to support and probably other things to do with your time you will likely apreciate taking the path of least resistance.
So.. I wouldn't pick the 'best' distro, I'd pick the most popular one. Currently that's Ubuntu. It sucks.. because this kind of thinking is what causes incumbant favorites to remain at the top even when they cease to deserve it. But... that's reality.
If you're running Windows 8 now, more than likely you will have a free upgrade path to Windows 10, which should take care of the OS for the next 5 years or so, so cost won't be any more of an issue. As far as maintenance, all GNU/Linux implementations will require the same type of maintenance as your Windows clients. Regardless of whether you stick with Windows or move to GNU/Linux, you will need a way to manage the periodic maintenance for security patching, etc. Although many lambaste Microsoft for the number of patches Windows requires, they fail to look under the hood to see where all the patches are actually going, and neglect the fact that with Windows patching you also get .Net updates, Office Updates, SQL Server updates, etc. In the GNU/Linux realm, many of these updates are 'hidden' in the kernel updates, so you see a lot fewer separate patches.
So, neither choice is necessarily going to save you money over the other, and neither is going to be necessarily easier to maintain. Which are your students going to be more familiar with and be more likely to use in the real world? That's what should drive your decision making.
Nothing to see here but us trolls...move along...
Here's what the guy who invented Linux has to say about what his OS is called:
... the same way that I think that "Red Hat Linux" is fine, or "SuSE Linux" or "Debian Linux", because if you actually make your own distribution of Linux, you get to name the thing, but calling Linux in general "GNU Linux" I think is just ridiculous.
Well, I think it's justified, but it's justified if you actually make a GNU distribution of Linux
The OS can have GNU stuff in userland or not, depending. So it's just called "Linux".
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
This debate is very very old because no one likes the solution.
The problem is it is not the 1990s where you could drop one browser for another and no one is ever 6 months old anymore etc.
Solution is frankly it is not up to you to tell a user which browser you support. Half of your job is to work around ancient bugs from the turn of the century. If you do not teach students this they will be fired when the client demands it because the customers will blame your site and go to a competitor.
Yes XP is the problem it most certainly IS BROKE by almost every margin. It's browser is not W3C compliant. Corporations use IE because of GPO support and IE 8 is the denominator between XP & 7 so it is what they standardized on. If the client can't view your page right they wonder what kind of school is this??
Refusing XP support would be ideal as modern IE or the new MS Edge browser is W3C compliant. IE 11 is ok. Not horrible or great but ok.
http://saveie6.com/
Mostly, it's about checking boxes on a job application: and for web "designers," Photoshop is often one of the boxes.
You do have a bit of a point yet I pity you. Once you actually get the job the checked box isn't going to help much if you do not understand what you are doing.
The main point is for the student to know what they are doing so that they can do the job even if the GUI is unfamiliar - which is going to happen at some point anyway. Being destined to be laid off when Photoshop 2016 comes up due to rote learning the way to use the GUI in the current product is not what you want in your student's future.
It depends on how many PCs per classroom you have and how much time is spend in Photoshop VS coding. Assuming 20 students per classroom and most time is spent on coding, you can probably go with 5 Windows PCs per classroom with Photoshop on them to allow enough access to it while the others do coding so 20 Linux PCs per classroom with 5 Windows PCs. So if you end up with 200 students max spread out into 20 student classrooms you'd only need 50 Windows PCs with Photoshop. I don't recommend using a centralized location over an ADSL connection. Windows in my experience, likes to lag a lot over remote connections that aren't synchronous (ex: 20Mb down and 20Mb up instead of 20Mb down and 1Mb up). As for distribution, Ubuntu/Lubuntu/Xubuntu or Mint would work for a desktop depending on your desktop GUI preferences. No matter which Gnu/Linux distro you pick you'll have no shortage of editors to use for coding so if it were me, it would really boil down to what would get out of the end user's way and give an environment for getting work done so choose accordingly. I wouldn't worry about rolling out Windows 10 as a free upgrade since you have an aggressive PC redeployment schedule which inherently means at some point you'll be deploying new hardware, and Photoshop is Photoshop whether it's on Windows 8 or Windows 10. If you want students to see if their websites work correctly in the new Edge browser you could have a cheap Surface Pro or other Windows tablet do that for you. Also Surface Pros can use regular monitors when they're docked and USB keyboards and mice so that may or may not be an option for keeping costs down for the Windows side of things instead of having regular PCs. We have some employees setup at work like this so they're mobile and able to work as if they're at a regular PC at work. Also for your redeployments you probably already have an imaging solution in place, but since you're asking about Linux, you may want to consider setting up a FOG server. We have one running on Ubuntu server at work and we use it image all our Windows and Linux PCs.