The place I work at just jumped off the SharePoint cliff. Lot of money. It has potential but I'm just not sure how to justify the $$ if only 10% of it will ever even be used.
It was interesting to see your post about Plone. Just played with it this morning. Pretty cool and incredibly easy to setup. Any ideas of how to pull user accounts out of AD instead of manually entering accounts into Plone?
Since we get temps of minus 40 degrees Celsius in the winter.....gotta wonder how the lens will hold up. Interesting. Maybe the company could send me a lens to do some cold weather "product testing"??
I couldn't agree more. I would love to see Linux boxes and have all the apps on-line. No localised student apps except things like Gimp, Tux Type, Tux Math, Tux Paint and a few of the other good ones out there. Each time I talk to a curriculum vendor, I like to ask if there is a Linux version. The answer is always no but hopefully they will get a clue someday. My wife and kids use our Fedora Core box at home with no problems. The kids love Tux Paint and I just installed Gramps for my wife to do geneology. Good stuff. Anyway, I've gotten off-topic.
I agree. However, you got a school board who thinks they are one and the same. A lot of school boards in our state and the surrounding states have the same philosophy. You know, everyone thinks it's so easy just to drop down a Linux box in a classroom and tell everyone to have at it. If it were that easy, I'd be the first in line because I've been trying to slowly promote Linux and open source products in our district. People are coming around but it takes time. It's not that easy. I've addressed school board officials before. I'm willing to bet that only a very few individuals who were involved with this whole discussion have had to hang their butt on the line and make decisions that were scrutinized by board officials. Politics, politics, politics.
I agree that there are thousands of apps. I frequent freshmeat all of the time. However, my issue is that we have at least 60 textbook adoption software packages that come straight from companies like Prentice Hall, McDougal Littell, Houghton Mifflin, etc and I have yet to see any of these apps be Linux compatible. These are school board adopted curriculum packages where the software goes hand-in-hand with the text.
It's cool that your school lets you run a computer science and engineering lab using Linux but I don't think it will happen in our district for a long time until the curriculum vendors get on-board with providing Linux compatible software with their textbooks.
I work in a medium size district in the US. We have approximately 12,000 students. One of my duties is to repackage software into an.msi format so it can be deployed throughout the district in a Windows environment. Currently we have about 120 different software apps that are used throughout all the grades. I have yet to see a piece of software come across my desk that has Linux listed under the system requirements.
Don't get me wrong, I would love to see Linux in our district. It's my main OS at home but how do you tell teachers and board members that "yeah, we're going to convert to a better OS that will potentially cost less.....but you know, you might lose a few apps". That wouldn't fly and I'd find my butt out on the street looking for a new job.
I'd love to hear how school district are over-coming the software issue (besides using Wine...). Until textbook and other educational companies start providing Linux apps, I can't even think about deploying Linux on the desktop.
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Cool - thanks!! They have a lot of really good documentation at their site.
The place I work at just jumped off the SharePoint cliff. Lot of money. It has potential but I'm just not sure how to justify the $$ if only 10% of it will ever even be used. It was interesting to see your post about Plone. Just played with it this morning. Pretty cool and incredibly easy to setup. Any ideas of how to pull user accounts out of AD instead of manually entering accounts into Plone?
Beaver Pride! http://www.gobeaverpride.org/
Since we get temps of minus 40 degrees Celsius in the winter.....gotta wonder how the lens will hold up. Interesting. Maybe the company could send me a lens to do some cold weather "product testing"??
I couldn't agree more. I would love to see Linux boxes and have all the apps on-line. No localised student apps except things like Gimp, Tux Type, Tux Math, Tux Paint and a few of the other good ones out there. Each time I talk to a curriculum vendor, I like to ask if there is a Linux version. The answer is always no but hopefully they will get a clue someday. My wife and kids use our Fedora Core box at home with no problems. The kids love Tux Paint and I just installed Gramps for my wife to do geneology. Good stuff. Anyway, I've gotten off-topic.
I agree. However, you got a school board who thinks they are one and the same. A lot of school boards in our state and the surrounding states have the same philosophy. You know, everyone thinks it's so easy just to drop down a Linux box in a classroom and tell everyone to have at it. If it were that easy, I'd be the first in line because I've been trying to slowly promote Linux and open source products in our district. People are coming around but it takes time. It's not that easy. I've addressed school board officials before. I'm willing to bet that only a very few individuals who were involved with this whole discussion have had to hang their butt on the line and make decisions that were scrutinized by board officials. Politics, politics, politics.
I agree that there are thousands of apps. I frequent freshmeat all of the time. However, my issue is that we have at least 60 textbook adoption software packages that come straight from companies like Prentice Hall, McDougal Littell, Houghton Mifflin, etc and I have yet to see any of these apps be Linux compatible. These are school board adopted curriculum packages where the software goes hand-in-hand with the text. It's cool that your school lets you run a computer science and engineering lab using Linux but I don't think it will happen in our district for a long time until the curriculum vendors get on-board with providing Linux compatible software with their textbooks.
I work in a medium size district in the US. We have approximately 12,000 students. One of my duties is to repackage software into an .msi format so it can be deployed throughout the district in a Windows environment. Currently we have about 120 different software apps that are used throughout all the grades. I have yet to see a piece of software come across my desk that has Linux listed under the system requirements.
Don't get me wrong, I would love to see Linux in our district. It's my main OS at home but how do you tell teachers and board members that "yeah, we're going to convert to a better OS that will potentially cost less.....but you know, you might lose a few apps". That wouldn't fly and I'd find my butt out on the street looking for a new job.
I'd love to hear how school district are over-coming the software issue (besides using Wine...). Until textbook and other educational companies start providing Linux apps, I can't even think about deploying Linux on the desktop.