Promoting Open Source in Schools

[Joseph Kubik]

Windows and linux have many similarities in a large campus roll out.
However, linux is designed to be easier to manage remotely.

At the university I went to, we had linux and solaris workstations as
the school approved computers. They used a kickstart system and
re-imaged every machine at least once a week.
If you dig around, there is some neat stuff here:
http://www.eos.ncsu.edu/

It was all spawned by the Athena project at MIT:
http://web.mit.edu/ist/topics/athena/

Overall the MS windows labs never worked right, and the unix labs did.
The automated re-deployment was the real reason unix worked. A given
Linux system could be destroyed accidentally in about 1 day of use.

While I do like linux better, my whole point is that it's not wildly
better than anything else out there.

-Joseph-

On 12/17/05, phiscock-g851W1bGYuGnS0EtXVNi6w at public.gmane.org <phiscock-g851W1bGYuGnS0EtXVNi6w at public.gmane.org> wrote:
>
> > On 12/17/05, phiscock-g851W1bGYuGnS0EtXVNi6w at public.gmane.org <phiscock-g851W1bGYuGnS0EtXVNi6w at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> >> There is also the issue that teachers are often totally occupied by
> >> teaching. They don't have time to deal with *any* glitches or
> >> idiosyncracies in the operating system. So for it to be accepted, it has
> >> to be a completely turnkey, foolproof operation.
> >
> > That _feels_ contradictory...  Windows is anything but "foolproof"
> > unless it is being managed in some pretty spectacularly draconian
> > manner.  It's so easy for it to be totally destabilized as soon as you
> > have the ability to (say) access the Internet by virtue of the
> > all-too-common virus-deployment mechanisms like IE/OE...
>
> Yeah, I agree. I heard of one educational environment which operated Linux
> and made Windows available in a separate partition. The system was
> scheduled to wipe that partition clean at midnight and re-install Windows.
> So students were advised not to try to store anything in that partition. I
> guess that's what you describe as 'draconian management'...
>
> And that particular strategy must have taken a few years off the life of
> the hard drive.
>
> Linux has nice tools to make it a very simple environment to use. But it's
> *really* important to test these user interfaces. One of the profs at
> Ryerson recruited me for a useability test, and one minute into the test I
>  had unintentionally navigated the thing into a black hole.
>
> P.
>
> --
> Peter Hiscocks
> Professor Emeritus,
> Electrical and Computer Engineering,
> Ryerson University
> 416-465-3007
> www.ee.ryerson.ca/~phiscock
>
> --
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