Open source in schools

[Tyler Aviss]

My experience with this (working in a district that is greatly Linux
and moreso over time) is that students and staff like it quite a lot
in terms of speed and functionality  compared to our locked-down
windows stations, but that the transition is hell unless you do a
really strong audit of your existing network/software infrastructure,
and take a good look at software that doesn't have a linux/FOSS
equivalent.

Many of the schools here run on thin clients. They're nice to
administer (central server), but lack of good backups may be the death
of us in that arena (no server, no clients). The majority of common
software is available to students/staff, they can login anywhere and
access their files, and there are a lot of conveniences. We've
definitely had issues with poor planning (aka it was oftimes crammed
down people's throats without assessing the important windows-only
software), poor implementation (daisy-chained 10/100 switches, no gig
uplinks, servicing 50-100+ clients and one server), and
miscommunication. It's a good way to give the techs white hairs (in my
case, hair loss), and a very good way to sour staff on what might
otherwise be a very positive IT environment.

So my personal opinion is somewhat mixed. I still say that a Linux
environment in education can be a great thing, but a poor
implementation creates havoc and just turns people off on the whole
concept.

Things to consider:

* Server power
* Redundancy
* Backup
* Existing software
* Existing hardware (compatability)
* Network infrastructure (including wiring, plain Cat5 doesn't do gig very well)
* Interface (KDE, gnome, etc)
* Security (NFS = insecure, and many others)
* Training
* etc

If looking to switch, it's also not a bad idea at all to get people
started with cross-platform FOSS software, for example: Firefox,
Thunderbird, OpenOffice, GIMP, Blender, GAIM, most google stuff
(somewhat), and others. It helped here at work, and also when I
switched my grandparents over to 'nix from win2k, and my cousin from
XP. It didn't hurt that my grandparents' "Hoyle Card Games" works
nicely in wine, nor that my cousin finds Vista a more painful switch
than Linux :-)




On 10/23/07, phiscock-g851W1bGYuGnS0EtXVNi6w at public.gmane.org <phiscock-g851W1bGYuGnS0EtXVNi6w at public.gmane.org> wrote:
>
> > As a LUG i feel we should be more pro-active in this area.
>                   ^^
>
> Is that the Royal We? Or the External We (ie, you guys)?
>
> This reminds me for some reason of my colleague's memo pad that says at
> the top 'I've got a good idea, you do this instead of me.'
>
> The trick to getting others involved in a project is (as Tom Sawyer points
> out in the fence painting episode) to make it look like soooo much fun
> that others will *want* to join in.
>
> --
> Peter Hiscocks
> Syscomp Electronic Design Limited, Toronto
> http://www.syscompdesign.com
> USB Oscilloscope and Waveform Generator
> 647-839-0325
>
> --
> The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://gtalug.org/
> TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
> How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://gtalug.org/wiki/Mailing_lists
>


-- 
Tyler Aviss
Systems Support
LPIC/LPIC-2
(647) 477-1784
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://gtalug.org/
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://gtalug.org/wiki/Mailing_lists