Creating a School Computer Lab With Ubuntu For $0 229
An anonymous reader writes "Here is an interesting story of a school in Oakland that used old computers running Ubuntu and OpenOffice.org to provide a school computer lab for students."
Linux is free (Score:5, Funny)
Shock! ....
I never knew I could download linux for free and get it to run a a decent rate on old hardware
what have I been doing with my life.
who passed this one line summery !!
Re:Linux is free (Score:5, Insightful)
While Microsoft locks into contracts [microsoft.com] with educational institutions it's a nice change to see this sort of thing happening.
Now hand in your sarcasm badge, Sir!
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So does Apple. Apple still has a HUGE lock today but with them getting greedy and not supporting a mac more than 3 years old that might change sadly.
Anchorage school district is finally retiring its 2004 emacs and just updated city wide last year and the year before to new imacs. They also use Ubuntu netbooks for creative writting classes and other uses as you can't fit 30 macs in one classroom as easily.
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/me dons flameproof suit
Thank goodness somebody is finally retiring emacs! ;-)
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Indeed and Vi is perfect for that ;-p
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Well, given the eMacs are 8 years old at this point... even Ubuntu doesn't support them (I think last su
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It's nice to see people doing it though, not complaining that "Open Office doesn't do everything MS Office does", then getting a few free lunches and other 'perks' from Microsoft and Apple reps to buy their hardware and software.
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It is a great pity that schools(on the instructional side, obviously certain people on the management side are essentially corporate excel jockies whose paychecks just happen to be signed by a public entity) don't take more advantage of the fact that it is largely impossible for students to give a damn about full compatibility with business-critical workflows laid down before they were born by companies that they don't work for, or interface consistency with the version of MS Office 2024 that they might enc
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I worked in 3 school districts in the last 6 years. One was all Windows, the other two use Macs. Apple still has large influences as MS realizes schools never update and are cheap and cash budgeted. Corps are an easier sell in comparison.
But one thing working for Microsoft right now you do not see is they support their operating systems for 10 years! Apple used to do that but has stopped angering tax payers and many who do budgeting for the districts. The fact a 10 year old computer still runs on XP saves t
Re:Linux is free (Score:5, Insightful)
This makes me feel damn old; but today's "10 year old PC" is a 2GHz-and-change Northwood P4 with a GMA900 or GMA950. Probably a half-gig of RAM.
That will run XP just fine(I'm currently showing some systems of roughly that spec, a bit more RAM, the door in fact); but its also pretty damn modern for everything except gaming and 64-bit memory spaces.
At a computer-lab level, reliability among 10-year old PCs can be a bit troublesome; but the sheer power of what is considered no longer worth bothering with is not to be despised.
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That will run XP just fine
Of course a ten year old PC will run XP -- XP is just shy of 11 years old currently, so that's probably what it came with!
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is reliability such a problem for old kit?
I mean, sure - fans on those heatsinks will need replacing (but a new fan = brand new), and old hard drives should be replaced with a new one too. The end result of 2 replaced items is something with the same reliability as brand new equipment (and with added burn-in so its possibly more reliable in some aspects).
The problem is warranty - if an old PC dies, you can't phone up dell and have them send an engineer round to fix it. But I guess if you have a couple of sp
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The 'ten-year-old' bracket unfortunately includes the tail end of the 'capacitor plague' era hardware. There would certainly be plenty of survivors; but motherboards and/or PSUs with substantial ripple on important rails, possibly just to the point of glitchiness, possibly to outright failure and rivulets of crusted capacitor pus all over the place next to what was once voltage smoothing for the CPU are definite possibilities.
As long as you have some spares on the shelf, and a tolerance for the occasional d
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That will run XP just fine
... and provide much needed habitat for all that malware created over the past 10 years. And then you add antivirus that runs in the background and consumes 70% of resources of your "2GHz-and-change" and "half-gig of RAM.", and they still need to be wiped semiannually from stuff the antivirus missed.
Win XP is best run from a virtual machine these days, and I am sure those boxes are powerful enough to do it. Or you can abandon XP entirely and teach children a system that belongs to THEM, and not some cor
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No, that's exactly the point, Microsoft still patches each new vulnerability discovered in Windows XP today.
For all the bad things about Microsoft, they do pretty well in supporting old APIs and old products, which is enormously valuable in practice.
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That will run XP just fine
No, it won't. XP hasn't been able to run "fine" with less than 768MB since at least 2009. You'll sit through dogged waiting just to use a browser and it'll take a full coffee break to boot with 512MB. (A system with 512MB will run the initial release of Windows 7 better than XP.)
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The web browser will actually be OK(I have a classic EEE PC 2G with an authentic whatever-ultra-crappy-celeron-occupied-the-bottom-of-Intel's-SKU-chart-before-Atom-existed that runs Chromium(from a root directory located on an SDHC card of undistinguished quality, no less) quite adequately.)
Now, websites on the other hand... have a nasty habit of bringing that little combo to its knees as soon as the javascript heats up and the flash-object swarm comes in on the attack.
Re:Linux is free (Score:4, Informative)
Now, websites on the other hand... have a nasty habit of bringing that little combo to its knees as soon as the javascript heats up and the flash-object swarm comes in on the attack.
Might I suggest installing firefox, noscript, flashblock and flash video replacer.
I have done. I also find that firefox is a much better browser on an eee 900 than chromium. Chromium gets a speed boost by using many processes, which is great if you have more than one core. If you don't, however then it has a bit of a nasty habit of sending the load average through the roof and bringing the entire machine to its knees. Some things feel a little snappier, but overall firefox is actually faster.
As a bonus, you'll get less tracking, fewer ads, much less irritating advertisment driven poor quality javascript and youtube videos in MPlayer, which can do full screen HD without a problem.
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A perfect situation for AdBlock :)
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How far we have come.
I remember in the late 90s seeing advertisements claiming the Intel Pentium !!! would make your web browsing faster. At that time it was such a ludicrous concept that we had to laugh - the CPU was just not a limiting factor for web activity. Not even close. Well, not at 33.6kbps anyway.
Now we're talking about the primary driver for computer upgrades being badly designed web sites. *Marvels*
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However Ubuntu will use much less HDD space.
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"Can Linux run with a gui on a 10 year old PC?"
In '04 I was running Xandros OCE on an old Dell Optiplex, a GX100 built ~'99, had a Celeron-A @533MHz and RAM upgraded to 384Mb, added a 500GB HDD. Ran fine.
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Of course, even the most recent knoppix live CD can do that. There are also current distributions designed to run at a decent speed on even older hardware.
The old xfree86 drivers became the xorg drivers. I've used a PCI video card over a decade old when I needed to test a machine with a dead PCIe card.
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For a school, Open Office is fine. It's not like they're going to be doing the really advanced shit anyway (pretty sure most students aren't going to be writing VB scripts). The only (possible) problem is that they'll have a hard time adapting to MS Office once they enter the workforce or college. But the two are functionally similar enough that I doubt that would matter much either.
Re:Linux is free (Score:4, Interesting)
Not exactly newsworthy, but a good inspiration to other schools nonetheless. Let's hope some teachers read this, because education could use a little boost that costs nothing at all.
Mechanical keyboards? Those are worth something! (Score:3)
Re:Mechanical keyboards? Those are worth something (Score:5, Informative)
In my (thankfully limited) encounters with formal disposal rules, public and private, 'just flog the stuff on ebay' is frequently far more trouble than it ends up being worth.
One major factor is that a successful institution needs to be set up so as not to be easy meat for dishonest functionaries(at least before they've worked their way to the top). Common result? Low level cogs selling things, especially things with unclear value, is not encouraged. This goes double if the said low-level cog has some degree of purchasing authority. It's just too easy to use official funds to pay at the front door, then flog gear out the back door for direct personal profit and/or kickbacks of some flavor. This does cramp a lot of perfectly legitimate plans by honest people; but tends to remain in force because nobody has a better idea about how to discourage the entrepreneurial tendencies of the chronically dishonest.
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(one common flavor: There will be two separate processes for asset disposal: If an institutional asset is judged to have no internal use and no value, it can be disposed of, subject only to any hazmat/environmental restrictions(in practice, any outfit slinging a lot of IT gear has some recycler who will at least lie credibly enough about responsible disposal, so this isn't hard). If, however, the asset has no internal use; but is judged to have value, it is kicked to an entirely different 'Surplus property
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nobody has a better idea about how to discourage the entrepreneurial tendencies of the chronically dishonest.
Discourage them? Hell, we make them executives.
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Yes, but then they'll have to buy new keyboards a couple times a year or so, whereas those keyboards (not withstanding the kids stealing/breaking/etc. the key caps) will last until their grandchildren go to school. :)
Great reuse of old hardware (Score:5, Insightful)
An old idea in action is refreshingly inspirational. It humbly reminds us that newer is not always better, it's what you make of it that counts.
Upon reading the comments section... (Score:2)
Can't tell if RMS in comments or troll.
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You could repost a cryptographically signed message still not be the original poster, unless the message was rewritten to include a declaration of where you were posting it.
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The first RMS post has him spelling out his whole name, and linking it. The latter just has him post as RMS. Any guess which one, if either, is the real one?
The claim that the cost is less important than the 'freedom' of the computer users, while standard about RMS, is lame. Since this school district's computer budget is $0.00, it's the biggest thing. To flip the issue, had Windows or OS-X cost $0.00 and 'GNU+Linux' cost, say, $20, the school would have gone w/ the unliberated software.
The rest of
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To flip the issue, had Windows or OS-X cost $0.00 and 'GNU+Linux' cost, say, $20, the school would have gone w/ the unliberated software.
As if that would ever happen. I agree with RMS: The fact, that a mature OS like GNU/Linux, which runs on about every old hardware you throw it on, and a complete set of tools and application running on the OS, can be had for $0 is a direct result of "free as in speech". Only because the code is free and it is secured that all subsequent development stays free to, there is such a large and vibrant developer community constantly improving upon GNU/Linux and the whole chain of tools, applications and distribut
Been there, done that. (Score:4, Informative)
Within a few week we had to refuse too old hardware, because our usable volume was full.
Touching story (Score:3)
With the onslaught of Apple, it's touching to read a Linux success story, like in the old days of Slashdot.
The story of these 6th graders gives lie to the claim of TCO, training and so on. If kids can figure it out, what's wrong with you (talking to you dumb office workers).
Annoying (Score:3, Interesting)
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What was the reasoning you presented to your school to have them take a resource and divert it from its given purpose to install another OS besides it being "teh Linux!!!!onehundredeleven!!!"?
Should a bespoke reason be required if a student offers something that's free with "I want to do this" and it encourages learning concrete and timeless "job skills"?
I don't know how Windows would be under-featured, other than it being too bloated for the systems in question. I'd wager half the systems received did not meet the minimum requirements for Windows 7. With XP, each machine would've taken hours++ to get installed. Windows also does not offer a suitable security model for out-of-the-box multiuser u
Hardware not the problem (Score:3)
I've been volunteering at the Boys and Girls Club while I transition careers from web developer to high school math teacher and they have many old computers and brand new ones. The reason the brand new ones run horribly slow is because of all the "protection" software that's one them. A cleaned up P4 they have in stacks runs really well after I clean installed Windows XP. Their dual core 2+ Ghz systems the kids use now are tedious to work with. Windows spends more time preventing kids from breaking the computers or visiting the wrong sites than just doing what you tell it to do.
I'm teaching a week long class there now that involves tearing down and putting together old computers and seeing how much parts cost. I'll be having them put Ubuntu and LibreOffice on them to make them useful. There are about 12 donated systems that claim to be Windows XP ready. I'm holding off on the P4 ThinkCentre's until I get more enthusiasm for what I'm doing. That will be more of an investment since they really need new hard drives which are the biggest cause of slowness in them. The kids will get to take the computers home so they can do homework and what not.
Re:Free hardware? (Score:5, Informative)
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You could have done that just as easily with Windows computers. Hell, I know because I did it once myself. I once got a local company to agree to donate their old computers to my school for nothing. They already came with Windows licenses too (even had a nice sticker with the activation code right on them). Total cost $0.
Re:Free hardware? (Score:5, Informative)
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Most of the 'free' (as in speech) application programs available for Linux are also available for Windows. Things like Open (Libre) Office, the Gimp, etc, can be downloaded for use on Windows. Thank MicroSoft for making available a 'free' (as in beer) version of Visual Studio for C,C++,C# and VB that you can use to build applications for Windows XP and Win7 (but NOT windows 8!).
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And why can't you use Visual Studio to build applications for Windows 8 exactly? News to me, cause I am.
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There is a HUGE amount of ports of Open Source Apps for windows.
With windows you allowing yourself to purchase if needed that closed source tool that will really help (whatever class) that there isn't an open source (or Linux Port) software version. Also schools have a library of old software that they can run on Windows too.
Windows does have tools to automatically update itself. Also for a lot of software you can use a Schedule Task to update other software... But really today what are kids going to be u
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But really today what are kids going to be using the computer for.
Browsing the Internet.
and nothing else.
These are students. They may be kids, but they are in a computer lab to learn.
Stick a windows OS with IE in-front of them, and you'll get kids browsing the internet. However put a GNU/Linux distribution in front of them, and you could have students that are interested and focused on learning logical and open-source, free Operating systems and software.
With open source we can teach kids that if something isn't there, if something isn't available, we have a few options. One option is to throw money at a corp
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Re:Free hardware? (Score:5, Informative)
No, you couldn't. Or rather, this gentleman couldn't have, and it'd have been much more time consuming for anyone else to approach.
I installed Windows 7 on a new 128GB Crucial M4 SSD last night (in an i7 tower). Not latest-greatest, but by no means a slow machine! I suppose I should be more precise, in saying that I finished performing the task last night. I actually started several days ago. The process involved:
* The initial installation. This took maybe 30 minutes (as I wondered around the house getting other things done, waiting).
* Configuration of the machine. So far, it's pretty identical to a Linux install in what's done.
* First boot. I now spend an hour or two hunting for and downloading the appropriate drivers for things which aren't quiet working fully. This may or may not be similar with Linux, depending on hardware.
* Oops! Looks like there are updates to perform. Over the next two days, I ran updates, downloading everything that's been released as an update, rebooting, then re-downloading essentially the same fileset for the next update. This would've taken significantly longer if I hadn't been actively doing it. I think I went through over a dozen reboots, and obviously didn't use the computer for much during this time as a result.
* Antivirus, useful utilities, and applications - thankfully, there's Ninite, otherwise this would've taken much longer than it did, all told. Three or four hours, maybe? And I knew what I was doing.
* Oh, look. Now you've got a Windows machine with Administrator access - fine for me, but for an 8th grader? You're going to have to try to figure out how to get them to not break it.
I only spent $7 or so for the AV and had my Windows key already, and everything else was 'free software'. But between the bandwidth and monkey-like setup procedure, doing the same thing with a lab full of old Windows machines would have literally taken months. Many of the machines he was likely receiving wouldn't have even worked (presumably he had at least some with 512MB of RAM, and many with small drives). On those old systems, W7 took the better part of a full 'work day' to just get installed. If he used XP, just forget it.
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You would have had to do all that with a Linux install as well. I've installed both Windows and Ubuntu and found them roughly equivalent, time wise. Drivers are the biggest PITA on both OS's.
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Re:Free hardware? (Score:5, Insightful)
Windows is NOT just as easy.
Issue One: License compliance. You have to make sure you each machine has a legit copy of windows. Making the assumption these systems have an OEM copy of Windows and knowing what it takes to pass a BSA audit they should have the following: A copy of the invoice for the hardware which shows what verion of Windows is on it. Not just "Windows XP", but "Windows XP SP2". Then they need the Original Windows install media. They should also have a bill of sale or something to document the donation. Plus the maching should have the Windows Licence Key Sticker on it. I know no one crosses all the T's and dots all the I's, but that is what it takes to be in compliance.
Issue Two: Software compliance. You have to make sure you are legit on the software on the computer. MS Office, WordPerfect, PhotoShop, etc. So now you have to do a software audit on the computer. Or you can skip ahead to Issue Three and just wipe the drive and reinsatll the OS.
Issue Three: Cleanly installing the OS to bring the computer back into compliance or to kill the spyware , Cant have a pirate copy of Windows 7 installed on there. If the machine came with XP S2, You have to install that from the original media. Many times people don't even bother to make a set of backeup media. If the system is old enough to use original media instaed of a backup set. then you need drivers for the computer. You may or may not have been given the driver CDs/DVDs. Even if you have, those drvivers are buggy. That means you need to get drivers. So off to to Dell. or HP, or whoever to get the drivers.
Issue Four: Installing the same software on all systems. And again, if any of this is nonfree software, pay attention to license compliance.
And I am not joking. Anyone can phone in and ask for a BSA audit. The school system can decide they don't want to sign on to another 3 years of "MS Software Advantage" at which point the friendly MS rep will remind them that they will be audited for compliance. This is serious stuff.
With Linux all they have to do is toss all the paperwork and CDs. Install from a CD and then check off a list of packages in Synaptic/Software Center. If they partner together with a local linux group/guru they can get an install image with everything already set up. They can even mass blast intalls over the network out to multiple machine. With widnows that takes you to
Issue Five: Purchasing additional licenses if you desire to reimage systems.
I am not saying Widnows is NOT the way to go. There is a lot of great commerceal educationl software. But the license compliance and routine audits are time consuming. You need to have written polices in place about installing and copying software. You need to pay for this software. You have to update a variety of programs with different updaters.
It is NOT as easy as Linux is. It you use a .deb based sytem and only install software from repos. You can image machines, and use batch updates
Issue Six: Heterogeneous computing environment. Windows XP home, Windows XP Professional, Windows Vista Home Basic, etc. Complex environment. The Home machines can't join a domian, cant be administered with group policy. XP using Documents and Settings, Vista using Users. This adds complexity to taking care of these machines.
Then there are other advantages. I can patch, update, modity and work with all of the Ubutnu systems from cli even when there are users logged into the desktop. Even if I have to install an app with a gui I can always do a "vncserver :5" and start up a new desktop that does not interfere with user desktop.
Please do not tell me that it is as easy setting up a computer lab ruinng widows with random donated hardware as it is with Linux. Unless you have a lot of manpower, experince and finances. At that point you could more eaisly create a Widnows Lab with all new Hardware.
Re:Free hardware? (Score:5, Insightful)
They already came with Windows licenses too (even had a nice sticker with the activation code right on them). Total cost $0.
Even if the licenses were donated and legally transferable (MS may not agree), that would still not enable installs of a recent and common version of Windows on all donated PCs. The teacher accepted donations of PCs from 2002 and onwards - that means some of the donated machines would've likely been running unsupported operating systems like Windows 2000, which now completely unsupported. Using Linux means he could use the same modern distribution across every donated PC.
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Very easily, I'd imagine. You've got a whole bunch of pupils, every pupil has parents, many parents have either old computers and/or contacts with old computers they want rid of.
Every parent wants their kids to have the best resources possible, but acknowledges the school may not have the money to go out and buy 100 brand-new computers.
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Where are you going to find that much labor for $0? Or are teachers - and their time - really as worthless as some people claim?
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There is a hard reality facing this school district - this teacher is leaving and someone will have to take this on for no extra money, a little extra time (4 hours/week), and no budget.
How many union teachers in California will take on such a role "for the chidren"?
This school was very lucky they had this fellow on staff - his moving on leaves a much bigger hole than some might suspect.
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Hopefully, he'll have inspired at least one of his colleagues to carry on his work. If he didn't actually reach a single other teacher, then it really is a sad world out there.
Re:Free hardware? (Score:5, Insightful)
Many teachers, union or otherwise, would gladly do it but they won't because they know that as soon as they volunteer the administration will make it a "voluntold" position that will simply be another duty that person is expected to work for no additional pay. Once that happens the altruistic nature goes out the window.
Some teachers are bad and some teachers are in unions. The overlap of these circles is unfortunate because bad teachers are defended from the administration by a union just like good teachers are. Unions are not about money. They are about job security. A teacher risks their job by going above and beyond like this. Suddenly an administrator sees 4 hours being worked for free and the situation becomes "if you can do A for free then why can't you do B for free?". When the union defends the teacher getting paid to do B the administration publicly paints the unions as money grubbing anachronisms that served their purpose and need to go away, when paradoxically the fact the the union needed to step in at all proves they are not yet done serving their purpose.
Teaching, much like police work, fire fighting, is a "share the burden" profession where workers help one another often times at personal expense, financial or otherwise, to achieve a common goal. The mindset of "help others" that these workers possess however is easily abused. Administrators seek to pay themselves as much as possible, because they're the chief executives of the district, while paying the "working class" as little as possible and often times asking for volunteer labor that could be paid labor if the administration paid itself less greedily.
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More to the point. How easy for citizens in the school district to volunteer their time to help teach children in these schools?
I would love to take my lunch hour off, and teach a math, or computer programming class, or lead an after school activity...
But for a Non-Union person to work for free. I am just opening a can of worms. I mean just imagine a Teachers strike where the learned citizens come in and educate the kids during this time. Journalists teaching English and History, Engineers teaching Math
Re:Free hardware? (Score:5, Informative)
More to the point. How easy for citizens in the school district to volunteer their time to help teach children in these schools?
From TFA: "He came upon a local Linux user’s group, a friendly group of people dedicated to helping people get started with free software. With the help of his local LUG, he got Linux up and running on his 18 donated machines."
So, go join your local LUG and offer to help out...
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Don't get me wrong, I think most school systems are top heavy with admin, but public schools provide a lot of first line social services and that shit isn't free.
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How many schools measure in details their expenditures and success based on expenditures.
A school will keep the Math textbooks for an other 5 years, Algebra hasn't changed much, new books is just wasting money, just so kids have a shiny new textbook.
How much of the school bus seats are utilized when transporting kids, could you adjust your routs to pick up more kids with less buses.
Which classes can be taught with more kids and what classes are really more successful with smaller class sizes.
Unfortunately t
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You forgot that this is California we're talking about. Most everything gets 50% of the revenue, and total spend is around %4500 of revenue ;)
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Hey, even lawyers, traditionally the lowest of the low, do pro bono work. Most people I know who use computers for a living (myself included) do free work for good causes. I help out high school and college students working on projects that catch my eye, the web design place down the road has adopted a couple of charities and provide free design/hosting, there are all sorts.
Small mismatch on meanings, that's all. Even "pro-bono" work is worth something (possibly a tax deduction). You're counting their absolute cost, I'm counting what it would cost for someone else to do the same thing, minus donations. Which is to say, value versus tangible cost.
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The GOP seems to think so. Tech workers can be outsourced to China, Unions should be busted so it's an at-will work state.
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From a company that takes its social responsibility. Companies discard computers a lot sooner than normal consumers. And they will discard dozens of the same computers (nice for the school's admin)... But alternatively, they can use their HUGE network in the local community. Seriously, the parents will happily bring their old computers to school if that might improve their kids' education...
If they do not care that the computers aren't uniform, and if they only set a sort of minimum system requirement, they
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Probably in the same place as the article. You should go look there.
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The story centres around the problem of not having a budget, OK the 4hrs/week are not free but a relatively minor burden.
So switching to a proprietary system is simply out of the question. Further we read there are some 70 computers set up, you can't tell me this man is the only teacher involved, by now others will have started to understand the system.
But then Evil(tm) might read this story and make an offer the school can't refuse...
Right now they are independent an
Re:Free hardware? (Score:4, Insightful)
With Ubuntu/Linux/GNU and the local advocates the teacher found, I suspect that this program will be self-sustaining. Other teachers will learn about the system hands on. Free software is like a disease; the more you learn about it, the more you want it.
My biggest fear is that the in-fighting of the various free software groups could kill all of this with too much 'love'. "This is better." "That sucks." "Use xxxbuntu, instead." That in-fighting is a bigger threat than MS or Apple.
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I predict that within two years this school will switch to either a Mac or PCs, sinceudget item they will not find another teacher willing to simply take this on,
Out of interest, where do you predice the money will come from?
and then when they hire a computer person to manage the infrastructure that person will be the justification for actually making computer costs a budget line-item, and then Linux is toast.
So, you claim that since they will have to hire someone to wrangle the computers (which they would
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Re:1...2...3 FUD Is Rolling In (Score:5, Insightful)
- students will learn the "wrong" office flavour, which is of absolutely no use in the real world
- students will suffer badly later on, because they won't know exactly the "industry standard" Windows
The irony is that MS keeps on changing the UI of both Office and Windows so much it doesn't matter if they learn one UI in school. By the time they get into the work place, the UI for both will have gone through several iterations.
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No, how about the included system management tools that come along when a school deploys Windows on their student desktops?
To deploy a system management tool that is similar to Active Directory in a large Linux environment is anon-trivial exercise.
Also, don't forget parental predjudice - if you deploy Linux in the inner-city, you run the risk of being branded "racist" by fobbing off inferior tools the kids in the suburbs wouldn't adopt, and they are not the tools used in the corporate world. Try and roll ou
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To deploy a system management tool that is similar to Active Directory in a large Linux environment is anon-trivial exercise.
Why on earth would you need such "enterprise" features in a classroom.
What does it provide?
Well, it authentication, which can easily be managed by LDAP or even ssh pushing passwd files around on a network of this size.
It gives networked filesystem access. If only Linux had a Network File System as either userlend or kernel modules since basically forever...
NFS is perfectly scalable fo
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- your kid will become a child molester if you subject it to Linux. Or at least a terrrrorrrrist.
She'll become a college drop out! [youtube.com]
(I like the idea of the first comment on this clip).
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Laptop carts full of netbooks are slowly being replaced with smaller carts filled with iPads, and it makes a certain amount of sense when you realize that when a teacher wants to roll in a computer for each student they typically want them to go to some highly-interactive, media-heavy website and tablets typically provide a better experience than, say, a Mini 9 or Inspiron 2110.
There is also the issue of managing a deployment of Linux netbooks - that is a non-trivial thing once the deployment exceeds a few
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The only codec problems I have on Linux are where someone has created their own insane proprietary format for purposes of control - ie, they are actively trying not to have their media file read. This usually occurs in conjunction with web conferencing software.
It's true that you usually have install extra packages to get to this point, and a shame that the distro can't really encourage you to do this with a popup that says "now install the codec support we couldn't include because people invent this stuff
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What if it's a video instructing you how to debug programs or plot graphs..?
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Part of a good teacher is to keep students limited attention span engaged.
Yes, and they managed to do that without video and audio 100 years ago. Why can't we do the same now?
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A license to run the latest Microsoft OS and Office tools, along with a long list ofother minor MS software applications costs between $30-40/year per desktop, Add in Active Directory and System Center Management Suite and you have a very powerful infrastructure (akin to most in private industry). Severe discounts in server licenses are also offered, but I don't have those numbers handy.
In my school district we have Mac & WIndows systems (about 1 Mac for every 5 Win PCs), and our MS license agreement fo
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Does it really matter if they are not exactly the same? The purpose is education, not training. MS Word was probably about the fifth or sixth word processing program I used but of course I didn't have to learn from scratch five or six times since all that software worked in a similar way. We want kids to know how to type a letter and not how to navigate a specific maze of menu items that's been replaced by a ribbon and will morph again in the next version.
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Yes, it does matter if they're exactly the same. If that student doesn't go on to college (at least right away), and wants to get a job in the community that requires computer literacy, they won't be able to say that they have multi-year experience working in a Windows environment. Or, if they get sat in front of a computer as part of the interview, and the HR drone sees that they don't know where anything is, that is that.
Is it right? Probably not. Fair? No, but nobody said life was fair. Does this h
Re:Microsoft provides discounts to Students and Un (Score:4, Insightful)
> If that student doesn't go on to college (at least right away), and wants to get a job in the community that requires computer literacy, they won't be able to say that they have multi-year experience working in a Windows environment.
So?
"I can use any computer you put in front of me" is a hell of a lot better than "I'm a robot that only learned one way to do things"
>but if you don't develop on Windows, you have no marketable skills.
This is the biggest load of bullshit you've said.
There is more to computing than office documents. There is more to computing than the desktop. Indeed, it seems that anywhere *real work* is done like science and engineering, Windows is nowhere to be found.
Out of the Top 500 supercomputers in the world, you know, where the real big problems are solved, there are a token *two* Windows clusters.
Linux owns 92 percent. Proprietary Unix, Mixed, and BSD the rest.
Linux runs embedded devices
Linux runs smartphones
Linux runs the databases
Linux trades your stocks
Linux probably runs your car's computer and if Google gets its way, you'll be sharing the road with Linux automatically driven cars.
Linux runs the computers that found Higgs and got us to Mars.
Yeah, no marketable skills if you write for Linux.
Troll.
--
BMO
Get the facts (Score:2)
Only Dumboids think that Windows is "modern".
Clearly uninformed! Get the facts [goo.gl] (Yeap! they are still on the Internets)
(grin)
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vi doesn't have facebook in it, and latex would be considered inappropriate in a classroom.
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KDE has for years had a smaller memory footprint than Gnome, it seems Unity is in all it's infancy also lighter than Gnome.
Teaching computer use to kids should prepare them for a world several years in the future, when we look at things like Win8/ Metro we really don't know what the computer environment they end up working in is going to be like.
So teaching them how to use an open and easy to tweak syst
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Got my stepdaughter an old 1 ghz Dell laptop a few years ago, it has 256 megs of RAM so I went with Lubuntu.
WTF is the idea behind "Gigolo"?
http://linux.die.net/man/1/gigolo [die.net]
When I asked the maintainer what is up with the name "Gigolo" for a program, he replied that it is named Gigolo because "it does what it is told".
What a douche.
So I ended up going with Xubuntu instead.
Re:It's free if you don't value your time (Score:5, Insightful)
It's free if you don't value your time
I despise articles like this.
And I despise posts like this. It's basically a disingenuous lie wrapped up in a tink kernel of truth, making it the worst kind of lie.
Everything takes time. Absoloutely everything. Which means that according to you nothing is ever free. Well done. You've successfully removed a useful word from the english language. You are also strongly implying that other options are cheaper because they take less time, again, something which isn't true.
Yes. You need to do a lot of hustling though to get the components, assemble the network and keep it running.
Basically what you've said is completely vapid since it applies to every network ever. New machines will require hustling (infant mortality, wrangling with vendors over bulk contracts and school purchasing systems) and to assemble the network.
But it sounds like it was done by a teacher for the school, so actually, it was free. As in, cost the school nothing.
Which is, you know, kind of the definition of free,
Additional, electricity and internet access are never free. Someone maintain the network, install software and answer user questions.
Well no shit! This applies to basically every school ever. Basically, computers don't actually draw that much power and electricity is quite cheap. The payoff time for more efficient CPUs is actually quite a long time if you can get the computers for free. Running 8 hours per day, 180 days per year and old P4 will cost about £200 in electricity after about 5 years at current domestic rates. You're looking at about 7 years payoff time for buying new hardware.
But this doesn't affect the fact that the guy built the network of computers for free.
Noone tried to claim that it was not only free but zero cost to run as well.
You can't whip a linux network on a bunch of teachers and expected it to be useful. I can't even do that with IT professionals.
Well, then perhaps you should find a new job better aligned to your skills, because a completely unqualified self taught teacher did, in fact, manage to whip up a linux network that was useful to him (a teacher).
So basically, you've managed to claim that you're less use than a self-taught guy working in his spare time (and then moving to 4 hours paid time per week), while you are a fully paid up, full-time prefessional. Well done.