[K12OSN] wild speculation on K12LTSP's future

[David Trask]

Eric, (and all)

Jim had mentioned that you guys were going to meet when I spoke to him at
LinuxWorld.  We had LTSP and Ubuntu running in the LTSP booth.  I must say
that the more I play with Ubuntu (and it's a lot as Matt has given me some
CD's as he's doing some work for Canonical Ltd....the company behind
Ubuntu)  I'm running Ubuntu on my PC laptop and my older Apple Powerbook
(Pismo).  It runs great and setup is a breeze.  I love the fact that Jim
Kronebush (I met him and his business partner Mike at Linux
World...awesome guys) has LTSP running on Ubuntu PPC on a Mac
Server....that's supremely cool and could have huge implications in
schools.  Ubuntu gives me a warm fuzzy feeling as they appear to be
reaching out in all the right directions...unlike some of the major
distro's who appear to be more wrapped up in their own business affairs
(understandably, but it doesn't help us a lot)  Ubuntu is also based on
rock-solid Debian...and the more I play with Debian (and I have a LOT to
learn) the more I like it.  It just makes sense.  I've been teaching a
class in New Hampshire this past week to tech folks from schools all over
NH.  I taught them as much as I could about K12LTSP, Samba-LDAP, and SME
server....along with the issues, educational advantages....etc.  It's
really taking off.  I also gave all of them a copy of Ubuntu as well.  ;-)
 Matt Oquist (of smbldap-installer fame) came up and joined us on Thursday
and we presented Samba-LDAP and the installer in all it's glory.  Matt and
I also came up with an idea for "deleting users" and Matt wrote a script
during the class and packaged it with the latest smbldap-installer 1.2 
Anyway...I view the meeting as a great step and having Ubuntu, The
Shuttleworth folks, and all the good karma that comes with it...as
something that bodes well for the future health of K12LTSP and LTSP in
general.  Thanks for all you and Jim (and everyone else) do...keep us
posted on the developments and let us know how we can help.  Have fun in
Hawaii!


"Support list for opensource software in schools." <k12osn at redhat.com> on
Fri Feb 25 2005 at 19:13 +0000 wrote:
>
>First off, please note that is all "speculation". I've been pretty quiet
>the last two weeks and I'll probably be offline most of next week (I've
>had my arm twisted into attending a conference in Hawaii ;-). This is
>more or less just a quick brain dump on what I've been working
>on/thinking about.
>
>Over the last couple of weeks, I've been chatting with Jim McQuillan of
>LTSP and Mark Shuttleworth and Matt Zimmerman of Ubuntu. We have
>discussed a large number of topics, many of which concern K12LTSP and
>the areas where it is best for us to focus our resources and expertise.
>
>Yesterday, Jim and Matt flew out to Portland and the three of us spent
>all day hacking on code, talking about how LTSP works, the
>needs/concerns of distribution developers, etc, etc.
>
> From a technical stand-point, I believe we made great strides in
>developing a game-plan to make it easier to integrate LTSP into a
>distribution. The hopeful outcome of this would be (this is where the
>speculation part comes in) that Matt will successfully integrate LTSP
>into Ubuntu and the workload on Jim will be reduced significantly so
>that he can focus on adding new features into LTSP.
>
>What would this mean to K12LTSP? Worse case it will also reduce my
>workload on integrating LTSP into K12LTSP so that it is easier for me to
>focus on adding new features to K12LTSP. Best case, the unique features
>of K12LTSP will be mainstream, fully supported by the major
>distributions, and we can focus our resources and expertise completely
>on education issues.
>
>
>Which brings us to speculation on education. Mark Shuttleworth has been
>doing a lot of work with schools around the world. You may remember a
>recent post talking about how the Shuttleworth Foundation has installed
>K12LTSP for 80,000+ children in South Africa. The Shuttleworth
>Foundation is funding a number of projects aimed directly at education,
>the Schooltool project for example: http://schooltool.org/. Since the
>interest of the Shuttleworth Foundation/Ubuntu cross over into the areas
>of interest of K12LTSP, I'm willing to speculate that we will be working
>more and more with them in the future. I've already volunteered to help
>with some of the packaging of the schooltool project...
>
>
>-Eric



David N. Trask
Technology Teacher/Coordinator
Vassalboro Community School
dtrask at vcs.u52.k12.me.us
(207)923-3100