[K12OSN] general acceptance of k12ltsp in schools

pogson robert.pogson at gmail.com
Mon Jun 4 16:59:44 UTC 2007


Barry Cisna requested feedback on the subject.

I have used k12ltsp, Debian+LTSP and Ubuntu+LTSP.

I find mixed acceptance from students. Those who come to school
expecting to be able to play around that other OS are a little
disappointed that the BOFH can kill a proces that is off task... Those
who come to school to learn and rejoice in sharing of ideas and
technology love it. In the middle are many who do not care as long as it
works. Linux does work. The first place I installed LTSP had 25 Dell
Optiplex desktops with Lose98. About 10% of the machines would crash
hourly. I tested the system myself. If I simply browsed with Opera and
used a single window I could surf forever. If I opened a few windows, it
would crash in 15 minutes. If I browsed and used Word, I could crash a
system in a minute. These had 64 MB RAM. I had the kids design and build
with me a Linux terminal server and it ran all year without another
crash. The students loved working in an AMD Athlon 2500 environment with
1.5 gB RAM instead of 400 MHz on 64MB. They were free and empowered. At
that same school, not one staff member was willing to try Linux. We used
a CD to boot Linux so Linux was optional. One day a visitor came in
wanting to prepare a document. I seated her down at OpenOffice on Linux
and she finished her task without even noticing that it was not that
other OS.

Last year, I installed  Ubuntu+LTSP in a new school with machines in
every classroom. Compared to nothing in the classrooms the year before,
staff loved it. Students loved it because it worked. Only 2 staff had
problems with Linux. One needed hand-holding for anything not like that
other OS and the other kept demanding new and interesting features which
I was only too glad to add... The organization was persuaded to go with
Linux because it was less than half the price per seat and we obtained
many more printers, cameras and scanners than with that other OS for the
budget. It was an incredibly small budget for a $28 million school,
$100000. For that we installed 153 new seats. Four terminal servers and
two general purpose servers along with 8 wax colour printers, ten
digital cameras and five USB scanners. It was a lot of work but fun,
too. The system ran all year with one failure of memory modules and one
hard drive failure. Infant mortality, I suppose. No full time tech was
needed. A staff member occasionally monitors the system and watches it
just work. Professional visitors are aghast. In a school of that size
they often see as few as 40 PCs, in the lab and a few in the library.
The power of PCs in every classroom is amazing. It is like having a
teacher's aid. An ambitious teacher started doing multimedia on a thick
client and another obtained a multi-seat-X cluster. The deciding factor
to go with Linux was money, but the reward is ease of maintenance and
long life. Students and teachers each have their own website and several
students and teachers used that to great effect. That feature took me
only 15 minutes to set up. As a techie, I am just amazed at the
possibilities.

My last school was a disaster. I set up a Linux terminal server in my
science lab. Students used it to collect and analyze data, to do
research and to prepare reports. Not one staff member came in to see
what was happening even with repeated invitations. I found grade 12
students that did not know what a spreadsheet was and teachers were
happy with one PC per classroom used for e-mail, browsing and chat. The
school had not even applied for school improvement funds that were
available. I applied for some Computers for Schools machines. I was
fired without notice for vague reasons that the staff and students did
not like me. It was amazing. I am not sure whether I did not fit in
because I prod people to change or whether it had anything to do with
LTSP. What a difference a year makes! That school is following a
curriculum that was obsolete in the 1990s. All the new curriculum
strongly recommend using computers in classrooms.

I have discussed Linux with many school divisions. Most are not even
aware of Linux existence. One even said they were a Wintel shop, period.
When I mentioned that they were spending twice as much as they needed to
spend or were getting half the benefit of the taxpayers' money, they had
nothing to say. A few school divisions around here have jumped into
Linux but with a division there does not seem to be anything between a
demonstration projects and division-wide systems. They have IT teams
running off their feet trying to fight fires all over and they do not
have time to think ahead to the imminent demise of XP. Most of the
current equipment will have to be chucked or converted to Linux
thick/thin clients. Most IT guys still think Linux is only good for
servers. The policy makers only think of the bottom line and do not care
what they get for it. We need to make sure Linux/LTSP is exposed at
conferences. Once people have seen and used it their minds will open.

Robert Pogson
Canada
-- 
A problem is an opportunity.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listman.redhat.com/archives/k12osn/attachments/20070604/ada78afc/attachment.htm>


More information about the K12OSN mailing list