[K12OSN] Any LTSP/Linux ideas?

[William Fragakis]

Joseph
Not to detract from the wonderfulness that is LTSP, I hope you are also
aware of this:

DRBL http://drbl.sourceforge.net/


Last thing (and I know I'm preaching to the converted):

One thing school (non-technical) administrators forget is that the
Windows license is just for the OS. At the point you have an empty
toolbox and pricey one at that. There are no tools. Each tool in the
Windows world, typically, has it's own license that must be paid for.

Compare that bare Windows box with a full-featured Linux desktop box
with Libre Office, GIMP,  Stellarium, Celestia, LMMS, Audacity,
Childsplay, GCompris, Tux Paint, Blender, etc. 

Then most traditionalists will spend for Symantec bloatware and some
proprietary firewall (which in our case was a $2000 box actually running
Fedora underneath). Now, price in all the administration tools -
authentication servers, web servers, mail servers, database servers,
firewalls. 

Sure, there are Windows versions of many of these programs (e.g.
LibreOffice) but why pay for Windows to run the same program you can run
on Linux?  

For those who insist on Microsoft Word as a mandatory requirement, you
might kiddingly ask them how the students are ever going to learn how to
use Google Docs for when they do a collaborative project in college.  

Having 60 workstations with 60 hard drives means a lot of possible
points for hardware failure. Small hard drives are still ridiculously
expensive (a 160gb HD and 1 TB aren't that much different in price)
compared to other hardware and 3-5 yr old hard drives are just waiting
to throw bad sectors if they aren't already failing SMART tests. You
have to manage 60 software installs - that's always a lot of fun (no,
it's not) when you install a new program and very expensive in terms of
time. 

All the best,
William

On Mon, 2013-04-22 at 12:00 -0400, k12osn-request at redhat.com wrote:
> From: Joseph Bishay <joseph.bishay at gmail.com>
> To: "Support list for open source software in schools."
>         <k12osn at redhat.com>
> Subject: Re: [K12OSN] Any LTSP/Linux ideas?
> Message-ID:
>         <CAAQsohA3ssc6UROPU3UngdXVeiL_qMX0m5cuTBPe-Njx0Hv9dw at mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
> 
> Good day,
> 
> Thank you for your reply.
> 
> We are in a lucky situation in that we just received 60 workstations
> for free.  These are Core 2 Duo machines with 4 GB RAM each and 80 GB
> drives.  So the administration is thinking "well we just saved a lot
> of money on the hardware, so we can now afford Windows".
> 
> I tried out the machines and they work perfectly with LTSP but even so
> that's not going to eliminate this line of reasoning.
> 
> The other reasons you mentioned are great ones -- especially the
> centralized management.  We don't have any administrators other than
> myself, and I'm a volunteer.
> 
> Thanks
> Joseph