Re: description of benefits and limitations of debian-edu/skolelinux
on 02/12/2004 22:58, Vagrant Cascadian at vagrant@freegeek.org wrote:
> i'd like to get a short description of the advantages (and weaknesses)
> of a debian-edu/skolelinux network...
>
> i looked over these pages:
>
> http://www.skolelinux.org/portal/about/what
> http://www.skolelinux.org/portal/about/why
>
> any other suggestions for more information to look over?
Hi
I'm Deputy Principal of a school in Dublin, Ireland, and we are in the
middle of a move to a thin client network on skolelinux. We have made some
approaches to IT companies here to see if one of them would buy the school a
server.
Two documents have been very useful in our English-language advocacy:
The Statskonsult report:
http://www.skolelinux.org/portal/user_experience/
and a draft translation by Lars Erlandsen "skolelinuxkapittel".
The initial letter from the school to the companies made the following
points:
begins
Re: Linux Desktop project in Mount Temple Comprehensive School.
Dear Company X,
* I would like to bring to your attention a project, which may be of
considerable interest to X and its orientation towards the primary and
post-primary school market. Your support for our project will be mutually
beneficial (please see below).
* We realise that X receives very many requests for assistance, but we hope
the company will be interested in what we have to say.
* In assisting us with the provision of servers, X will publicly be seen to
be at the cusp of IT developments in Irish and European education.
At Mount Temple we are installing a thin-client system to run over a new
network. We are testing a system called Skolelinux, which is based upon the
Debian distribution of Linux. Skolelinux has been developed in Norway for
use in schools and in local education authority networks. The thin-client
machines run open source applications from the server, so this project is
about the Linux desktop environment.
We believe that the thin-client model has much to recommend it to schools
in Ireland (and elsewhere):
1. Maintaining the server and carrying out small tasks with the thin clients
replaces the expensive and time-consuming maintenance of large numbers of
workstations. With each high spec thin client server we can service up to 50
thin client terminals, which are inexpensive and need almost zero
maintenance.
2. Older machines can be recycled to become thin clients.
3. Expenditure on software licences is restricted to specialist areas.
We believe that schools in Ireland running 30 or more PCs are reaching a
crisis with maintenance and repairs, because there is no specific budget
provided for this by the Department of Education and Science (DES), and
because it is not a particularly productive way to spend scarce funds.
As you know, the DES is trying to move the computer into the classroom, in
order to integrate IT into the curriculum and use the most positive features
of the Internet and e-mail in schools.
HEAnet (the national university/college computer system) has been charged
with the responsibility for providing an Internet of educational sites and a
system for filtered and spam-free e-mails. Schools are currently waiting to
receive grants from the DES to pay for the networking of classrooms across
the entire school. The issue of how to use these networks has become a
priority.
Company X
What has X to gain from assisting our project?
· This is a unique opportunity for X to demonstrate its commitment to
open source and to help raise the profile of Linux in Ireland.
· This is a unique opportunity for X to demonstrate that server-based
systems, especially thin-client models, are precisely what schools need just
now to meet the new orientation in educational policy for IT.
· Any assistance by X will be widely publicised and acknowledged as a
contribution to the common good.
Mount Temple & the Skolelinux Project
· This is not ?a pie-in-the-sky¹ project that is destined to take years
to complete. We are at an advanced stage of development, with a full network
across the entire campus near completion, and a test server running with
Linux desktops in place.
· The specific Linux distribution - Skolelinux - is based on the Debian
community distribution and has been customised and well tested in over 100
schools in Norway.
· A member of our Project Team has attended a recent Skolelinux
developer conference in Oslo.
If you would like to learn more about our project, please do not hesitate
to contact Dr John Evans, who has specific responsibility for this project
in the school.
Should you or any of your staff wish to visit our campus, please let me
know. If you would like Dr Evans to make a presentation about the project or
provide more detailed information, feel free to contact him.
ends
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