[Year 12 Its] Linux v XP

[Guy Flaherty]

On Thursday 16 February 2006 10:50, Con Zymaris wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 15, 2006 at 07:00:09PM +1100, Guy Flaherty wrote:
> > You can also build a VM Ware install of linux that can be downloaded onto
> > a machine or added to an image. All you need is the free VM Player
> > installed and then you can run Linux from inside of windows! It is a
> > little slow at times, depends mostly on the amount of system RAM. If you
> > just want to let students have a look at linux in a non-threating way,
> > this is really good. If they mess up in any way you just delete the one
> > VM disk file and then copy it back onto the machine. This way you can
> > have a full install running without any hardware problems or worrying
> > about reinstalling or
> > losing/forgetting disks. We are using it on the lab computers and on the
> > student laptops. Works well with SuSE 10 and KDE.
>
> Guy,
>
> some questions.
>
> 1) What kind of hardware are you using to make this arrangement fly?
>
> 2) What are you gaining from using SuSE 10? Are there apps that you need
>    which you can't get for Windows? Or are you just showing the students a
>    new desktop?
>
>
> Cheers,
>
> Con Zymaris
>
> - CEO, Cybersource Pty. Ltd.
> - Director, Open Source Industry Australia, Limited.
> - Convenor, Open Source Victoria (A Government-funded industry cluster.)


Con,

We are a laptop school, so all the students use their own laptops, mostly 
standard Acer models, along with HP business desktop machines in the lab. 
Just standard PC boxes for the most part. 512mb works better then 256 though! 
The VM disk file comes in at 2.7Gb, but this is no problem with a wired 
connection. Struggles on the wireless a bit.

I do a lot of development work here at the school, and only started teaching 
again this year after returning from overseas. I use SuSE for all our 
development due to tools like Quanta+, Eric3, postgresQL, mySQL and others. 
With the IS class I decided to use Python as the language and the best IDE I 
could find was Eric3. KDE and SuSE work very well and the students have had 
no problems adjusting away from windows. They have been quite keen so far! 
Having a functional shell in Linux helps a lot too.

The aim of this is for Python development and general scripting development.

Hope this answers your questions.
Guy
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