[Offtopic] Linux

[Stephen Loosley]

Sydney school teaches with Linux monopoly 
Rodney Gedda 
Computerworld 
21/03/2006 07:15:56 

http://www.computerworld.com.au/index.php?id=407925021eid=-255

Linux may be struggling to gain a foothold in the primary and secondary 
education market, but one Sydney school is setting itself higher grades - 
all without Microsoft.

At the Lorien Novalis School in the suburb of Glenhaven, 350 students from 
kindergarten through to year 12 and 38 staff have been learning with the 
(Linux) penguin for the past four years.

Stuart Rushton, the school's ICT manager, told Computerworld that senior 
students first suggested the move to Linux.

"The school was Mac shop and when it was time to upgrade they said why not 
try Linux?" Rushton said. "So we bought cheap second-hand computers and put 
Linux on them and we've been running it ever since."

With about 30 desktops running Mandriva (formerly Mandrake) Linux 2006 - 
chosen for its ease of installation and use - on modest 1GHz Pentium 
desktops, students use a variety of open source applications for their 
coursework, including OpenOffice, Firefox, Nvu for Web editing, Evolution 
for e-mail, Scribus for publishing, the Gimp for image manipulation, QCad 
for design, and KDevelop for Pascal programming.

"They more than cover everything for education," Rushton said. "If we came 
to a blockage we would organize around it but have not yet."

The non-open source application is Mojo for animation which Rushton said 
"works brilliantly on Linux".

Other computers at the school are eight "legacy" Macs used for 
administration and two Windows machines required for a proprietary library 
catalogue application. Six other classic Macs are used for video editing 
but Rushton is seriously looking at replacing Apple's iMovie with the open 
source Cinelerra video editing tool.

The school's main server is also running Mandriva, version 10.1.

"In 2002 our first server was a well used Sun Ultra 10 (Sparc) running 
Mandrake 7 [and] it worked very well until the hardware failed," Rushton 
said. 

"In 2003 our second server was a very well used HP Netserver LD Pro 
133MHz, running Mandrake 9. It couldn't cope with the demand [but] 
nonetheless it gave good service 90 percent of the time. Late in 2004
our third server, a new HP Proliant ML 110 running Mandrake 10.1 has
given 100 percent service ever since [with] no downtime."

While Rushton's focus is on the "education side" everyone at the school is 
interested in extending Linux use, including moving the library system to 
the open source Koha. Also under consideration is locally-born Moodle for 
online course management.

"We have an opportunity to consolidate everything on Linux," he said. "Most 
important is students working with open source and evolving from there. We 
started with education because it's where the future of Linux is."

Because Lorien Novalis is comparatively small, Rushton said it does not 
suffer from the bureaucracy or the "enormous inertia to overcome" of a 
large school so Linux could get in easily and "everyone was unanimous".


"Our reason for going to Linux was predominantly philosophical, then for 
quality, and third was the cost - we wanted the best option," he said. "We 
bought the Mandriva PowerPack to get the manuals and to support open
source companies. Often we download free stuff but the latest version was 
purchased. We're interested in free as in freedom, not that you don't have 
to pay for something."

Rushton said cost is important but likened vendors that give away 
educational software to McDonald's giving away free food, "that's a 
short-term gain".

"School education should be about cooperation and sharing knowledge, which 
is exactly what open source is about - that's why I can't understand why 
schools don't embrace it on that level," he said, adding there is a "big 
black hole" when it comes to Linux in education.

"People are talking about it but are still way behind," he said. 

"Everyone's interested in teaching a word processor, but not interested in 
a political statement. The deep technology literacy issue is not even 
discussed."

Students using Linux at school is also having a flow-on effect outside 
campus with at least 12 using the operating system at home.

"The kids love their lab and have a lot of ownership. We take it seriously 
how they feel about lab, and they enjoy that it works," Rushton said. "The 
tinker value of Linux is brilliant and kids love to tinker so they organize 
their desktop in a way most people couldn't understand it."

-- 
I've never let my school interfere with my education. 
-- Mark Twain

Regards 
brd

Bernard Robertson-Dunn 
Sydney Australia 
brd at iimetro.com.au
--

Cheers Bernard
Stephen Loosley
Victoria, Australia