[Newlug] Re: Linux in Schools

[Justin Kuepper]

Well, I am a high school student (senior year), and I have been working with the system administrator for the last two years to push Linux, and here is what I have found:

When I first approached him he was reluctant because (1) the school was tied down to an organization that uses only Microsoft products, and (2) he had no experience with Linux. Finally, after several months of convincing he permitted me to setup a standalone Linux computer. Wanting to make a good impression I chose to use Mandrake, the easiest to use Distro (in my opinion). He was very impressed with this, (although at the time it only had KDE 2.2, so it didn't look the best). During that summer I worked on some documents that helped promote Linux, (ie. cost effectiveness, performance, etc.). When I came back, I burned him RedHat 7.2 and then later 8.0. With 8.0 he was extremely impressed, and we also purchased Lindows to try a commercial solution. Now, we are planning a network of test computers that are on their own isolated network. If this goes well, we will be one step closer to full implementation.

Also, when I first entered the school, they were using Frontpage for all of their website editing needs. Eventually they switched to Dreamweaver, and now, finally, we are working towards using a PHP/SQL system and having an intranet. (Open source solutions). We are also testing the use of Star Office instead of MS Office. We have come a long way though. If there's one thing that works, it's moving slowly and testing every step of the way - unfortunately schools do not just dive into such ventures :)



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