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GNOME GUI Education

Macedonia Deploys 5,000 Ubuntu Desktops in Schools 227

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the getting-schooled-in-being-1337 dept.
vladoboss writes "The latest GNOME Journal is running a story about the deployment of 5000 Ubuntu desktops in public schools. The Republic of Macedonia is a small country in Southern Europe with a population of around 2 million. Internet penetration is only around 5% and software piracy rate is rampant. Also, the government does not play any major role in the development of the ICT (Information and Communication Technologies) and a private sector is dominated by Microsoft technologies. Given the circumstances, one would not expect any free software related stories to make the headlines. Yet the presence of a small volunteer organization by the name Free Software Macedonia is making a big difference in this small country."
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Macedonia Deploys 5,000 Ubuntu Desktops in Schools More

Macedonia Deploys 5,000 Ubuntu Desktops in Schools

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  • Office Apps (Score:5, Interesting)

    by fembots ( 753724 ) on Monday December 05, 2005 @07:03PM (#14189329) Homepage
    The friendly article didn't say it, but I assumed these schools will be using OO.o, not MS Office on WINE?

    This is a strong movement because children tend to come back home and fiddle with home PCs (like installing games/trojans), so it's now more likely that more Macedonian homes will be running Linux too.

    What I am not sure is the career future of these children of the future. Will they be better off in their career now that they are primed with OpenSource ideas, will they become the valuable elites in "knowledge-based exports" market, or will they be forced to re-learn MS once they enter workfoce?
    • First, as you read in the news, very few people have a PC, so I'm not sure having a PC at home for kids will be that common.

      Then, knowing "linux" instead of "windows" does not mean anything. I guess there is more difference between windows95 and vista or between kde and gnome (which is what they would see) than xp/gnome or xp/kde.

      And there are custom themes to reduce this look&feel difference.

    • Re:Office Apps (Score:5, Insightful)

      by rolfwind ( 528248 ) on Monday December 05, 2005 @07:22PM (#14189457)
      Unless you are programming or "forced" to deal with the command line (not likely), I don't see much major relearing going on moving from Linux to MS or the other way around when it comes to office apps (OO to MSOffice or the other way around) - it's mostly point and click with similiar interfaces. Also learning to use the web (since they have low internet penetration), which is pretty much the same experience for any GUI system.

      Sometimes there is more relearning between versions of an App than there is between two different apps that serve the same purpose.

      The other thing I imagine they can use is educational software - I should check the article if they deployed Ubuntu or Edubuntu.

      I wonder if the free educational software in the OS world could provide schools lots of savings?
      • I wonder if the free educational software in the OS world could provide schools lots of savings?

        IIRC, both Apple and Microsoft really really really want schools using their software. Microsoft moreso, as they can provide their software only (free to them, but they might still charge) whereas Apple is still glued to hardware.

    • Re:Office Apps (Score:2, Insightful)

      by tsmithnj ( 738472 )
      37.5% of them won't have to re-learn anything, because that is their unemployment rate. (SOurce-CIA Factbook:http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factb ook/geos/mk.html)

      Perhaps free software will create jobs. The opportunity is certainly there.

    • What I am not sure is the career future of these children of the future.

      Well they can learn how to flameware with Greeks on the net about the name of the country and learn how to avoid getting shot by Serbs by playing Quake.

      • Re:Office Apps (Score:5, Informative)

        by nkrgovic ( 311833 ) on Monday December 05, 2005 @09:03PM (#14190166)
        Well they can learn how to flameware with Greeks on the net about the name of the country and learn how to avoid getting shot by Serbs by playing Quake.
        Hate to dissapoint you, but Macedonia (FYROM is the officialname, ask the Greeks why) seceded from what is now Serbia and Montenegro peacefully. We are still in good relations, and no side ever fired a single non-FPS shot on each other :). I do think we pwn them in Enemy Territory tough :).

        They are, unfortunately, being killed, constantly, but by Albanian separatists. They were promissed help by the U.S. , but since they have no oil they got nothing. Most of Macedonians still live in fear of Albanian terorists, who rampage, kill people, raid vilages and bomb cities allmost every few days.

        The only ones the U.S. helped there are the Albanians. Islamic extremist and terorists are allways welcome in Europe, by the U.S., especially when they have drugs money to pay for CIA instructors.

        • They are, unfortunately, being killed, constantly, but by Albanian separatists.

          Albanians! [imdb.com]

        • Re:Office Apps (Score:5, Interesting)

          by dwillden ( 521345 ) on Tuesday December 06, 2005 @01:07AM (#14191263) Homepage
          I was stationed with the US Army in your beautiful little country in 2001 when the NLA tried to spread the Kosovo Fighting into Macedonia. Unlike most troops there I had a job that allowed and even required me to travel around your country extensively rather than remaining stuck on Camp Able Sentry or limited to the supply route to Kosovo

          The US did not then and has not since supported any Albanian terrorists or even seperatists who were operating, or who even wanted to operate in Macedonia. We really haven't even supported those so inclined who live and operate in Kosovo, since we entered into Kosvo, if anything most of our effort is spent protecting Serbs from harassment and discrimination. We supported the Lawfully elected Macedonian Government (though we did encourage a few reformations to reduce the discrimination the Albanian minority thought it was suffereing, sometimes truthfully sometimes not.)

          The funniest thing about that entire Insurgency/Civil War/Call it what you will, is that the entire time the NLA was certain that any day we were going to start helping them either actively with troops, or with weapons or supplies. But we never did. The US always supported the government, mostly with monetary aid.

          Your accusation at the end of your post is unfounded and uncalled for. Although not really unexpected. Most the time we were there we were constantly being asked if the US still hated the Serbs. Which of course we the US never did, we just hated what some of them had been doing to Kosovars, and what they had done to non-Serbian Bosnians and Croats.

          As to supporting Macedonians, we've had troops in Macedonia since it declared independance and asked for UN Peacekeepers to keep Serbia from trying anything like it did when other states broke off from Yugoslavia. We joined that mission and supported it until the Kosovo War. We transitioned our base to be the rear support base for our main force in Kosovo. We remained there until a couple years ago when we moved those support personnel up to Pristina in Kosovo.

          Since the day The Republic of Macedonia (I heartily disagree with the politcally correct FYROM) declared independence, the US has supported the it and it's lawfully elected Government, and thus the majority of the people. We have supported your troops and police. We poured tons of money into your economy, and we definatly did not help the NLA or any follow-on groups.

          Oh and as to the original article, yea Piracy is big there, I myself brought home a few disks with software and music on them. Hey, they were cheap and it poured some money into the economy. Oh, and on a non-piracy note, my wife really likes the custom tailored tux I got there that I wore on our wedding day. $100 (US) for a hand tailored Tux, awsome for a really skinny guy like me who has trouble finding clothes that fit.

          • Re:Office Apps (Score:2, Insightful)

            by ddimas ( 629883 )
            Since the day The Republic of Macedonia (I heartily disagree with the politcally correct FYROM) declared independence, the US has supported the it and it's lawfully elected Government, and thus the majority of the people. We have supported your troops and police. We poured tons of money into your economy, and we definatly did not help the NLA or any follow-on groups.

            It's not a matter of political correctness. It's a matter of a Serbian nation making territorial demands in Greece. How would you like it if C

            • WTF are you talking about? Macedonia, or as you would obviously prefer it, FYROM is an independent country, geographically located just between Serbia and Greece. What would their name or territorial claims have to do with Serbia?

              BTW, yes Macedonian page clearly states that the OO.org 2.0 has been finally fully localised - kids will use their native language in Office Apps.

              • It is not your lack of knowledge of history and international affairs that annoys me, it is your insistance on having an opinion even though you don't understand the subject.

              • Re:Office Apps (Score:2, Interesting)

                by ddimas ( 629883 )
                WTF are you talking about? Macedonia, or as you would obviously prefer it, FYROM is an independent country, geographically located just between Serbia and Greece. What would their name or territorial claims have to do with Serbia?

                They are a Bulgarian (dialect) speaking sub-population of old Serbia. The ethnic composition is nearly 100% Slav or Albanian. They are no more Macedonian than Queen Elizabeth I. Certain Pakistanis have a better claim on calling themselves Macedonians than those people, as they ar

        • Macedonia (FYROM is the officialname, ask the Greeks why)

          For those curious enough as I was, this is why. [wikipedia.org]

      • Re:Office Apps (warning: rant, rave, and scream) (Score:4, Informative)

        by d.valued ( 150022 ) on Monday December 05, 2005 @11:39PM (#14190902) Journal
        Something to keep in mind about the Balkans:

        They are - and have been - and probably will be - a political and religious powderkeg.

        Greeks in particular have a few things to be pissed about. The religious leader of their faith is in a different country because of how the lines were redrawn post-WWI. Hundreds of thousands were massacred in Asia Minor during the '20s by the Turks, but no one there will admit to it. (And yes, I know, they didn't get the worst of it. It was still brutal.)

        In 1452, they (and the rest of the Orthodox world) lost their highest cathedral to the Ottomans, who desecrated parts of Hagia Sophia and turned it into a mosque. (Think of it as though St Peter's were conquered by Iran.) Now it's used solely as a tourist site.

        The name of Macedonia was assigned to the former southern province of communist Yugoslavia in 1952 by Tito.

        There's no historic basis for the name; the region of Macedonia whence Philip and Alexander came from was much further south.

        Yes, at the time, there was no concept of Hellenic unity; that developed mainly after the Latin conquest of Constantinople in 1204, which put the final nail in the coffin of unity between Rome and Constantinople. However, there was this understanding that they spoke the same tongue, they learned the same thought (pop quiz: who taught Alexander?), they spread the same ideas and believed in the same faith as everyone else on the peninsula now known as Greece.

        The Balkans as a whole are rife with religious and ethnic hates going back centuries. The Catholics hate the Orthodox, and both hate the Muslims. The Croatians and Albanians and Serbians are at each others' throats, the Greeks hate the Albanians for taking part of their country, the Turks for the same reason as well as the historical stuff, and everybody hate the Roma (gypsies).

        The only thing that kept a lid on Yugoslavia's ethnic groups, well, was the iron fist of Tito.

  • In Full Battle Array (Score:4, Funny)

    by 3Suns ( 250606 ) on Monday December 05, 2005 @07:10PM (#14189375) Homepage
    All right! only 2000 more to go before we have...

    Seven Thousand Macedonian Linux Desktops in Full Battle Array! [happychild.org.uk]

  • Glad to see... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by DimGeo ( 694000 )
    Glad to see our south-western brothers get it right. Nothing better than teaching children to use C++ with KDevelop + QT Designer, and in Ubuntu that setup is always just a few mouse clicks away.
    • Ubuntu, not Kubuntu.

      Why would they put KDE on a system and yet not use Kubuntu instead? It seems likely to me they're using gnome, which given their wonderful new Cairo API would be a good thing. I personally went right off KDE when i realised most of the apps were eating huge proportions of CPU and memory. It got so bad that i switched to a GNOME media player, despite me loving amarok. Now i don't use KDE. I'm thinking of this from the point of view that presumably macedonian poor families can't afford th

      • Re:Not KDE (Score:4, Informative)

        by jonasj ( 538692 ) on Monday December 05, 2005 @07:57PM (#14189717)
        You ask why they would put KDE on Ubuntu instead of using Kubuntu? Uh, Kubuntu *is* just Ubuntu with KDE put on it. You can do apt-get install kubuntu-desktop on a Ubuntu box.

        Kubuntu is just the name of the Ubuntu install cd that installs KDE instead of Gnome by default.

        So the parent post was right in saying that "that setup is always just a few mouse clicks away".

  • Copyrights, copyrights, copyrights... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by HermanAB ( 661181 ) on Monday December 05, 2005 @07:12PM (#14189386)
    Due to pressure by large countries to honour patents and copyrights, poor countries are all switching to free software. The strict enforcement of copyrights is the best thing that can ever happen to the Free Software movement and to the poor, it is a godsend.

  • Mutual Exclusion? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Pantero Blanco ( 792776 ) on Monday December 05, 2005 @07:14PM (#14189399)
    How exactly do you have such a high software piracy rate when only 5% of the people have Internet? Yeah, I know people can copy things at home and hand them out or sell them, but it seems like that couldn't spread things fast enough to come close to the rate in other countries.
    • Well, maybe there's a low penetration rate of computers in general: if 10% of people have PCs and 5% have internet, that means 50% of people with computers have the internet.

    • Re:Mutual Exclusion? (Score:4, Informative)

      by FinchWorld ( 845331 ) on Monday December 05, 2005 @07:19PM (#14189429) Homepage
      Simple. Local markets. They sell them there, the police don't bother with them for the most part, its pretty much the same as markets in china, all the software you could ever want for a few pennies (or cents).

      • Re:Mutual Exclusion? (Score:4, Informative)

        by dwillden ( 521345 ) on Tuesday December 06, 2005 @01:18AM (#14191305) Homepage
        Actually it's even better than that. The local police requested that the US and other NATO bases report when ever a CD dealer would set up shop in his car outside the gate of a base. Why? Because the guy selling out of his car at the base entrance wasn't paying taxes on his profits.

        Whereas we could go into any of the CD shops in town and get the same disks for just a few cents more. Or we could even go onto the NATO Base where there was a CD shop and again pay that same cheap rate. With the exchange rate in 2001 it cost $2.50 per disk and thats how everything was sold, on a per disk basis. A CD with hundreds of MP3's or a direct bootleg of a just released Album, or a copy of the latest version of MS Office or any other software you wanted was just $2.50.

        And as to bringing said bootleg CD's home, all Customs cared was that you were not bringing multiple copies of the same product back to try to sell.

    • "Well, see Bill, we haven't actually *sold* anything in Macedonia...."

    • Simple - all that 5% is used to pirate stuff, which is then sold on outside markets to the other %95. The pirates make money and the rest of the 95% of users of pirated software save money - ($2 for MS Windows as opposed to $200). Win-win situation as far as the Macedonians are concerned.
    • I live in Thailand, and it's easier to get pirated software than the real thing here. Loads and loads of markets, street stalls or computer centers sell CD's full of pirated software for about $4 a time. There's pretty much everything available - Adobe/Macromedia, Oracle, Microsoft, high-end video and audio programs etc.. even 'pirated' Linux distros! It's all the latest versions too, for instance there was copies of the Longhorn beta builds available ages ago. By contrast, real versions of software are eit

  • Oh, good grief. (Score:2, Insightful)

    by ScrewMaster ( 602015 )
    software piracy rate is rampant

    Stop it. Stop it, I say. I can't stand the words "rampant" and "piracy" in the same sentence anymore. And besides, how can a rate be rampant?
  • It used to be the argument between rich & poor schools. "We have a gym, swimming pool, theater, you don't have anything!!!" Now its, "We run Windows, your poor, you run Linux!!!" Open Source is a really good idea though, it will give pepole many more opportunities to access & use computers.
    • It used to be the argument between rich & poor schools. "We have a gym, swimming pool, theater, you don't have anything!!!" Now its, "We run Windows, your poor, you run Linux!!!"

      More like, "We run GNU/Linux, where we know what the shit we are doing. You poor bastard, running windows, have no freedoms and are left with a piece of shit."
    • Linux isn't considered the "poor man's operating system", is it? I've never once seen anyone running Linux in a trailer park!!
  • Damn, just when I was going to say: You forgot Macedonia!

  • Imagine if some wise tutor could harness this technology and knowledge and instill a pupil with the ability to conquer the world...

    muwhahaha...

    yes yes I know I know...it's not the same Macedonia [wikipedia.org].

  • FSM did a great job (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Karaman ( 873136 ) on Monday December 05, 2005 @07:41PM (#14189605)
    Free Software is a winner once more. Alas, not everywhere. I live in a neighboring country, Bulgaria, and it looks like our last government made a life-contract with MS for our schools and state administration. Corruption, you will ask, yes, a contractor which is in close relation to the government supplied all the MS products and there was no public auction for this contract. The MS products were even bought at higher than normal prices. And one more thing: There are computers in the state administration somewhere in smaller towns, that can only run DOS, but they still have bought MS WINXP for these PCs. And the contract being for life means as long as MS suppllies products our children will be forced to use Windows at school and call themselves computer-skilled. For me it is the worst nightmare. Go go go, Free Software Macedonia! I wish you more success!
    • It doesn't really matter. You can still install linux on these machines. It just takes some work. Especially if they aren't even capable of running windows whats the point?

      The guy got his money, but the movement continues.

      sri

  • flights booked (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I work at the MS travel office in Redmond.
    We read Slashdot all the time so we know in advance where the salespersons will want to go next.
    We have chartered a plane for next week.
    Expect a "Macedonian ministry of education revokes linux deployment plan" article here come January.

  • Only 5% are online? (Score:3, Funny)

    by Milton Waddams ( 739213 ) on Monday December 05, 2005 @07:54PM (#14189700)
    How does the other 95% get their porn!?!?
  • Excuse me, but what does this have to do with software piracy?

    There is a school district switching over to Linux computers, I just don't see where any type of piracy is involved here.

    The school isn't using them for piracy, and they aren't using pirated software.

    WOULD PEOPLE PLEASE STOP MENTIONING PIRACY IN EVERY DAMN ARTICLE THAT HAS THE WORD "INTERNET" IN IT!
    • I believe the reference to piracy was saying that more strict encorcement or copywrite laws intended to stop piracy is good for linux because it forces those who cant afford windows to linux.

      I just don't see where any type of piracy is involved here.

      That was their point. The combination of the fact that people will have used linux in school, and it doesnt require piracy to run will hopefully bring about more use of linux.
  • Makes me wonder if it's possible to create a country that has 100% of its computers running on OSS. And methinks Ubuntu is a good choice here. Check out http://www.edubuntu.org/ [edubuntu.org], Mark Shuttleworth seems genuinely interested in developing OSS for the not-so-developed countries. Its not just about the technology or the beauty or KDE vs Gnome, I think the philosophy of ubuntu fits in well with the market needs and the objectives here.

  • I wonder... (Score:1, Offtopic)

    by kukickface ( 675936 )
    was this Alexander's own idea? Or did Aristotle tell him to do it?

  • Math (Score:4, Insightful)

    by KlaymenDK ( 713149 ) on Tuesday December 06, 2005 @04:33AM (#14191959) Journal
    2.000.000 population, 5% internet penetration, 5.000 Ubuntu desktops -- instant 5% market share if you look at it one way.

    No wonder this makes headlines.
    • 2.000.000 population, 5% internet penetration, 5.000 Ubuntu desktops -- instant 5% market share if you look at it one way.

      Which way of looking would that be? Seriously, I just don't see it.

      • Okay, it's like this: The population is 2M. 5% of those have intertet access from home. That would be 2M * 0.05 = 100k machines. Deploying 5.000 new Ubuntu machines *compares* to 5% of the internet-connected home computers.

        I say "if you look at it one way" and "comparable" because we're not looking at the same pool of machines. But being school machines they are very likely to have an influence where it counts - in potential new computer users (as opposed to zombified corporate Windows users :-).

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