22,000 Indiana Students Using Linux Desktops

Anonymous writes "Indiana's Department of Education has moved 22,000 students onto Linux desktops, and it's looking like that's only going to accelerate with SLED 10, Linspire, and other distributions getting better."

Indiana

[8ball629]

After growing up and going to high school in Indiana, this is a surprise to me because our school was VERY outdated =S... of course this was a few years ago and it was in a town of about 7k people.

Re:Stigma

[Peyna]

The article is about high schools, not colleges.

Well...

[Lord Aurora]

If it's anything like my school, those 22,000 kids are actually using about 20 Linux desktops per school, in the "new" computer lab, while the other lab down the hall has 20 brand-new Macintoshes and the teachers are using networked Windows XP on those ubiquitous Dells.

All that to say that 22,000 students using Linux probably translates into ~150 Linux desktops in the better funded schools.

But maybe Indiana has a better public school system than California. Wouldn't be surprised.

Re:One or two Linux "flavors" are not enough?

[Skrynesaver]

when 22000+ students are divided into 10 or more Linux flavors.

The article mentions SLED and RedHat. They also mention Ubuntu being used successfully by a different school district, I presume because of the edubuntu project. No sane admin is going to roll out 10 distros, "apt-get emerge rpm, Oh sod it install the bloody thing yourself!". However what's happening here is that different school districts are approving A distro for use on their systems, not some poor support tech trying to work out what distro is being used in a given instance.

If my experience is anything to go by students who are introduced to linux early find Windows is broken if they are asked to move over. Employers of Indianna, prepare to be swamped with demands for cheaper OS installs in 6 years!!

Re:Can someone explain to me the Relevance

[megaditto]

How much are they going to save in licensing costs, does anyone know? (not just over Windows, but Office, Photoshop, etc.)

And how much are they going to need to spend on training up the competent tech support?

I remember MS claiming the TCO total cost of ownership is lower for Windows than for linux because of training...

Re:Stigma

[Anonymous Coward]

That's not a good argument. Why should every student in the college use Windows, just because some courses require Photoshop/AutoCAD?

If the students require it, just run it using a terminal service.

At my University I can just type "windows" at the Linux command prompt, and up pops a connection to a Windows server (Citrix based software I think). Then the colleges can also just pay licences per usage, so that they don't have to have multiple installations just in case someone needs it.

For heavy use, perhaps VMWare is required, but the terminal experience is very fast for me at least. It can't compare with VNC etc.

Re:Common Installer?

[JonJ]

I was also wondering about that, more specific: The API-part, what does he mean? Does he want a stable Linux-api? KDE? GNOME? X? OpenGL? From my point of view, it looks like he just hasn't completely understood what he's talking about. And common? They all share the Linux-kernels, and a lot of them uses the same graphical user interface(Red Hat, SUSE and Ubuntu have sort of standardized on GNOME)

Re:Well...

[davmoo]

I can't speak for all of Indiana, but I can speak for what I see in Bartholomew County, one of the richer counties in the state. Both of our public high schools have astroturf on their football fields. And both also have libraries that are woefully behind the times, with poor book collections that are held together with tape, and very little money to upgrade anything. If its for athletics, money can be found to do anything, and people will be fighting each other to be the first to donate. If its for academics, it takes a back seat and is ignored.

Using Linux here might appeal from an older equipment standpoint, but computer labs are not a priority here in the first place.

Unhappy with SLED 10

[Bender Unit 22]

I have been running SUSE on my desktop at work since v8 and just tried the latest.
Luckily I installed another harddisk in my pc before trying to install.
It looked great but I ran into some installation problems very unlike other SUSE installs I have tried. Even on my notebook it has worked perfect, even WiFi and Bluetooth.

Although the install itself ran fine. Getting the right drivers for my nVidia (6200) card failed. I got a trial key and went on to install the drivers in hope of running XGL. But it failed to make use of the card so I ended up installing my own drivers and forced XGL to enable. I did get that to run but then I had another problem, which was a show stopper.
I was happy to see the Citrix client included, but it seems to have problems with multiple desktops on this SLED 10. When I change to another desktop, all the Citrix applications vanishes. I can see in the process list that they still are there, I just can't see them. That worked great on the others.
So now I am installing it again from scratch, with KDE instead of Gnome, without XGL to see if it works then. Interesting to see what happens when I try to register the same license again. I hope that it was just XGL that broke Citrix.

Re:Stigma

[gripen40k]

We use Linux at the U of Calgary engineering dept., and all it did was ADD to the stigma. Before I thought all the 31337 people used Linux to hax people and did generally c00l things with it. Then I grew up a bit and started using Linux only to realize that to do something so little like write a report just sucked (using OpenOffice), writing code sucked (using xemacs *barf*), and surfing the web sucked (using a restrictive, buggy, and old version of firefox). I'm not trying to dis Linux here (to it's credit we had gaim msnger, which I now use on my win comp at home :), I'm just saying that it seemed a bit anti-productive, and this is mostly due to crappy programs and the time spent trying to do *anything* was too great to really get into it. Of course I don't have the privileges to load my own programs, but damn, those high school students are really up against a wall if they are facing the same thing (most likely). Anyways, I'm going to try loading ubuntu on my lappy and see how that goes, also have a 'media center' version of knoppix that I should try on my hacked together media comp. I'm not giving up *yet* but I'm still skeptical...

Re:One or two Linux "flavors" are not enough?

[online-shopper]

They're using two distributions, Linspire and SLED. And if you want them to standardize on one distro, best get used to the thought of it being SLED.

A common API?

[vogon jeltz]

"I think within five years, we'll see a huge market shift," Huffman said. "But the Linux community really has to come together. They do have to have a common API; they've got to have a common installer. If those things don't exist, it will not be a competitive market again. If they do exist, I think it will."

Like libc? I mean, seriously, I want some of the stuff that guy's smoking. First they go to great length explaining how they diversify on Red Hat, SUSE, Ubuntu and (sigh) Linspire and then he asks for a common API and installer? Like one kid stated when asked which system it preferres, either Linux or Windows the reply was:"Who cares?" Same thing here: who cares for a "common installer" (technically impossible) or a "common API" (it's there: libc, GTK, Qt, etc.). As a user you either see a Gnome or a KDE desktop anyway.
"Mike Huffman, special assistant for technology at the Indiana Department of Education", gimme a break!

Re:One or two Linux "flavors" are not enough?

[alx5000]

Although they said those are "future" plans, I really would like to see them standarize.

The ones I would really like to see standarize are those developing distros. I got friends who regularly use ubuntu and still 'wtf' when you show them a fedora.

Re:One or two Linux "flavors" are not enough?

[BoberFett]

And why standardize the Linux distro to be deployed? Let the kids choose which distro suits them best.After all, all these distros aim at the same thing : be a capable and functional desktop OS

Apparently you missed the part where the student stated that he "Didn't care" whether it was Windows or not. Do you really think he's going to be concerned about which Linux distro is installed?

Re:In indiana...

[flumps]

I think he's talking about Microsofts COM and DCOM, and probably OPENGL and DirectX or something..

.. but then there's Gnomes Bononbo [wikipedia.org] for a COM layer and the directx alternative SDL [libsdl.org], so I think hes just sounding off.

Re:Well...

[Sol_Web_Dude]

It's pretty much that way all over the state. All around the Indy metro area, you see local news rags carry on about HS Football, Baseball, etc. Not much about academics.

And the tax money spent on athletic programs, ug!

I would like to hope that this is a step in the right direction.

Re:One or two Linux "flavors" are not enough?

[FLOOBYDUST]

One of the largest drains on IT school budgets is the cost of licenses. From the article it appears they are focused not on "wow we use Linux" but we can put laptops in the hand of the students for substantially reduced cost. What needs to happen next is true integration of the laptop into the curriculum. I believe the algebra, geometry and calculus curriculum is ripe for improvement using laptops in the classroom to learn advanced concepts such as three dimensional coordinate systems , graphing, integration, integration etc. It is easier to understand if you can see it. The TI graphing calculators in use today are improvements on pen and pencil calculations but don't really represent a step change in the teaching methods. Unfortunately (or fortunately depending on viewpoint) the TI calculators have cool games which get alot of use during monotonous lectures. Has the teaching of advanced math changed at all in the last 50 years? Hopefully low cost laptops will inspire development of tools to bring about fundamental changes . The ultimate goal is to have the laptop and its underlying software transparent to the user. Any discussion of distros in the classroom defeats the purpose.

Re:Maybe it would be great, if it were true

[thejynxed]

But, what IT department manager in their right mind, when having the option NOT to install any Flash plugins for Linux, is going to do so willingly, knowing what everyone knows about Flash?

If you ask me, it is a perfect way to say, "Sorry, no Flash for you." No more annoying Flash adverts, or other exploits.

Also, this is a perfect time for them to prevent alot of things - remove the CD/DVD-ROM drives from the cases (or alternatively, setup the optical drive access to be ROOT-only), disable installation of P2P apps, etc. This will prevent students from wasting alot of educational resources playing around with crap like Limewire or Diablo II, and frankly, it's been needed for a long time now.

I admin on a few online games, and let me tell you, the amount of students that are on there during school hours never ceases to amaze me and piss me off at the same time, as I know they are wasting valuable school resources and educational opportunities to play games, instead of doing something useful like learning how to administer a web server, etc. There is a time and place for games, and during class is not one of them IMHO. We have, in fact, as administrators, turned in students to their school principals for precisely this reason. As a staff, we believe in education first, socializing and leisure time second when it comes to our games.

This could lead to a situation like Bavaria

[Slayer]

Thirty years ago Bavaria (southern part of Germany) was a somewhat backwards, conservative, agricultural state of Germany, whereas the northers states were highly industrialized and rich. Then the Bavarians started high tech business and have passed the north by far in the mean time.

Now the smart and educated come to Bavaria to find a decent job...

From what you tell Indiana tries exactly the same ... we'll see what comes out of that.

Re:Can someone explain to me the Relevance

[MISplice]

Well the techs involved in the install process are competent and actually come from school districts in Indiana. They are also the ones that are supporting the current environment. For the most part from what I understand it is almost like a cyber-cafe install where if something goes wrong ( Software wise ) they will have an image to just re-install the machine with the kids data on a network drive so they won't lose it. Who knows if this may change or not but if they get most of their schools on Linux it will be important for School Information systems (SIS) to start working in the platform as well because after the kids they may move over the teachers/faculty as well.

Mods: parent is Informative, not Funny

[mrchaotica]

I don't know how many people have noticed this, but the only people who complain about incompatibilities (e.g. library versions, paths, etc.) between distros (and/or support the LSB) are the ones who want to sell closed-source software.

If they'd just make a GNU Autoconf script and let the sysadmin/user install the program himself as the parent just described, there would be no problem!

Re:Standard installers == Bullshit!

[zaphod_es]

Try an installer from any of the major distros. They're ALL easier than Windows.

That is probably right but it is even easier to have have your new hardware arrive with the software pre-installed. Linux will always be in a distant second place until it is pre-installed.

The bright side is that Linux does not need a reinstaller :)

Re:Standard installers == Bullshit!

[Constantine Evans]

Just go to a few conventions that used to be Linux strongholds and look at how many powerbooks and macbooks are there now.

Be sure to check whether those are running OS X or Linux. I had an Ibook for a few years that ran OS X for only a few hours every few months (when I wanted to try it out). The hardware is sometimes worth it (Of course, now I have a Dell laptop which came with free 3 year next business day warranty support for higher education. I don't need reliable hardware if I can have someone come replace everything every few months. I'm already on my third motherboard, third keyboard, and second hinge, and the new motherboard is defective too.)

I said many of us end up compiling some things from source. I've had to do that for niche applications on Fedora, Suse, and slackware.

I had thought you were talking about autoconf only from the context. This is a problem. The hope is that most home users won't need those niche applications. But there is definitely room for improvement there.

Most major software is provided in multiple package formats for the different distributions. Lots of minor software provides one and the source. The source can be troublesome and the packages take extra work and cannot always be shared between distributions. So I have to download a different one for each distro I'm running.

I doubt that that is going to be solved unless one distribution gains significant marketshare, unfortunately.

Which is still not as easy as dragging and dropping or throwing something in the trash. Say you have two laptops running the same distro and you want to copy a program from one to the other. You already have a directory shared. According to the desktop metaphor you should be able to just drag the application from one computer to the other or even just run it off the mounted directory. It is intuitive, but it does not work on Linux unless someone is running GNUStep and happens to have something packaged for it, which is rare in the extreme. What about binary software that goes away. I've IM'd copies of such software to friends simply by dragging the icon into my IM chat with them. That is easy and intuitive, but it does not work on Linux.

That is quite interesting. It should be possible with some work to set up a system in Ubuntu that would act like that using deb packages and a modified file manager. It would also probably not be a bad idea to have themes set up that way, as opposed to the current, very inflexible theme manager. I will have to discuss it with some others. Unfortunately, it would only work with Ubuntu...

By which I believe you mean, most software does not adhere to a standard but sends random network traffic often in obfuscated formats. As security advances we'll have our programs running in jails and be able to restrict them at will from accessing any given resources. Having an official service for updates and registration in a clear XML format makes it clear what is going out from what application and to whom and lets the user restrict network access for say, a FPS video game from sending out network traffic once it has been registered and until you want to look for an update and lets a user examine what is being sent. This is vital if we ever want to mitigate trojans. It also lets us build standard tools to manage updates and installs, updating everything at, say 1am, instead of when you run it next and want to get work done.

A standardised system for updates for third-party programs would be great. Ubuntu is already able to update automatically at set times, if I recall, but only for software in the repositories. As for standardised registration, do you mean registration as in network-based licensing, or registration as in registering with a server? A standard for the latter would be nice, but I doubt that developers requiring the former would be willing to use a standard system.

Thi