Linux Taking Over Schools in India 84
slashchris84 writes to mention a BusinessWeek article about the growing role of Linux in the classrooms of India. In a country with a long history of corporate problems and financial issues, the inexpensive and flexible nature of open source software is gaining a lot of ground. From the article: "Two years ago, New Delhi said the best way to improve computer literacy in India was to adopt open source software in schools. Although Kerala is the first to introduce such a program statewide, 18 of India's 28 states either are using Linux or have pilot projects for its use in various government departments and schools. The education ministries in most states, and in Delhi the federal ministries of defense, transport, communication, and health, are all using the software on server computers"
Re:It's not just India... (Score:2, Informative)
Actually I'm sure this statement is true. They probably can't.
It would be false if they said it was impossible. What I like about Linux is how much more control and "precision" it gives me.
Re:It's not just India... (Score:4, Informative)
Sure, but wouldn't upgrading to Vista as well? The fruit is worth the work of the harvest.
Cheap in relation to...? I met with the principal and director of technology for a pretty big school district yesterday and one of his main motivations for moving to Linux and LTSP was because Microsoft has decided to start charging them anually for licenses.
LTSP updates the terminal server. The terminal server is what all thin clients run off of, so they are "automatically" updated when the server is (with a couple of rare occasions when you must update the chroot environment, but that is a one-stop simple procedure as well). Also, control is done through the terminal server. If you have multiple terminal servers for multiple sites and you're worried about updating them all at once, then there are things like Zenworks (though I'm not sure how it works with LTSP servers) and others I'm sure.
I administrate a ~13 node LTSP setup for a non-profit after school hangout for kids. Before I came around (about a year ago), their hardware was running with Windows 95/98, and was riddled with illegal software, viruses and spyware. The machines were unusable and they were begging me to help.
So, I sold them a cheap dual processor server and a bunch of PXE bootable NICs for their computers, and had an Edubuntu network running for them in a few weeks.
They haven't had any major problems since. It just works. Now tell me that THIS kind of thing costs more than administrating Windows boxes.
Re:It's not just India... (Score:3, Informative)
That is true. Admins that only know the Windows/Microsoft way of doing things would need to be removed and unix/linux admins would need to take their place.
As others have said, they are looking at rolling out a Unix infrastructure that resembles a Windows network. Ideally most systems would be running as thin clients with a central server cluster. You update the software at the master server, it populates the cluster and all of the thin clients run software from there. It is a much less intensive administrative overhead, reduces the need for admins/IT to go computer-to-computer (Thin clients are more reliable, if one dies, unplug it and plug in another one..) and all administrative tasks are centralized.
I provide technical consulting to a school that rolled out a thin client configuration across 150 computers (elementary school). There are 4 backend servers (for future expansion). The network just umm.. works. Upgrading software only happens at the master server, and everything rolls out nice. We can have multiple versions of software (if necessary) without having to deal with conflicts as on Windows. We don't have to ghost or create disk images. If a user has a problem, because they are ultimately running on the server, it is a piece-of-cake to see exactly what is on their screen and assist them from anywhere (remotely, from the front office, where-ever). There are no emergencies. The backend servers provide redunancy so if one happens to fail -- no problem. If a software upgrade fails, we only need to rollback at the master -- no need to jump around to various computers.
Furthermore -- centralization makes backups a breeze
The only major issue is legacy (windows) software that doesn't have a *nix port or equivilant. Those end up being run via terminal server which is adequate but not nearly as integrated as we would like.