[Nottingham]School linux {was Meeting- Wednesday 1st December}

[Haber, Michael]

Hi David

>>And on that subject, has anyone experience of moving a fairly substantial 
>>secondary school over to FLOSS?  Could be a *very* live issue for our school 
>>in a few months time....

I was IT tech for a large secondary school for 2 years, win95 based. I now run a  linux network, so I may have some ideas of the problems you'll face. The main non technical problem you'll have is attracting + keeping good linux staff on school IT wages.
If you have solid support from management *and* a number of key staff I would say its possible, and with only a couple of inset days training.

Legacy applications will be your major problem. We had lots of interactive cd based software for w95 (languages mainly), and all freebie software from carreers advice to drug awareness will be windows only.

You could also move to OO, Scribus & Gimp on windows, but with 1000+ users you'll be on one long beta test (of the windows port) and will just prolong the turmoil if you eventually plan to move to linux anyway.

ta
Mike


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