[Westwales] Linux in schools

[Jon Pearse]

  To comment on the 'convincing the Head' comment. I used to work on
and off at my old school while I was at home, doing various bits and
pieces with the network. One of the guys I had to clean up after on
a number of occasions was a staunch Linux fan - to the point where
he'd removed Windows from his home computers as he never actually
used it.
  He made a few noises to the head of IT that Linux wasn't all that
hard to use or anything, and lent the disks to the head of IT. When
I left, a small sub-network of 6 Intel boxes in the middle of one of
the IT rooms were dual-booting Win98 (with some ghastly security
program on it) and RedHat.
  This particular project never got mentioned to the Head, however
(the head of IT had full jurisdiction over the computers) and I
doubt whether he'd have objected anyways (his sum knowledge of
computers was pretty much 'yeah, I can use MS Word').
  Generally speaking, though, if you can convince the powers that be
that it's not going to cost anything (you're using Linux after all),
and it's not going to cause any problems with existing
infrastructure, configuring a small computing lab to be dual-boot
Windows/Linux (of whichever flavour) is a viable option.

  On the other hand, should you wish to get kids into Linux, you
needn't necessarily have Linux running on every box. One of the
first year modules here at UWA (or PCA, if you wish) introduces
UNIX-style operating systems as part of it. Instead of having a lab
with 70-odd Linux boxes, we have a central Linux box, and have an
x-windows client on pretty much every uni PC, and on the whole, the
system works quite nicely.

  As for security - give all the kids generic 'user' accounts, have a
fairly random root password, and there's very little damage that the
kids can inflict on the system. It works for me :)

  My 2 cents, anyways.

-Jon

Rob said:

> I think all of us are interested if anyone has ideas.  I would like
> to set up an after school club to encourage the kids, but I'd need a
> room of PC's and I'm not confident/competent enough to set them up
> suitably so the kid's couldn't scramble them and I'd need to
> convince the Headmaster of the benefits of a non-MS suite too.

---------------------
http://www.jonpearse.net - http://users.aber.ac.uk/jnp2
       jon@jonpearse.net - jnp2@aber.ac.uk

Some people come into our lives and quickly go. Some stay for a while
and leave footprints on our hearts. And we are never, ever the same.