Linux Desktops in New Zealand Schools 280
nigelr writes "The New Zealand Ministry of Education has signed a deal with Novell New Zealand to provide SUSE Linux desktop licenses in schools. The article claims that while the price for a desktop license now matches what Microsoft charge, the new deal will significantly reduce the over all cost due to reduced charges for existing Novell products used in schools around the country."
Additional Coverage (Score:5, Interesting)
http://www.nbr.co.nz/home/column_article.asp?id=12 417&cid=3 [nbr.co.nz]
My take - I'm a student at Perth, Western Australia. My school recently got a whole bunch of iMac G5's, and Panther, and they are a nice set of machines. I run a heavily customized ubuntu/Gnome 2.10 setup at home and I would have to say that OS X is all that it's cracked up to be. It has a great interface and file/folder management system (finder), is stable, and seems to be easy to administrate (given that the sysadmins seem to do little work :D).
It's a great choice for a school desktop, due to it's ease of use and solid support base. I use Linux at home and prefer it's data management capabilities, but there will always be a place for OS X in my heart.
At least until the GNOME team creates an expose-like function
A step in the right direction (Score:4, Interesting)
Similar thign happening n the UK (Score:5, Interesting)
Times Educational Suppliment ran it a few weeks ago. You needed the paper version for the full article but this is a good summary and primer: http://www.tes.co.uk/2094985 [tes.co.uk]
Now... Can everyone who has kids in the UK start asking the teachers about this at their next school visit?
It's a pretty well known fact that if you TEACH *CHILDREN* to use Linux and not Windows from the start, it will filter up through the years and (with any luck) become the system of choice in the home too... Then the last 'bastion' will be industry... and with 1000's of up and coming children leaving schools with skills fully developed in Linux, the old excuse of 'training' kinda starts working against Microsoft. 'Cause none of the kids use it (nor want to). It's the same trick Microsoft used (Free O/S etc for schools).
Hope I haven't failed to explain in enough detail all of this, and you can all 'join the dots' and see where this might be going.
So... Start hassling your teachers NOW. I personally *am* getting involved in a new school to get all their computers on Linux from the start. When it opens in September.
If you're *serious* about wanting to see a less monopolostic computing environment, but don't know where you should put your effort in to help... This is the place... IMO
Re:A step in the right direction (Score:4, Interesting)
The parent is bang on here. I can't say anything for how the system works in New Zealand, but I do recall my days as a high school student in Alberta, Canada. In my high school, the technical support staff were not permanent staff working at the high school -- heck, they weren't even government employees. They were simply tech support guys from a local company that were hired as the need arose to come into the school and fix up problems.
So, you have to remember -- each tech problem == cost to the school. Hence, if the schools can get a distro that offers tech support as part of its one-time up-front charge, this could translate into savings for the schools (especially during the first year or two, when the transition from Windows to Linux is being made -- quite frankly, no matter how easy different distros try to make that transition, there are always bumps that show up, where your average school librarian will need tech support help!)
This price comes from where....? (Score:3, Interesting)
This is a strange statement, due to TFA later saying the following:
The ministry won't comment on the cost of the contract.
Further investigation to this shows the following server costs from Novell's site:
http://www.novell.com/products/linuxenterpriseser
These are all non-haggled prices, too. There is nothing on there for $99, and I wouldn't think that they would be buying new servers just to change over the OS. Elseware I saw that these prices are supposed to include one year of matenence as well. Either I really missed something, or there is a flaw in Mr. Schwarz's journalism. Anybody have any insite into this little paradox?
Re:Additional Coverage (Score:1, Interesting)
It's odd how everyone running a commercial CSS OS keeps saying "well, until $OSS_OS gets $FUNCTION, it won't be ready for the desktop", when $FUNCTION is only available with the most recent versions of their fav OS. It never seems to mean that no OS was ready for the desktop before then...
SuSe, why not? (Score:4, Interesting)
I guess the point here is that instead of having a solid Debian or a powerful Gentoo GNU/Linux, institution, companies, schools, prefer to have technical assistance and a commercial product in general, which will then be open source.
Do not forget that together with the SuSe package (that I do not really like myself) it comes a very well organized guide oriented for that distribution in particular, plus they have a phone number to call if they want professional help.
On the other hand, if the system adminnistrator was good enough to do everything in his own, he could have install e Debian through the whole netowrk, asking help to the community when needed. But that doesn't happen often, so you get these commercial packages.
I do not think that this is a problem, as long as it is Linux and not some creepy linux-similar distribution with tons of closed source application is fine to me.
RegardsRe:Bugger! (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Isn't the point (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Isn't the point (Score:5, Interesting)
As for the DMCA - the mechanism by which I'm guessing you think that works - content providers DRM their files and then don't license open source developers to write programs that can read it - depends on a few things:
1)US judges ruling that cracking a DRMed media file for the purposes of fair use and/or interoperability is against the DMCA (though the DMCA explicitly says otherwise)
2)Proprietary Linux/Apple companies NOT being licensed to write DRM-capable media players
3)The Disneys and RIAAs of this world still retaining their stranglehold on the mass entertainment media in the face of competition from random people on the internet and/or piracy.
4)Consumers being sheeplike enough and malleable to upgrade all their DVDs and CDs to the digital video/audio format of the month, whenever the content providers demand.
5)The DMCA, or something like it, being extended to the 96% of the population of the world to which it doesn't currently apply
It's emininently possible that all of these things might occur, so you could well be right, but it's not a foregone conclusion - I reckon patent lockups on internet servers, clients and protocols, (making using Linux a jarring experience compared to Windows) is a bigger portion of the threat meself.
But time will tell.
Re:Isn't the point (Score:1, Interesting)
I mean, Microsoft have to put much more resources into os development than Novel/SuSE. Do they make money by selling licenses so cheap and giving support?
Re:Perhaps it more like Trancendental Meditation (Score:3, Interesting)
Novell are pretty nice people to work with in a business context -- they understand taking care of their customers, and are big enough to have someone local pretty much wherever you are, have influence with vendors who need influencing, and so forth. They certainly understand the customer-centric thing better than Red Hat does, though I've never dealt with Canonical comercially so I can't comment on them in a business context.
(Not relevant for the school district necesarily, but being one of the 2 linux distros Oracle will actually officially support is a pretty darned big selling point too).
Ignorance only lasts a little while (Score:3, Interesting)
Bill G. had one chance to pull the wool over people's eyes, and now the evidence is in front of everybody.
So the GP is right. Either Microsoft throws off the Bill & Steve act, or Microsoft gets plowed into the ground in the next five to ten years as the kids who know _why_ their parent's boxes are full of malware grow up.
And that's not counting the people outside the US and Japan who haven't become numb by constant exposure to MSWindows, who expect computing equipment to actually meet spec.
Re:Teacher!...leave the kids alone (Score:3, Interesting)
What applications? Which job?
Superior by what criteria?
Superior for what purpose?
Superior according to whom?
Vastly by what scale of measurement?
If you think you have a point, support it!
It's rarely sound policy to make purchasing decisions based purely on adjectives and adverbs.As the GP mentioned, for the purposes of teaching general computer skills, the choice of OS is of little difference. Skills gained on OpenOffice will be readily transferrable to Office. The desktop metaphor isn't so very different that it's going to cause problems either.
And this way the kids get exposed to some alternatives to MS and don't leave school thinking computing begins and ends at Redmond. That's a good reason in its own right.
Re:Additional Coverage (Score:3, Interesting)
You know, GNOME!=GNU/Linux. I've been using X Workstations for nearly a decade now, and I've NEVER needed a 'taskbar.' Not once. Try getting away from the GNOME/KDE 'windows-alike' paradigms and try some real window managers. WindowMaker for instance. Use multiple root windows, cycle through them by clicking the paper-clip or use the root menu or the task list... you can place different windows on their own screens, yank them back into the one you're working on when necessary, switch roots or yank windows into place with a click or a keystroke... yes it takes a little work to learn a whole new paradigm, but it's well worth it.
Now I'm typing this on a Mac, and I like them, but let's be fair. The reason the Mac needs exposé is because it's lacking basic functions X Window users have had for many, many years.
No. It's not laziness. It's simply unnecessary (Score:4, Interesting)
But since the thread is talking about basic users the problem is simpler. It's not a matter of users being lazy. It a matter of the changes being unnecessary. And they're not going to do their own changes anyway, that's the job of IT support.
Face it, Win95/NT/2000/XP/2003 all have different interfaces and behaviors. It's not like dropping a new kernel or even an new OS behind KDE or Gnome: on MS-Windows everything changes. When you change from one version of MS-Windows to another, your basic users will be inconvenienced by it and not like it. Ask them in a non-threatening way, you'll find they do not like the changes in the interface, especially when they're using the computer for exactly the same tasks as before. With a linux distro, they can keep the same GUI behavior and menus -- even in many applications -- for years longer and concentrate on their work rather than learning a new interface.
So, I say again, inconvenience from upgrades is unnecessary for the basic user. Most of these basic users have a computer on their desk to write reports, letters or memos, work a spreadsheet, use e-mail, use the WWW, or print something from any of the above. There's no real reason any of that has to change so often, especially the computer's GUI and applications. In fact if the user is happy with the functionality, then same system and applications could be used indefinitely and there should be no reason to do anything other than the occasional security patch. And a patch should not affect functionality unless some unethical bastard decided to piggyback non-security related stuff into it.
As an NZ IT Technician... (Score:2, Interesting)
The educational space is very MS application specific, and I'm not joking about this.
With the MS deal having appeared first, I discovered that naturally the school I started working at has a very tight W2k3 infrastructure, based around Active Directory ( not pretty, but it does work when you find out all the undocumented "features" ). Breaking this structure down to work with Linux boxes is currently not an option, I'd simply not be able to get clearence.
I've been trying to get Linux into the school more prominently, but with myself being the only guy with Linux system expertise this is a wee bit hard. Some of the more liberal departments are running Linux specifically for some courses, as it forces the kids to think outside the box [ The Young Enterprise course and their companies have been the benefactors of Mandrake 10.1 ].
The kids have unfortunately bypassed the command prompt stage, so they have no idea about the underlying power of any OS, let alone windows. I'm trying to train a geek squad now, but it's a bit embarrassing for them when they don't even know the dir command... does this matter some may ask? Well it certainly matters when you run 90% of the system updates at high speed through batch scripting.
Right now all schools are currently sorting out which administration packages they will use, some are fine, but most face transferring to a new system at great expense. This requires re-training and immense additional expense in the IT budget, money which does not flow into getting a Linux solution in place.
From what I read, Kirstin school currently has a 50% install base of Linux, I think it was SuSe, and they duel boot their systems for the best of both worlds. I don't have that option, they have about seven technicians for about 350 PC's ( and about 1200 student laptops ), I am one head technician dealing with roughly 450 PC's, and roughly 70 Laptops. I simply cannot train everyone to be able to effectively use it.
However, it's not all doom and gloom, I'm not one to run away from a challenge, and this looks suitably difficult to implement. There is nothing more boring than having everything running smoothly; the kids provide ample entertainment with destroyed PC's and other miscellaneous problems, something which attracted me to the area I work in today [ oh, and lets not even begin people and kids bringing in PC's infected with spyware + viruses ].
Regards,
Nuke Bloodaxe.
Re:Isn't the point (Score:3, Interesting)
Anyway contracted support for linux installations can be purchased from any number of companies and the great thing is that, unlike with windows sites, support companies have the possibility of fixing bugs (if not necessarily the skill).
Re:Isn't the point (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually he is adding something of "distinguishable" value to message boards. Since this is a written communication medium, the poor grammer and spelling often exhibited by posters makes that purpose much more difficult pursue.
While I understand that sometimes the person in question is from a non english speaking country and that english is a second, or third, language, my guess is that is rarely the case. I think most of the time the poster is just ignorant. I mean ignorant in the literal form, not as an insult. (Although I am sure the ignoramus in question would take this as an insult, and thats fine.)
Sure, someone will probably find some small grammatical error in this post, as the Slashmob often will. This will in no way change my point.
People are idiots. (Ok, that one was purely for insult purposes, so sue me
P.S. I am aware that I am posting in response to an AC, one who will likely never see this response, and if they did would likely just dismiss it out of hand.
What about the apps? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Isn't the point (Score:4, Interesting)