OpenSuSE to Release Linux Distro for Educators 51
christian.einfeldt writes "The next version of openSUSE, due out in the fall, will include an add-on CD optimized for educators. According to the Education section of the openSUSE wiki, the openSUSE community sees the add-on as a way to make it easy for school administrators to create both networked systems and stand-alone desktops for teachers and students. To tailor the add-on CD to the needs of educators, the openSUSE community is asking educators and technologists to submit their software successes, applications used, and 'HOW-TOs' for writing applications and using applications. Dubbed the SLEDucator, the package collection is being included as an add-on, as opposed to a new distro or a fork."
the SLEDucator (Score:5, Insightful)
Now all we need is a similar add-on for SMBs (Score:4, Insightful)
Making tools which allow educators and people in small businesses to deploy and administer a small networked Linux environment is a great idea. And the lack of such tools is often what intimidates non-Linux-geeks from adopting Linux.
Apple called ... (Score:5, Insightful)
k12ltsp (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Good approach (Score:3, Insightful)
I've read about 1,000 variations on this sentence over the past few years, and I haven't been able to puzzle it out. Maybe I'm dense, but I've never figured out why diversity is a problem that threatens to make all our heads asplode. You don't see Baskin-Robbins cutting back to serving only vanilla and chocolate because people have avoided their store, heads dizzy with thoughts of cookies-n-cream, mint chocolate chip and the like.
I suppose computing is an inherently stressful field. (I know this first hand after spending a few years supporting desktops for some of the smartest neuroscientists in the world, who still can't organize a folder or set up a wireless network nearly as easily as they can publish a 100-page paper on brain chemistry ... if they can figure out how to get their network printer to work.) But still, in software I've always found a lack of choice to be more stressful than too much of it. This is particularly true with free operating systems. Pick one of the major ones: Ubuntu, SuSE, Fedora, RedHat, CentOS. To find out whether it works, just install it. If it runs on your hardware (which almost any major distro will) and if suits your needs (you may be able to figure this out relatively quickly), the choice is made. If the choice was RedHat Enterprise, having people tell you that Ubuntu was also a good choice doesn't diminish the choice you already made: you are not qualified to feel stress. If you decide that the cost of running RHEL is not worth it and you want to run Ubuntu, you have the freedom to switch.
Contrast with non-free software. You can buy Windows from one vendor. Ditto with OS X. And with Solaris. If you decide you don't like their terms, tough. If you want to take OS X and run it on a non-Apple machine someone donated to your school, or roll out more copies of Windows Vista than your budget allows, then you become eligible to feel stress.
Re:Apple called ... (Score:2, Insightful)
I believe the idea was that by having Apple computers in schools, when parents purchased a PC for home they would buy Apple, because that is what their kids were used to.
In reality, what happened is most people bought PCs (In the "IBM and compatible sense", so don't get pendantic) because that's what they used themselves in the workplace.