KDE Desktops For 52 Million Students In Brazil

An anonymous reader writes "Mauricio Piacentini writes about a deployment of systems running Linux and KDE in Brazil's schools; some 52 million students are to be served by this initiative. 'What is interesting about this project is that it not only provides infrastructure (computers and net connectivity) but also open content to students in public schools. The software installed on these systems is "Linux Educacional 2.0," a very clean Debian-based distribution, with KDE 3.5, KDE-Edu, KDE-Games, and some tools developed by the project.' The distro comes in Portuguese only at this time." quarterbuck notes that Linux is making other inroads in the BRIC economies (Brazil-Russia-India-China): India and China are getting a custom-designed Ubuntu laptop from Dell, and Russia is making their own Ubuntu laptop this year.

Re:Excellent!

[abigor]

Actually, it's only around 825 000 installs (55 000 labs * 15 "access points" per lab) serving several tens of millions of students. It's still a lot, but not as huge as one install per student.

Re:Building a new PC vs. switching

[Hadlock]

I've had really good luck with intel brand motherboards. Other than futzing about with an eithernet driver on a 7.x version of ubuntu (works in most recent version), intel has pretty good driver support, and the boards exceedingly rarely fail. Price/features are competitive with other name brand boards like Asus.

Re:Excellent!

[xSacha]

There is a huge take up of linux in schools now. I heard about some very large install base but forgot where. Heck, there are even doing it here in Melbourne, Australia: http://freesoftnews.com/archives/7184 [freesoftnews.com] (13th April, 2008)! Problem with those estimates is they they extrapolate linearly. I think the growth is exponentially increasing -- especially with this hunk of rubbish called vista.

Re:If this was not Linux or F/OSS

[mhall119]

What Microsoft has done in the past is offer to pay for the cost of "upgrading" to Windows. This covered not only the license cost, but also the cost of manual labor, which was always billed at well above the going rate for the location. Basically they say: "If you want to switch your computers to Windows, we'll give you a free license plus give you $100 per PC to cover the cost of labor to install it.", when the labor costs about $1 per PC. Who can pass up such a deal?

Re:Building a new PC vs. switching

[Hadlock]

Last time I checked Laserjet IIs have been supported since linux's conception. They go for less than $100 and often have the eithernet adapter added already. That printer will probably outlive your children. Dropped mine from 5' up on it's corner onto concrete and still runs like a champ.

Re:Building a new PC vs. switching

[indifferent children]

I'd just like a $200-$300 laser printer on the network, from the printer compatibility lists I've found there isn't one.

I run a Brother 5250dn on my home network, with no problems printing from linux or Windows. My mother runs one of the cheap ($100) Brother lasers (no duplexing) on her home network, and prints from linux with no trouble. Even the setup was a breeze; the CUPS configuration GUI found the printer, and suggested the correct driver. I was shocked at how seamless this was.