High School Students Develop Linux Imaging and Help Desk Software 116
An anonymous reader writes "A Pennsylvania school district is going Linux and building an open source high school with the help of student technology apprentices. As part of a 1:1 laptop learning program, 1725 high school students at Penn Manor School District are receiving new laptops running Ubuntu and open source software exclusively. Central to the program is a student help desk where student programmers created a Linux multicast imaging system titled Fast Linux Deployment Toolkit. The district posted pictures of the imaging process in action. Working alongside school IT staff, students also developed help desk software and other programs in support of the 1:1 student laptop program. The student tech apprentices also provide peer support for fellow students."
Meanwhile.... (Score:4, Funny)
Somewhere in an office in Redmond, chairs are being thrown.
Re:Meanwhile.... (Score:5, Funny)
I hear that since Ballmer has been given the boot he's switched back to barrels again.
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Somewhere, a Italian plumber is looking for his hammer...
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Donkey Kong! Wait, who is Mario and Pauline then? :P
Re:GH link (Score:5, Informative)
This is a typo in the story posting and I contacted
What about the windows only software? and office? (Score:4, Interesting)
In schools there is quite a bit of windows only stuff (part why macs are not as big in schools as they used to be) but the big part is lack of office on Linux and open office does not fully work with office files.
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For me the problem is always the other way around. Microsoft Office doesn't work well with .od? files.
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I graduated from college recently. I've never even owned office, or used open office. I've been fine with basic rtf when I need formatting, or Latex for a couple things where that was the encouraged approach.
Mostly I've needed to read PDFs (Ick!). The few word documents I had to open that have complex formatting crap were just things I hard to read, and thus broken formatting was fine. TextEdit or Google Docs worked well enough.
Really, whats office for? Formatting text? Thats not an important part of my lif
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I graduated from grad school recently (PhD in physics), also without touching Microsoft Office. I did use Microsoft Word on Mac a tiny bit, in versions that pre-dated Windows; but, by the time I was doing anything sophisticated enough to need more than a plain .txt editor, I was using LaTeX (via LyX). So, I can't answer what Office is for --- neither I, nor most of my colleagues, have any need for it (despite generating substantial quantities of documents requiring sophisticated typesetting). Formatting te
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It's nice that you took the hard way, but not everyone wants to do that. Most people want to focus on their degree and not trying to figure out how to make their computer do what they want it to do.
Re:What about the windows only software? and offic (Score:4, Interesting)
And you think Word does that? If you are going to write a doctoral thesis in Word, then you have my pity starting out. With LaTeX, you have a formatting area at the front, your references in a nice separate bibliography file, and most of your document is just the text you have written. Setting up a master document that includes separate documents for each chapter, allowing cross-referencing, a single bibliography, and a table of contents is possible in Word, but it's dead simple in LaTeX.
Setting it up in the first place may take a little looking into, but building a master document in Word isn't intuitive either. If it takes more than a day to get your basic file structure sorted, then you aren't trying. It's three or four years of your life that you will be writing this thing. If the format guidelines change during that time, you can fix it in one place (in fact, some procrastinating student will probably build a fresh style file to share so you don't even need to fix it yourself). How long would it take you in Word to change the margins or line-spacing for a multi-chapter document? What about copying formatted text from a research paper you just finished, keeping all the figure references and citations, but in your university format instead of the journal publisher's?
I'm in business now, and use Word and Excel regularly because that's the de facto standard. Every time I need to re-format anything in Word I wish I just had to edit LaTeX instead. It's just simpler. In the long run, it will save you time and agony.
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they teach word first year as a required course, not open libre whatever it wants to be this month
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Well, you generalize way too much - maybe they do where YOU live/study.. they sure as hell did not where I went to university / high school..
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must be old cause they have been doing it world wide for at least 15 years if not 20
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At work, I was later able to switch release note generation from Word to LaTeX, which was much easier to script (extract change logs from the vcs, match with some extracts from the error database and test results etc, feed a database with release specific information [which b
Re:What about the windows only software? and offic (Score:4, Insightful)
Which is why they teach LaTeX.
If you want to spend 20% of your effort on formatting my school suggests using Word.
If you want to spend 5% on your formatting and 95% on your content you use LaTeX.
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so you never touched office, cept when you touched office
stfu
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I graduated from grad school recently (PhD in physics), also without touching Microsoft Office. I did use Microsoft Word on Mac a tiny bit, in versions that pre-dated Windows; but, by the time I was doing anything sophisticated enough to need more than a plain .txt editor, I was using LaTeX (via LyX).
Really? Which particular versions are you referring to? Anyway, Office != Word, and as much as I hate storing data in Excel files, a lot of basic things are just much easier in Excel ("real" data and complex manipulation are a different thing, obviously). Then there's Powerpoint, which is actually pretty good for group presentations, teaching, etc, as well as OneNote, another fantastic tool (the enterprise features of office, such as Outlook/Exchange, I'm not particularly impressed with, but I can see many
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Well I engineer enterprise grade software, and this wouldn't be at all possible if there was no MS-Office, and hence no VBA.
Enterprise grade software and VBA is a contradiction. I'm sure you write some kind of software, and I'm sure somebody somewhere hobbles along with it, but please don't call VBA "enterprise grade".
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Or did you honestly think those ATMs and power plant control systems would autostart and background MS-office for no reason?
Now you know.
LaTeX and rtf are fine, until EDIT with Others (Score:1)
When it's just you producing the document in your cloister for submission to the Obscure Journal of Esoteric Research, nobody cares what tool you use. When you have to pass the document around at work and have 13 people edit different sections, it helps to have everyone be able to do it. For better or worse, MS Office is the dominant product in the real, income-producing salary paying world for most areas of commerce. So you need to be able to effectively read and write MS Office documents. If you give
Re:What about the windows only software? and offic (Score:5, Interesting)
What about viruses, anti viruses, malware and antimalware? Novell network compatibility? Flash and Silverlight, IE and Exchange compatibility - and persistent mutual incompatibility? Patch Tuesday and its need to intercept updates, test against your set of mission critical apps before rolling them out and then triage and treat the inevitable undiscovered issues? Recurrent planned obsolescence? SharePoint and pirated Photoshop? Landsharks? Goblin invasion?
It appears they have chosen to operate in a domain where these problems don't exist. Good on 'em.
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And the landsharks?
Lawyers are supported like normal people, yes
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The 928 predates fancy in car computers.
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office was chosen over dozens of competitors, but somehow its a problem when od files are not the norm, when 99% of the world doesn't use them
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you've never tried opening an .xlsx file from 2014 in 2007 or earlier have you? The formatting, colors, margins and everything else is fucked up if you can even open the file. I get Word and Excel files from folks who're using the latest greatest from MS and many times they're fucked up as I'm only using 2007 and am not going out and upgrade for no good reason. Hell I'm moving all of my older files to RTF as it's the only one other then PDF that I can ensure is cross platform.
Re:What about the windows only software? and offic (Score:5, Insightful)
I look at it the other way. Microsoft products do not fully work with open formats. Public institutions really should be using open formats.
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And yet the rest of the world could care less about open formats.
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Open Office and Libre Office *really* need the Excel equivalent (Calc) to be able to print better (like zooming, fit to page, select a range).
How about having a chart as a sheet to itself? Has either project ever gotten around to that?
Polynomial regression trendlines? Passing an entire column as a range to a function (e.g. SUM(A:A) rather than SUM(A1:A1195756262959999287362))?
Calc makes me a Sad Panda.
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If you're going to be summing up to A1195756262959999287362, then you shouldn't be using Calc. Or Excel. Learn a proper programming language for data analysis --- there are great tools in everything from Python to C, plus specialized mathematical/statistical environments like R, Octave, or Maxima. Spreadsheets of any variety are a poor choice for serious work; once you go beyond adding a couple dozen numbers, you'll be wasting more time fighting against the inherent shortcomings of spreadsheets than the lea
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Thanks. I already use R as appropriate. Your overly generalized comment about spreadsheets being inappropriate will be taken under advisement.
The satire of the row offset is based on the fact that once there is enough data that there are rows offscreen, *I don't want to have to care* what the final row in the data is... I want to apply the function to the entire column. Excel makes this easy with full column references like B:B, whereas with Calc one has to come up with a guess for a final row number that w
Javelin solved most of these, in 1984 (Score:2)
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Try a different print driver (Score:2)
I suggest try libre/openoffice with a different printer, or on a Mac or linux and that problem will most likely go away.
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And please don't say something like "I should switch employers" or something unhelpful like that.
Re:What about the windows only software? and offic (Score:4, Insightful)
Link to a document that does not open correctly in up to date Open/Libreoffice.
It is harder than you think. It has been on par for a while now.
And if the entire school uses it then there is no Office anyway.
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I don't thing the full back office work / school district is windows free / outside stuff needs office files.
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outside stuff needs office files
Then as OP requested, please link to a file that cannot be opened in Open/Libreoffice.
In my experience, the import filters have been steadily improving to the point where its rare to have a problem with MSO files any more. If you have evidence otherwise, please produce it.
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Like I said, care to share one of the documents? (Redact personal info if needed)
I've never actually seen a table issue since they are so similar to HTML tables these days.
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Documents with "shared" access on network drives do not open properly. The render correctly, but LibreOffice will remove the shared status causing the next person to open it to lock the file and have it no longer shared.
That's the only situation I've found, but it is a pretty big deal at my office. I use LibreOffice everywhere except there.
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Got a link for a example?
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If the school's going to make a commitment to Linux, Open Office is usually compatible enough. Yes, you can probably build a spreadsheet or word doc that doesn't render correctly on OpenOffice, but you don't need to do that if you have people doing most of their new documents in open software.
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It works well enough. I work for a city that has been using Linux exclusively for many years and between WordPerfect, OpenOffice, and LibreOffice shit gets done just fine. Sure we have the occasional formatting problem but it's better to rack up some small help desk charges here and there than shell out for a ton of M$ Office licenses (and Windows licenses....and Windows Server licenses....)
new Word won't open old Word files, Ooffice do (Score:2)
My mother was upset when her new copy of Word wouldn't open her Word files that are so important to her like her will, all of the family recipes, etc. She feared that she had lost everything.
I opened them in LibreOffice with no problems at all. In this respect, older files, Word is the one program that is not compatible with Word. OpenOffice/ LibreOffice can handle older Word documents; Word cannot.
Does this image system do UEFI? Clonezilla does (Score:5, Informative)
Does this image system do UEFI? Clonezilla does
Clonezilla also can do Multicast as well as PXE and Wake-on-LAN
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Apparently their system works with the hardware they have. They don't have to borrow trouble. In the future they can choose hardware that works with it.
My quick reflex was to ask "whar Clonezilla" too. I use cz to image systems by the thousand and ltsp to netboot guest thin clients. They are both great stuff. Apparently they considered the lessons Clonezilla gave and leapt from there. Don't forget that as useful as clonezilla is the primary purpose is to image supercomputer nodes, not end-user laptop
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yay for common sense in education (Score:4, Insightful)
so often it seems the answer is just "throw some money at it, give the little shits an iPad" with no real
any idiot can use a computer for lowly office grunt work. Basically, that is to technology what working at McDonald's is to culinary training.
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Great part is because it is open source they will learn to program, and not have a few students being exploited be there closed software overlords {Um hmmm MS, Apple]. The will be able to share and hopefully be open minded enough to accept any criticism or help in being able to better there programming, and in turn add to the community him/herself...
Kudos to the school!!!!!
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Windows: made by 40-year-olds with the minds of teens, for corporate drones with the minds of demented hamsters. That's why it's broken.
THAT'S education (Score:5, Interesting)
Kudos to that school's admin staff. This is a real educational experience. You can't beat hands-on. Plus the students are engaged in the operation of their school; IOW they have some ownership or at least a partnership.
I agree with the comments re compatibility. MS is the odd-man-out. They've been forcing their proprietary stuff on the world for too long. And innovation has been stunted as a result of their dominance. My peers and I witnessed time and again in the 80's when someone would come out with a great idea and then MS would buy them and the great idea would disappear so there would be no competition in the marketplace.
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open office does not fully work with office files
To be more specific, that comment must be with re to macros because I've never had any problems and I still don't.
I did a lot of support work for a one of the divisions of a large, world-wide corporation. One of the things I did was edit/fix Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files. I pulled the files into OpenOffice, fixed all the formatting, spelling, grammar, calculation, and punctuation mistakes and then exported the files back to the appropriate MS Office file format. Nobody knew and I always received compliments re how nice everything looked. As a matter of fact, I did most of that work on a Mac and later on Linux. And, of course, that corporation was Windows only.
It still brings a smile to my face. They were paying huge sums of money for their licenses and here I was using an open-source solution to fix all their problems.
which of the five Word formats is "the one"? (Score:2)
cause this one and only special no one else can use format sure as fuck has been used on every office suite since the late 80's
Which of the five MS Word formats is "the one"? .doc file f
Different versions of Word have used first textual formats similar to rtf, then binary OLE containers, and now XML. As you surely know if you've used Word much, the product is not backwards compatible. Word 2003 will not properly display a Word 6.0 document. OpenOffice does a much better job rendering the older Word files.
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That's a fair and very interesting question. It raises a valid point. MS does have a variety of word processing file formats, don't they?
In the case I described it was doc, xls, and ppt.
.doc could be any of four different formats (Score:2)
> In the case I described it was doc, xls, and ppt
That excludes .docx xml format, leaving the other four formats Word has used. The earlier textual formats, which used a .doc extension, have virtually nothing in common with the several OLE based binary formats, which also used a .doc naming extension.
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Obviously you don't know what "proprietary" means. Just because other suites have allowed the export of docs in an MS format (even a commonly recognized format) does not change the fact that it's PROPRIETARY.
Most schools that teach computing can not pull (Score:1)
Sooo frustrating! (Score:4, Interesting)
There has been a powerful infrastructure almost ready to do this (plus much more) available for ages : A GUI + LDAP based web interface called GOsa [gonicus.de] and a more active fork called FusionDirectory [fusiondirectory.org]. It does almost everything, but noone has pulled the trigger on an important piece to allow imaging and/or OS installation - this requires a plugin for their messaging daemon. This messaging daemon is either called GOsa-si, or Argonaut in the two projects respectively). This has worked in the past... though bitrot and lack of interest has broken that particular piece.
Right now it allows GUI administration of DNS, DHCP, Samba, your choice of SMTP and POP/IMAP daemons, multiple groupware, Squid, rSyslog, Asterisk, Nagios and much more... with the ability to extend the interface via plugins. If/when the messaging daemon bits get completed it will be able to deploy clients and servers... using FAI/puppet for Linux and OPSI for MS. This HAS worked in the past, and I even believe the Munich Linux project may have had this working for years - but they've only packaged it for their own distro.
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Holy attack surface, Bat Man!
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It's about time (Score:5, Insightful)
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Sorry, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation push for charter schools (along with friendly help from the Waltons of Walmart, et al.) --- to destroy the public schools infrastructure --- is not going to be promoting Free Software in the new generation of corporate-controlled indoctrination --- excuse me, "education" --- centers.
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these kids are shooting videos of common "i cant facebooks" problems, not exactly writing anything, let alone of some value
I'd have stayed in school (Score:3)
The people that point out existing technologically superior software solutions are being unforgivably obtuse.
Of course there are existing open source and commercial options out there, that make this high school student implemented project technologically obsolete; there are also existing craftspeople and professionally run woodworking shops that make the products in wood shop class obsolete, as well as many tailors, restaurants, fashion schools, and culinary schools that crush what home-ec classes teach... Not to mention the many science-oriented-businesses with technology and products that dwarf the technology that you would find at a high school science fair. See it for what it is: a learning experience!!
If there was some alternate dimension where I had had a chance to work on a project like this in high school, I probably would not have gotten kicked out for boredom fueled truancy, and would have worked my way into a decent comp-sci program at a college rather than working my way up in my 20s through shitty tech support and lower level IT positions... I Would have been making my current, totally decent software dev salary YEARS before I actually earned it in this dimension.
permanent computer skills (Score:1)
This is a good move for the children. It goes beyond IT education and will impact their lives with very good outcomes.
Since i switched to linux in 2005 all the command line skills and fundamental understanding of the OS and how it works has changed very little. Hence no new UI rewrite can hurt my productivity. Linux is a 'you have to learn it not guess it' system and taking the time to learn regular expressions, a bit of bash and back in the day deal with package management problems or compile your own driv
Um.. and? (Score:2)
So the kids created 'yet another lame management tool'.. *yawn*
The community needs to stop re-inventing the wheel and work on improving existing ones. Hard to take over the world when your car is always on blocks.
Does it run Office.... (Score:1)
In "Enterprise IT" most of your communication will be done through e-mail or a ticket management system... you may have to read some documentation in PDF format... or WORD but guess what... it will be some text about application footprint/interfaces/configurat
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I have to disagree, as regardless of what you personally like or dislike, MSO is still prevalent in the business world and if you are going to be in IT and actually have a job, you have to at least have a clue of what your future companies end users are working with. Once ( if ) you grow up and get out in the real world, you will find out how things actually work out there. .
Hell, most likely you will start working the help desk and supporting it, to prove you have skills.. so better suck it up, and shut u
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In any large organization i have worked for, if all you did is blow the customer off and call for a reload because they asked how to do something simple in MSO, you would not be there the next day. ( this would apply to both level 1 and higher levels, and in some cases you are expected to know a hell of a lot more at higher levels ). If all you do is say 'is it installed' then you are a call center robot, not a help desk.
Do you need to be at a expert level? Most often not, but a working knowledge is requi
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A typical scenario these days would be that the level 1 guy is located offshore and all he does is to capture whatever you're telling him over the phone, using the enterprise ticket management system; then assign it to the proper queue and give you a ticket nr. Then
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You either must have worked for some really nice organizations or this was a long time ago...
Still valid as of of yesterday. ( we have Saturday staff ). Been doing the IT thing for 30 years. ( not the same company all that time )
Perhaps i'm spoiled/lucky, but i haven't experienced these companies you speak of that don't care about their users ( not caring about internal staff, sure.. ) .. And sure there are always limits on how far we go, which vary from place to place, but no where near the limits you have seen apparently.
Sad really. Without the users there would be little need for IT staff in