Hi All, As a Linux novice I hope people don't mind me weighing into this debate.
I am the Head Teacher of Industrial Arts at Cabramatta High School. I am one of 4 Novell Network "administrators" at the school, and by administrators I mean I have admin rights to do odd jobs on the network, I am not a network engineer. We have one permanent Linux box at school, an Optima P4 running Mandrake 7.1 using Squid as our proxy server. I am a big believer in OSS and I ran SuSE Linux 7.3 on my work computer for 4 months and at home for 7 months. And lately I have been playing with Corel Linux. It was a steep learning curve but I ended up running XP simply because the education department has made schools more and more reliant on M$. By giving each school a site licence for their latest operating system M$ is insuring students and teachers are constantly using Windows. They also have a deal with MS Office where teachers are free to install the Office suite on their home machine while ever they are employed by DET. This gives all teacher a "legal" version of the very expensive MS Office. By doing this MS ensures that teacher's documents are all created using MS products. Now when I was running Linux it created great problems with sharing documents as each file had to be converted back to MS Word format and at times formatting could be lost. The thing that frustrates me is a lot of taxpayer dollars are spent on this site licence for teachers and schools. At the start of this term I ran a Computer Troubleshooting course for teachers who get stuck when their MS box (surprise surprise) freezes, or they can't print. I was quite frankly amazed at how lacking some teachers are in their knowledge of computers. And this is using MS Win 98 which is pretty well known. Linux would be a steep learning curve indeed. We have enough trouble getting students and staff (sadly) to log into the Novell 4.11 Network with a nice GUI client, let alone using IPX interface followed by ncpfs as I was doing with SuSE. Although apparently Novell 6 has no need for clients anymore. However, there must be agitation for Linux in schools. Students and staff must be made aware that their are viable alternatives to MS Windows. Schools should be good place to widen the knowledge base when people are young and not as close minded as they will be later in life. Mind you not many students have shown a willing ness to try Linux in my room. That said I would happily involve myself in promoting Linux in schools. While I am certainly no expert with Linux I am the most experienced Linux user at my school (not hard)(this is including the Computing teachers who know of Linux but show little interest), and I am looking at it from a teachers perspective. It is essential that schools start to expose students (and staff) to a wider variety of OS and make students aware that MS is not the end all be all of the computing world. Jeff if I can help SLUG in anyway I would be happy to. Best to all Paul Copeland -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
