Hi, I usually just lurk here, but I have to reply to this. I'm a year 10 student who got his craptop last year, and I hate to be a killjoy, but these things are _hard_ to do absolutely anything with, including installing another OS on ( and you run the risk of getting into *a lot* of trouble if you do so, that said, the only year that had people doing this was the current year 11 because their laptops were easy to dissassemble to get the hard drive out; my year and this year's laptops have hard drives phyisically in a secure location ). The BIOS has a password that prevents one from changing the boot order. You run as a butchered guest account that cannot run executables anywhere but in the usual Windows directories ( eg C:\Program Files and C:Windows. Before the last update, one could copy your own programs to C:\Program Files\Adobe\Photoshop Elements somethingorrather\Presets ( or C:\Windows\Tasks among others ) and run them from there, but now you cannot ).
Basically, these things are a dead end. For educational purposes, they fail miserably mostly because they are extremely slow, clumsy to use and generally the only use these get are by naiive teachers and by lazy teachers who would rather have most of a class playing crappy Flash games on crappy laptops instead of teaching a class. I have a few friends in year 11 who got Ubuntu running off of their laptops HDD or off of a USB, but unfortunately, it is orders of magnitudes easier to do this with the first batch ( their batch ) of laptops than it is with the later ones. Mike ( mikeplus64 on #slug ). PS I'm a complete noob to mailing lists so I'm probably sending this wrong, sorry. On Tue, Mar 8, 2011 at 8:59 AM, Jon Jermey <[email protected]> wrote: > Last night I went to an information evening at my daughter's high school > about the new laptops which students are to be given. This is the third year > of the initiative and details of the current batch of laptops can be found > here: http://tinyurl.com/4zdzuyx . They have the usual complement of > Microsoft and Adobe software, which cannot be removed or bypassed. And the > promotional video is hilarious. > > What made me sit up and listen, though, was the announcement that when > students leave school they get to keep the laptop, but all the software is > wiped including the OS. It occurred to me that this is a great opportunity > for Linux. If we can get a message to Year 12 students early in the year > telling them that open source software is available for free to replace > Windows and their wiped Microsoft and Adobe applications, then a fair > proportion of them might be willing to give it a try. The laptops don't have > CD drives, so the software would have to be distributed on bootable USB > sticks or SD cards. Maybe we could even give them away. > > I don't have any contact with high schools other than having a daughter at > one, so other people may have a better idea how to go about this. Maybe > somebody already is. (Is there a Year 12 mailing list?) By my calculations > the first cohort to receive laptops should be finishing Year 12 about > halfway through 2012. > > Of course this assumes that policies will continue in their current state. > > Jon. > --------- > Indexing * Proofreading * Software consultancy and training * Linux > -- > SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ > Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html > -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
