School districts serve up lessons in Linux

Windows may boast the lion's share of the desktop education market, but the economic and technical benefits of open source software has seen many schools and education institutions implement various flavors of Linux across their desktops and server back-ends.

In a two-part series, Computerworld investigates the role of Linux and open source software in education institutions in Australia and North America. In this, Part 1, Computerworld spoke with the technology coordinator and network support technician from two large school districts in Canada and the US for whom Linux and other open source software is the plat du jour on the education menu.

British Columbia's School District #73 opts for Debian Linux

Kamloops Thompson School District #73 is comprised of 55 elementary and secondary schools in British Columbia, Canada. The district opted for a majority of open source software as it is easier to maintain and in their experience offers better access to support.

Approximately 30-60 diskless Linux workstations are used in the computer labs and libraries of every school in the district, in addition to 2-5 Windows workstations in special needs rooms. The largest Linux implementation is running close to 200 diskless clients in a single school.

The district's elementary schools were the first to receive modified LTSP computers which initially ran on Red Hat. In mid 2006 it moved over to Debian because it is significantly easier to keep up-to-date.

The district completely rebuilt its server model for the high schools, starting at Barriere Secondary School where students, teachers and office admin staff switched to diskless Linux desktops.

"It was successful and the rest of the schools started lining up to get the new Linux system. Now the elementary schools are moving to Linux as well. The image is based on Debian because the deb packaging system makes it very easy to upgrade the software," said Dean Montgomery, network support technician and programmer for District #73.

"Diskless only requires updating the server and the entire school gets the update. I can also cluster the servers and issue the update. In 15 minutes I can update OpenOffice on thousands of diskless workstations. This beats ghosting Windows hard drives," he said.

Montgomery said the district uses considerably more open source than proprietary software.

"We get better support with open source software: online wikis, forums, mailing lists etc are much faster and better to get support than phoning up Microsoft and listening to someone read off answers from flash cards."

The elementary and secondary schools in District #73 utilize a range of software tailored to the kids' ages and learning levels.

Montgomery said the youngest students particularly enjoy Tux Paint, Web apps tailored for younger kids, Gcompris and the Supertux game. Intermediate level students favor Web apps, OpenOffice, Tuxmath, Supertux, Pingus, Tux Racer, and playing with the look and feel of their desktop environment - KDE. The secondary students also enjoy tweaking KDE, as well as using OpenOffice, drafting, art, multimedia and Web applications.

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