[FSF-India] GNU/Linux in Schools

R Sai Kiran fsf-india@mail.gnu.org.in
Thu, 2 Aug 2001 10:39:01 +0530 (IST)


Hi,

	A quick intro - I'm 20 yr chap doing my 4th year Chemical Engg. at
IIT Madras. 

> This is a very important step. Probably the first thing to be done is to provide
> help for installing GNU/Linux in schools having computers already. Present

	Accept every word. The problem is, as most of you will accept, a
lack of awareness about Linux and "fundaes" in general. I was in Trichy
recently, doing my summer job in BHEL there. They use all Windows 2K
machines. I started talking with the people about trying out Linux and
they'd ask me questions like after I have Linux can I still boot into
Windows, how can there be two different OSes on the same machine, won't it
delete all my files, and worst of all, IS IT SECURE!! It took me one hour
to convince them to finally try Linux and the guys there are actually
pretty happy about it. The point is, inspite of the huge media attention
Linux is getting these days, *LOTS* of people still have no idea about it.
So, getting people to try out Linux implies that you'll have to spend
quite some time discussing the various issues in favour of Linux, get the
teachers familiarised with it, lots of patience etc. It would be great if
we could get more volunteers in this regard. I'm ready from Chennai (and
places in and around it .. I love driving :-)


> status at many places is, they just have MSWindows running and the
> "Educational Software" is MS-Office. But without an easy to use word processor,
> many won't switch over.  I use 'abiword' and find it very good.
> Another aspect is the kind of machines owned by achools. Many may have
> Pentium-I  machines still running.  RedHat 7.1 or any latest distributions are
> not going to run on it comfortably. They can run as good X-terminals. One
> good place to look for is the Linux Terminal Server Project homepage.
> www.ltsp.org.  A networked system is anyway a must in schools to have
> teacher-student interaction.

	Abiword is good. I'd actually suggest Star-Office. The nice thing
about having people start off with Star-Office is the ability to have them
save their files in native Windows formats like .doc, .ppt etc. I mean, if
a teacher has to, say, give a presentation, the machine she'd use to give
it would more probably than not, have Win on it. Until and unless they
have Linux on all machines, we'd rather not assume so. Regarding the OS
flavour, I'm pretty much in favour of LTSP. On the server, personally, I'd
say Red Hat 6.2 over 7.1. Don't aske me why ... I just find it a *LOT*
more comfortable, and definitely so for a newbie. Just a personal opinion.

	I might have made some extremely stupid/WRONG statements in
the paragraphs above. If you find something wrong, feel free to flame me
:-).

Regards,

Sai

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R Sai Kiran	http://www.che.iitm.ac.in/~ch98086