[FSF-India] GNU/Linux in Schools

Ajith Kumar fsf-india@mail.gnu.org.in
Thu, 02 Aug 2001 15:40:05 +0530


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R Sai Kiran wrote:

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

> 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 :-)
>

What you should do is write to the heads of few colleges and schools about
Free software  offering a talk and demonstration. Talk should stress more
on the philosophy of 'freedom' and demo should talk about the technical
merits. If you can rent an LCD projector and show something like 'gimp',
even the diehard Window user will have second thoughts.  If you don't talk
about the philosophy behind 'free sofware', always there will be people
trying to compare MS with GNU/Linux  by bringing out irrelevent details.
It is difficult to convince an average user about the quality and reliability of
an OS but he will easily see the 'advantage ' of having two more fonts supported
by his word processor. Anyway these are my personal *untested* opinion only.

ajith



>
> > 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
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Recursion n:
>         See Recursion
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> R Sai Kiran     http://www.che.iitm.ac.in/~ch98086
>
> _______________________________________________
> http://mail.gnu.org.in/mailman/listinfo/fsf-india

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