Describing what happened, he wrote on a local mailing list: "I have had many discussions with the ICT people about IT in schools. Most of the specific IT subjects comprise training students in using software, mainly from Adobe and Microsoft. The staff know these programs and have prepared training materials. I have tried to argue that we should be teaching students how to do something and that the choice of tools should be part of the discussion. This fazes most teachers as they are not comfortable teaching when there are gaps in their knowledge so they stick with what they know."

Importantly, he says, he never gave up. He says Hansen decided to give the students an early start on an online learning system by implementing Moodle, an open source course management system.

Baxter says someone was paid to install and configure Moodle using XaMP on a PC which was running Windows XP. "It worked OK but fell over with any more than 20 concurrent users. That's when I arrived at the school. I talked to the tech about Linux and he was unsure but trusted me enough to give it a go. I took the box home for the weekend and moved it over to CentOS 5. Fired it up on Monday and it was humming nicely with over 250 concurrent users."

Baxter has always been a tinkerer and, from an early age, has been pulling things apart to see how they work. "I first started playing with computers at school in 1972. We used some weird thing that had a console and paper tape. That's where my interest in computers started. My mother had worked as a computer programmer at the Waite Institute in South Australia in the early 1960s and then as a statistics lecturer at RMIT.

"In the early 1980s, when one of her colleagues decided to upgrade his computer, I got the old one. It was a Dick Smith System 80. I taught myself to program in BASIC and Assembler and had a lot of fun. Over time, I upgraded to various other computers - Hitachi Peach (running CP/M), IBM PC (running MS-DOS), 286, 386 etc."

His first contact with Linux was "back in the dark ages." He says he can remember trying out MCC (MCC Interim Linux, a distribution first released by England's Manchester Computing Centre back in February 1992) and SLS (SoftLanding System Linux which was around at the same time and served as the basis for Slackware) and then buying a book on Linux written by a couple of German guys (possibly including Patrick Volkerding) that included a CD with very early (versions of) Slackware. That was the start. I enjoy tinkering so I continued. I like FOSS because you can pull it apart, tweak and use."

Baxter is an unusual character - before he took up teaching, he was a successful wine industry professional. In his own words, he has "wide experience across winemaking, wine technology, electronic control systems, winery record systems and computer systems whose major successes have come from the innovative application of technology to solve industry challenges." (Incidentally, now that he has left Kyneton, he will be returning to wine-making.)