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The Linux distillery Linux netbooks look likely to save Australian government education election promise
The Linux distillery Linux netbooks look likely to save Australian government education election promise | Linux netbooks look likely to save Australian government education election promise |
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| by David M Williams | |
| Wednesday, 03 December 2008 | |
      
One of the most notable promises by Kevin Rudd in the lead up to his 2007 election victory was the announcement that a Rudd government would provide high school students nationwide with laptops to assist with their education. While it seems most of the voting public regarded the news well, the various state governments – who oversee the implementation of secondary education within their own state – have not been so content to take the message on face value. Discontent has arisen over just how much the plan costs, with Rudd’s advisers having apparently underestimated the price of equipment let alone the ancillary costs for support and wireless and power upgrades within state schools among other items. Understandably, the states were not keen to be hit with a bill for an election promise not their own. Meanwhile, NSW is moving on with the project and thrashed out a funding deal in Commonwealth-state funding talks at the end of November. This resulted in a decision to custom-build low-cost laptops which will be issued to 197,000 senior public school students across the nation’s most populous state. DET has mandated specifications of no more than 1.75kg weight, including battery; no larger than an A4 sheet of paper; a screen size ranging from a minimum of 8.9” to a maximum of 12”; a built-in webcam; and a battery life of at least six hours under normal usage. An optical drive has been flagged optional. There is one other catch: the laptops must be $500 each, with a total of $2,245 per student to be spent on the entire rollout (leaving $1,745 to cover deployment, installation and ongoing costs.) Hardware manufacturers have been asked to provide expressions of interest by January 14th. The specs look spookily close to the current emerging market of netbooks – low priced ultra portable computing devices – and it seems most likely that, in a blow to Microsoft, a variant of Linux will be chosen as the operating system to power the units given that Linux attracts no licensing fees whatsoever and has been proven to work on low powered hardware already. There are two areas of divergence from current netbooks however: firstly, to encourage students to protect this investment the devices must be capable of personalisation in some way, whether by catering for a paper insert or having snap-on covers in different colours or some other means. Secondly, the units must only be capable of operation if a DET username and password is given. It is expected the devices will not function for any person who cannot authenticate themself in this way and this feature must be protected from circumvention (by reformatting and installing a different operating system, for instance.) It will be interesting to see the winning bid early next year, and whether the other states will follow suit.
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