Educating Tux: case studies of Linux deployments in high schools around the world

David M Williams
Wednesday, 05 March 2008 19:38

Opinion and Analysis

Orwell were concerned for teaching quality and evaluated OpenOffice, The GIMP and other applications, finding them to meet and exceed the standards they imposed. They also felt doubly impressed that these packages could be used at home by students without any concerns of licensing violations or burdening families with software costs.

The adopted solution was a thin client one, meaning the PCs boot across the network and run Linux Terminal Server software. By using terminal services the expenditure required on workstations was drastically slashed. By making the PCs thin clients their hard drives could be removed which in turn decreased noise, power consumption and another point of failure.

Two clustered application servers drive the terminal server environment, allowing students to log in from any workstation at all and yet be at their exact same customised and individualised desktop.

This thin client approach also ensured deployment time was absolutely minimal; in fact, Orwell record the whole installation as working within a week. Had they not switched to Linux, they say, they would have had to cut back their hardware and application software spending. Instead, software licensing is now no longer a factor whatsoever.

Duplicating the experience of the previous schools, students have willingly flocked to the new platform without any difficulty. Funding is being allocated to other needy programs without the computing environment suffering. And, so far, student attempts to break the network have not been successful.

Orwell believe that had they continued the Windows route they would have required additional technicians to cope with the maintenance burden they had. Under Linux their technician has been greatly freed up and in fact the school estimates a single technician could easily administer between three and five similarly set up schools by himself or herself.

Heading over to Asia, the awful issue of money again raises its head. In the Philippines many schools cannot afford computer facilities. After the 1997 Asian financial crisis business and government began looking into open source software for the potential value it offered. At the same time, the government launched a program aiming to provide one PC for each public high school. This ultimately began in 2000 but by 2005 it was discovered many computers were not being used because nobody knew how!

Ultimately, one innovative vendor – whilst preparing tender documents to supply for 1,000 schools – proposed Fedora Linux. By this time, the funding now allowed for a server and ten desktops per school. However, the reviewers were perplexed as to why someone would give away software for free. An arduous bureaucratic process followed but finally the company was awarded the contract and delivered 10,000 computers by December 2007. In fact, they supplied an additional 3,000 computers on top too – given to a further 300 schools – because they had saved so much money by using free software.

This project is still underway and the success is yet to be measured but by all means the financial savings have been dramatic and Linux has directly contributed to making computers accessible to school students in that nation.

So, all around the world Linux is helping our educational establishments. The message about cost savings is consistent without exception. Indeed, the stories have pleasing conformity that school pupils are unfazed by non-Windows environments and in every case have embraced the platform delivered. To their credit, each school also emphasised that quality was essential in the teaching tools used. Fortunately, their standards were met by the range of FOSS software available.

However, having knowledgeable staff appears to be a contributing factor to the success or otherwise of an implementation. Those schools which are still progressing strongly were the ones where strong advocates came from inside the faculty.