Enquiring minds want to know - why no Linux for NSW high school laptops?

By David M Williams
Sunday, 05 April 2009 16:17

Opinion and Analysis

It comes as both a surprise and not a surprise that the New South Wales (NSW) state government chose a "safe bet" of Lenovo and Microsoft to supply many thousands of taxpayer-funded laptops to secondary school students. Was Linux ever on the short list?

An announcement was made this week that hardware vendor Lenovo and old faithful Microsoft got the deal to fulfil Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s 2007 pre-election promise to give away hundreds of thousands of laptops.

It has been a trouble-ridden path getting to this point and the turmoil demonstrates a lack of thought, planning and costing in all the election period rhetoric.

First, the states – who administer secondary education in Australia, not the federal government – wanted to know just how much the feds were putting in. They rightly pointed out a successful mass-scale deployment isn’t just a matter of buying a bunch of machines. Schools needed network infrastructure upgrades to cope, people actually had to distribute the machine and most certainly someone is going to have to fix them when things go wrong.

Obviously, state leaders didn’t want to have their budgets go into deficit to service an election promise that wasn’t theirs.

While at this time it appears the other states have stalled, the NSW government managed to thrash out a funding deal which resulted in extra funding and consequently the choice of a hardware/software bundle.

Yet, even so, the cash allocated to the project was a total of $AUD 2,245 per student. Of this, a mere $500 was apportioned to the actual laptop itself. Public servants deduced it would cost $1,745 per student to cover deployment, installation and ongoing costs.

The Department of Education (DET) then put forth a request for suppliers to quote. The stipulated specifications were a weight of no more than 1.75kg including battery, a size of no larger than an A4 sheet of paper, a screen within the range 8.9” to 12”, a built-in webcam and a battery life of at least six hours with normal usage.

Woah! Where do you get such a machine! Actually, those specs sound pretty much like the wide range of netbooks available today. In fact, I even pitched that Linux netbooks looked set to be the saviour of the Australian government’s election promise.

A stock-standard off-the-shelf netbook wouldn’t do, however. The DET request for tenders had two additional requirements both focusing on giving students a genuine sense of ownership for their equipment (and subsequently an interest in protecting it from damage!) and to deter thieves or e-Bay sellers.

Specifically, the devices required provision for personalisation in some way (like snap-on covers) and must only operate if a DET username and password is given. This latter feature, it was stated, must be protected from circumvention (such as by reformatting the hard drive.)

How well did Lenovo and Microsoft meet these requirements? And how many Linux submissions were considered?