If you are a school already using open source, please post a short summary of what you are doing and what benefits you are getting from open source.
What have been the particular benefits and challenges?
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If you are a school already using open source, please post a short summary of what you are doing and what benefits you are getting from open source.
What have been the particular benefits and challenges?
Started off with good intentions - scuppered by one small hiccup - we'd completed "due diligence" and were assured by Capita that SIMS would be comfortable with Open Office and so we went for it.
Unfortunately - SIMS wasn't comfortable with Open Office this then affected the Head and Senior Admin Staff who showed their disatisfaction which then snowballed to classroom teachers who missed their Microsoft "Linus Blanket" - before we could blink - school purchased MS Licences and rolled back.
Be interesting to see wat the Learners do now they have a choice on their desktops - MS or OO? Will report back.
We use Xen and DRBD running on top of CentOS to run our virtual computing server "cloud". There seems to be lots of literature and sales talk regarding virtualisation at the moment (last term I was getting phone calls a couple of times a week from sales people wanting to sell us "virtualisation"), and I can't quite figure out why everyone seems so keen to spend money on it. CentOS is free and the install wizard comes complete with a tick-box option to install Xen and a bunch of other associated packages. There's nothing else to configure, Xen is ready to go as soon as CentOS is done installing.
DRBD proved a little more fiddly to get going (there's some confilct between CentOS packages, so trying to install the DRBD package knackers the Xen install), but it's easy enough when you have it figured out (I've got the documentation written down, I'll tidy it up and post it on a wiki somewhere at some point). DRBD mirrors disk volumes between physical machines, so you can have a copy of your entire harddrive in case one server explodes or whatever. This, to my mind, eliminates the need for expensive SAN technology (which is mainly what the sales people are trying to sell you when they ring up saying "virtualisation"). The idea is that a SAN is a large, fast central disk, probably a large RAID array, split up into smaller disk volumes of some kind. These disks can then be mounted over a network connection by virtual machines or whatever wants to use them. Trouble is this increases read/write latency for your disk volumes (the PC is in one place, its disks are down the end of a network connection somewhere, it's going to take time to send data back and forth) and bandwidth is more limited (cheap SATA connections manage 3GBit/sec, cheap network manages 1GBit/sec). You can pay for expensive fibre channel equipment, of course. However, I figure that at today's prices it's cheaper to simply buy more disks (500GB is under £80) and set them up in the second machine, with mirroring set up to provide a backup if one machine fails.
At the moment I am running our own somewhat flakey monitoring script, but I plan to switch to a more comprehensive monitoring solution at some point soon, so I can see what servers are running which virtual machines and what resources we have left over our network.
We use OSS in various ways. 12 servers running Linux (Karoshi and One Red Hat). 250 computers running Linux(PCLinuxOS), 15 eeePCs (with another 60 Aspire Ones by the end of the financal year). Plus a few dual boot computers and laptops around the school.
Use various software, OpenOffice, Gimp, Nvu, Scratch, Alice, Scribus, Rosegarden, Audacity for different aspects of ICT as well as other subjects. Also use Moodle for VLE, SquirrelMail and Egroupware for eMail, Joomla for website, Elgg for Blogging. If we do use purchased software it has to be web-based, examples included the Library system and our MIS - Facility CMIS.
Have noticed recently that alot of students coming in have had experience with Linux/Open Source from one place or another, some year sevens already use it at home, and a couple we have joined the school because we use OSS and thier parents wanted them to use that instead of Microsoft.
The office staff still use Windows and MS Office though.
Think thats all!
Jo
Really interesting about your Y7s arriving with OSS experience already.
Interested why your librarians opted for proprietary library software; had they explored www.koha.org and/or obiblio.sourceforge.net ? If so, were their issues about interface or feautres?
Thanks for posting.
Miles.
Hi all, long time no speak. Just to bring you up to date, I managed to get a job as Physics Technician here at Hutton Grammar 2 1/2 years ago. I made myself indispensable as Moodle Admin manager and manager of the Cashless Dining system and then negotiated a move to IT technician. We have made small inroads into OSS. We use Audacity extensively in Music and us technicians have a DHCP server using Ubuntu at the moment on a Vlan specifically for Staff wireless laptops. We also use Moodle as our VLE, but it is supplied and hosted by CLEO.
We do have also one little use of ubuntu that you may be interested in. We needed 6 PC's in the 6th form common room specifically for internet access. They needed to be cheap and virtually indistructible. We came up with a method of building the Ubuntu image ready for burning onto a CD as a live CD, but instead put it onto USB pen drives. We then locked the pen drives (not that this is strictly necessary) and put them inside the PC case on a cable. There is no hard drive or CD drive. Any changes that anybody makes are lost on reboot but they can use open office and save stuff to their own pen drives if they want. So far they haven't managed to break them. We are looking at Ingots as we have applied for specialist Maths and IT status. We may also try Open office alongside MS office. We are currently using Microsoft server software because the Active Directory gives us the best chance of locking machines down so that the students can't break them.
We tried Terminal Server software (both LTSP and one called thinstation) but they didn't suit our needs at the time.
I'm interested in your USB powered Ubuntu machines... I tried to achieve something similar using old pc gear that would otherwise be headed for landfill, using an adapted ditribution of DSL (Damn Small Linux) that booted staright to Firefox.. there was a project we followed for a while http://www.eng.uwaterloo.ca/twiki/bin/view/Linux/LinuxKiosk, but it seemed to run out of steam.
In the end we decided that the lack of user authentication for the kiosks outweighed the benefits in terms of freeing up machines for people to work on.
I've had a go at booting Ubuntu off USB, too - our snazzy £99 Dell servers came with internal USB ports, ready to have USB drives plugged straight in. My intention was to have them boot Ubuntu and run Xen virtual machines, unfortunatly they kept on crashing. At first I figured this was due to loading off USB, so I switched to harddrive but found the damn things still crashed - turns out it was simply lack of Xen support for that version of Ubuntu. I switched to CentOS, which has worked a treat, but we still tend to use Ubuntu as a VM guest, just not as a host.
Has anyone managed to get RAID working with USB drives? Intrigued as to what performance / reliability is like.
Also, if you want a Linux distribution that is easy to modify, Slax has been re-jigged a bit and now lets you reconfigure it via its web site. You can edit the disk image (startup scripts, etc) in Windows and then boot from CD or USB. I've currently got it going as a DHCP server.
I have been using usb bootable environments for a while and there is an issue of how many times you can actually use a usb flash memory stick. Some usb drives will only survive about 1000 writes to them. The way you have it set up with the usb drive not writeable is fine but if others follow the model but with the pen drive simply bootable with the os installed on it, it does not take long to run through 1000 read write cycles.