It's a good idea to look at a Linux as an alternitave, just remembe to consider where you are able to get free support as well as paid support if required.  There really are only two supported Linux option at this moment in time, they are Red Hat and SuSE,  If I were looking to go with Linux in a business or education environment now I would deffinetaly consider SuSE because it's better supported and it come with dot.net integrated so you can still run your windows apps where desired.  If you want education support for it, it's cheap professional support from Novell with their SuSE Linux Enterprise 11 hot off the press.  Best thine to do is download the DVD, install it and see what you can do with it - Not the Open SuSE version as that's more for developers.

Difficult one.  

Firstly pupils and learning to use apps in general. 

Doesn't matter a damn if they use MS or Open Office; they need to be able to learn effectively and equally be able to use apps to generate coursework across a range of subjects.  For many years you have been able to open x-terminal stye windows onto apps on other servers.  You can then use thin(ner) clients and connect to apps on WIndows mac or Linux servers using VMware or a range of server virtualisation products.   Things could actually get better for pupils as this all starts to settle down.  It may not matter soon whether you have a Windws or Linux client, if you can pick a range of apps off a range of servers.    Real life now, though, means apps stored and run on the clients themselves ...

Secondly access to particular apps.   Yes employers expect certain skills. Hopefully transferable skills rather than button-pushing.  I realise in many cases we are talking kids leaving age 16 and going direct to business. It would be an unwise employer who relies only on the skills learned in school.  Most offer training. But they'd expect some platform to build on.

For those going on to 18 and in all likelihood going to college/uni, why are we worrying about what they do in particular at school?   If they learn IT at age 14-16 (typically) it'll be 5 more years before they are employed. And that's a generation of IT under the bridge.   Office 2003 courses are now irrelevant; Office 2007 will follow soon.  It's unrealistic to expect all pupils to be pretty expert on latest versions of software.

Apply this process logically.  Abandon Publisher and Scribus in favour of Adobe CS3.  Teach them to use real software! 

I'm much more interested in pupils using IT effectively while at school than whether they have CLAIT or Microsoft Academy certificates.

Admin staff

People hate change.  Office upgrades are bad enough, but Open Office?   Here be dragons.    You need a good PR consultant and some training courses to hand.

In some cases change is impossible.  Sims.net is tied closely to office apps and windows .net platform.  So big fat clients running Vista please.  And you change platform because Capita tell you to. When they tell you to. Back end requires SQL server and a windows-only platform.

If any apps use code written in VBA to integrate Office apps or automate back-end processes, you have a major job on your hands - Open Office macro programming isn't pants, but it's very different and not as sophisticated.    A lot of work in translating one to the other.

We use Isams (which is a company aimed at private schools. My secret is out).  It uses SQL and IIS and .net - so windows ony at the back end.   It's web-based. That sounds clever.  Unfortunately they need to rewrite it because at the moment it only works on IE.   They will.   I'll be happy once they make it work from Firefox.

Government

They make appropriate noises about open source.  Actually in the UK it means very little.  Have a look at BECTA's site.   At least (and unlike a few years ago) they admit Linux exists.

The real issue is support: cost of it and lack of it.    MS has been so dominant in schools over the last generation that support departments know little about Linux;  they can hire Linux people, but few know a lot about schools software.  Their eyes water at the costs of having to support two or more platforms.  Most authorities tend to fall towards just one platform (often Windows, sometimes MAc, only infrequently LInux) because it's cheaper to run.

I think purchase cost is almost irrelevant in their minds.

bottom line

I would be happy with a linux client (and we have a couple of hundred little notebooks running Linux) so longs I could continue to run my favourite apps like CS3.    So longs I could continue to do my admin with min hassle.

IMO a Linux client on a Linux network makes sense in conjuction with a Windows terminal server available to those who need it.   A mix or real and virtual desktops.   You can sort of do that now via VNC but it's clunky. We can do better.

Derek

Derek, I'm in total agreement with you. Once you have learnt the principles of an application, they are transfferable. The devil is in the detail!

As far as I'm aware mono is available for all distributions and is definately available in Ubuntu. From my experience of trying to get Linux to integrate in to a MS infrastructue, unless you replace servers (like  ISA) with a Linux proxt server, it is very hard work. So is integration with Active Directory. If your infrastructure is predominately Linux based, then this is a considerably easier task.

Centralised update management is a nightmare compared to Windows Update Services, although Ubuntu now provide a paid for service to do this for you called Landscape http://www.canonical.com/projects/landscape/landscape-tour/.

It might be possible to run SIMS under Wine with MS Office 2003 /7 installed but this is not going to be easy to maintain as it is yet another layer of software to manage. SIMS will not work under Mono as it still requires a mapped share  (normally S: drive) for some of the legacy applications to work and it needs Office 2003/ 2007.

Unless you have a load of free time on your hards, are a Linux Guru or have one in your team then whilst online support is readily available via blogs and support forums, you will need to do a lot of trawling to find not only the correct information, but also information which is correct for your distribution and release.

Unlike Windows, Linux is a moving target with frequent core updates which has it's advantages, but one of it's disadvantages is a greater support overhead. Essentiually you can get away with using free support for home, as it is your choice howlong you put up with a problem, but when it comes to using Linux in an environment which has users reliant on the technology working, you need to get solutions fast! In most cases that means paid for support from the big players like Canonical, Red Hat and Novell.

In my view OpenSource software is not about cost. It does cost money and whether it is cheaper to run than a MS shop depends more on the experience of your IS department than the cost of purchasing software and hardware. In a busines environment, there is a stronger case for Opensource software as businesses (except very large organisations like multinationals) do not get the same level of license discount on their MS licensing agreements as schools. The same appies to other vendors like Adobe. Having worked in IS for multinationals in most of my working career, I was amazed how cheap you could get MS-Office. My last company had 40,000 employees worldwide and a centrally managed global MS Select agreement. We were paying £115+VAT for Office Standard edition, when schools were paying £45 for Office Professional!

Unlike in business, schools use a raft of educational applications designed to do specific tasks, each of these would have to be tested and to do this properly takes time, even of you think most will work out of the box under Wine or can be replaced with an OS compatable version. 

My strategy for deploying open source\ Linux would be to:

1. Stick to Windows as the platform, in the short/ medium term. The users don't care what operating system your PCs run, except when they don't work or run dead slow! Since Windows XP, this has been less of an issue.
2. Deploy Opensource/ free cross platform on your Windows PCs like OpenOffice, Firefox, GIMP, Scribus, Audacity, etc, alongside existing closed source applicationa like MS Office. Use the Opensource apoplictoins in lessons where appropriate so users get used to using these applications. Bear in mind you will need a strategy to ensure these applictions are patched and centrally updated as Windows Update is not going to help you here!
3. Deploy Linux based clients in to areas of the school which are not mission critical i.e. outside classrooms and the administrative areas because if they go wrong here you are going to be in trouble with your users who are going to want instant fixes.A good example would be a 6th form ICT resource room. He you can get the users to use the software under Linux, understand the difficulties in supporting Linux in your environment and more importantly understand how to "lock down" the Linux desktop to the level of security you require in your school.
4. Once the trial is complete, you then slowly roll it out to other areas of the school, probably best when you are about to do a technology refresh of a classroom/ department.
5. At the back-end, virtualise your servers and then set about replacing the Windows servers with Linux based servers when they reach the end of their useful life or as part of an infrastructure -redesign project. The virtual environment will give you greater flexability and if all goes wrong it is relatively easy to shutdown you Linux virtual server and bring up your windows equavilent without the need for additional hardware or long periods of downtime. You can also easily setup a test environment, prior to deploying your servers.

Make sure that at all times your users have a "positve experience" in using open source, otherwise you are giving them reason to revolt, resulting in you spending most of your time fire-fighting and defending the strategy, rather than planning and testing. Be assured that you can never do enough planning and testing!

As strongly as I feel about the benefits of Linux and Open Source software, I'm also realistic about what is achievable in a school environment where the cost of software is not an issue, as long as you put forward a decent business case for having it! 

I feel that the issue of effectively supporting OpenSource software in schools is the area the OpenSource Schools website needs to address. Schools need to know how to deploy and manage OpenSource software. They need a technical forum appropriately organised and moderated which is targeted at supporting OpenSource software in Schools on all platforms, not just Linux but also Windows and OS X.

OpenSource is all about freedon of choice and openness, it's not about getting software for nothing! It applies to all operating environments, not just Linux.

Finally, if any of you think I'm a "freedon hater" then you couldn't be further fro the truth. All my PCs at home (all seven of them run Linux) Ubuntu, Xubuntu, Kubuntu, Suse 11.1, Mandriva 2009.1, using GNOME, XFCE and KDE4 desktops. At school I'm "fighting" with Linux to get it to play nicely with pure Microsoft network using SUSE 11.1, with some success. I've been in IT Support for over 20 years and I've been using Linux for four of them.

I still think that there is a need to get ordinary people to understand the potential of open source methods and philosophy in relation to education. That requires practical experience. While one school of thought is that technology is just a set of value free tools, this is extremely simplistic. Modern society and social, moral and cultural considerations can not be separated from technological developments whether the ethics of biotechnology or marketing muscle and lock-in to proprietary monopolies.Part of education is explaining the world so that citizens can make informed decisions rather than simply responding to peer pressure and advertising hype. Don't we think this is important for children? So shouldn't we eat our "own dog food?"

So what has this to do with migrating from XP to FOSS? The success of such a  migration is more likely to be due to people and their attitudes than any specific technology. I'd say make changes incrementally when you know people are ready for them or when there is a natural upgrade and disruption is inevitable anyway. In the interim devise strategies to educate colleagues and learners about the longer term benefits of open systems in general and why the overall strategy is to rid the school of dependency on individual suppliers and their proprietary technologies. That is pretty difficult to argue against - if the government came out with a clear policy statement that all schools should be planning to migrate to such technologies and provided some financial incentives to do so things woould accelerate in the righht direction more quickly but like most of the rest of the population, the politicians are insufficiently technologically literate to make informed decisions. Note that such a statement would not discriminate against any supplier since all suppliers are free to provide open systems.

In the end technology is a confidence trick. Confidence comes from either understanding or following the herd. Good educatiion should be targeted on the former and mitigate against the latter.

Re Support

Ubuntu provide the LTS (Long term support) version which overcomes some of the issues raised.

One of the great strengths of FOSS is allows you to chose you best support option from the full spectrum of completly in-house to fully out-sourced. A very good option to choose is the services of a System Integrator who will act as a single point of support and work with the open source projects themselves. As an example I just presented at the RSC SW's Sharepoint/Alfresco event with the folks from SirusIT who are "UK's only Becta accredited provider of Free and Open Source-based ICT services to schools, colleges and regional authorities".

If you have the licences and don't want think clients then running Windows in virtualiser (e.g VirtulaBox) is another option.

Oh you could also look at Linux Mint to overcome some of the fear of change, as it makes Ubuntu looks a little more like Windows (I can't help thinking - 'but why?').

Steve

OSS Watch

I am in the school of computer science at University of Birmingham. For many years we have run a mixture of operating sytems including desktop and laptop machines of various sorts (running Windows, Linux or Apple OSX) and shared servers of various kinds including shared compute servers running Unix (Solaris) or Linux. For all the centrally supported Linux machines our computer officers chose CentOS (RedHat Enterprise Linux free lookalike) for stability, though that may not suit everyone. People who use something different on laptops or desktops are not allowed have them so closely integrated -- e.g. no NFS. But they can log in via SSH, run X window apps, etc. and it seems to work well -- many of the individuals have chosen Ubuntu or other things on their laptops. I use Fedora 10. For those who need to use Windows, but want to log in to linux machines we install Hummingbird eXceed, but that's a commercial product and I mention a better alternative below.

We recently decided to make it possible for teachers interested in gaining experience of using linux to have remote access to one of our linux servers, for an experimental period, after which it could be more permanent, if we can find funds to support the service. I should announce that opportunity somewhere else on this web site, but my main point here is that while I was investigating modes of remote access I learnt about Xming, which turns out to be outstandingly useful for people who currently have to use Windows machines but have access to a linux machine. It is available from here:  http://www.straightrunning.com/XmingNotes/

A tutorial on installation and use is here: http://gears.aset.psu.edu/hpc/guides/xming/

You also need to fetch an SSH client for remote logins, e.g. PuTTY, and set it up to do X11 forwarding when you connect to the remote linux machine. Then with Xming running on your desktop you can remotely run all sorts of things that produce graphical displays and it all works. I was able to do that from home using my wife's Windows PC (via virgin media 20Mb/s cable) connected to a linux machine in our department.

I feel this could be a very good way to ease the transition from windows to linux, or even to allow converts who need to keep windows running for whatever reason, to access linux without having to reboot, or use a virtual server, and who can leave it to someone else to manage the linux machine. (I hope to be talking about this and some the things that can be done that way by learners, at the 'unconference' on 20th July.)

If any teacher wishes to try using linux remotely on our departmental server feel free to email me about who you are, where you are, what you want to do, etc. (We'll need you to fill in a form and sign it.) I am particularly keen to help people wanting to try out use of AI examples for teaching programming, as supported in Poplog/Pop-11, but that isn't a requirement. (It's what I hope to demonstrate at the unconference.)

Aaron (A [dot] Sloman [at] cs [dot] bham [dot] ac [dot] uk)
www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~axs