Hi All,
Hi
Anyone interested in collaborating on WINE how-tos for UK schools software. It's the only argument left that is stopping Manchester eduation migrating to Linux. It could well involve contributions into the WINE project itself, if there are any interested coders out there...
Cheers
Chris Puttick IT Manager Central Manchester CLC
As and active advocate of open source software in schools I have to question the reasoning behind the desire to run WINE at all, surely the ideal in an educational environment is to provide usable, cost effective and reliable software on the desktop.
WINE allows you to run Windows application under Linux/Unix, so what? You still have to pay for licensing for those applications, it's less reliable
There are all sorts of educational applications which schools already have. Licences bought and paid for, in some cases the publisher went out of business years ago. Teaching staff, especially the less IT literate, can be very conservative and may insist on sticking with the aplication they have used for the last 5 years. Especially if they have well developed lesson plans, worksheets and the application in question does the job well. N.B. some of this software may only be required a few hours a year, but if it isn't available at that time some head of department will be very upset.
that running those applications on their native platform and have you tried
In some cases such emulation can be more reliable that running native, because the application is given a virtualised environment to suit it, rather than a possibly less than idea one where it's important it dosn't step on the toes of other applications.
to get Micro$oft to support there support their software when running it on another O/S, no I didn't think so :-)
The only software which springs to mind which Microsoft makes is Encarta, most of the relevent software isn't made by them at all. In education it's quite likely that attempts to get support would result in a "your software is too old, update it!" type response anyway.
Surely we should be putting our combined efforts into finding/supporting/developing applications which are good solid open source replacements for Microsoft Office et al. I agree with you that we should be
Microsoft isn't really this issue Star/OpenOffice can easily replace Word, Excel and Powerpoint right now. Though replacements for Publisher and Acess lack a bit. Most importanly something to be able to read existing files.
assisting the developers and providing central support for open source products, but lets ensure that we choose the correct people to support.
So what do people do in the mean time with DK CDROMS, ProDesktop, TechSoft bits and pieces, Kudos, Omnigraph, Geomat, MicroSMILE stuff, Cubase, StarSpell, QuickRoute, Crocodile Clips, Interactive Control, etc? Some of these have open source equivalents or possible replacements, others at the moment do not. Let alone the admin side of SIMS, PLASC, Alice, etc which is more a political than technical issue :) -- Mark Evans St. Peter's CofE High School Phone: +44 1392 204764 X109 Fax: +44 1392 204763