I've been sitting here looking at all the postings and have felt the stirings of an odd nostalgia, all the great arguments remind me of the Acorn lobby. Having at last been allowed to dump the old A3000 acorns I no longer have to listen to people banging on about how god they were. I've played about with LINUX a bit but can not spare the time to work out how it all works. I am a teacher who, with the current state of things, gets 2 frees out of 30 a week (which I generally use to support others using ICT). I do not have the time to learn. As a head of ICT I have 1 ex-army technician who is self taught. We could not afford anyone who is LINUX able. I've spent many hours trying to get Apache/Squid to work, only to work out eventually that it was the addressing system forced on us by the old Acorn kit that stopped Squid from working. On the other hand it took me a couple of hours to get Apache running on an WIN98 box. The nice people at Tiny came in and set up our NT server for use and answered all our questions about adding another one. All the software installs itself and runs. WINSUIT keeps the little dears out and the OS in and if anything goes wrong we Ghost it all back. If I was foolish enough to want to go my own way, I would return to the sad old Acorns because they atleast worked straight out of the box. OK you lot, fire ;-) Jamie On Sat, 17 Mar 2001 16:37:10 +0000 (GMT) "Alan Davies" wrote:

*This message was transferred with a trial version of CommuniGate(tm) Pro* OK I heared the arguments...

I largely agree with the arguments...

But I think the arguments are not about the issues which others....and yes, myself too...feel are the necessary ones to consider.

I have no problem with Star Office....neither would others. I have no problem wih K desktop.... I agree - we are 'Educating' not training....

BUT

Pupils need to use current MS tools NOW - not just when they leave school...in many other subject areas than IT.

You only need to take one look at programs like 'crocodile physics, technology, chemistry' to be converted. They are simply fantastic compared to anything (are there isn't much) to satisfy CAL.

The 'control' programs for Data logging....all require MS OS.

Publisher (....and I hate it....much prefer my Acorn copy of !Style) is everywhere...integrates very nicely with other MS packages (just as well because it doesn't have much else going for it) but it simply doesn't have a convenient way of transfering material to LINUX platform.

I might well migrate by NT servers to LINUX...

I might well change my Netscape proxy server to LINUX (although I've never managed to get the MS proxy client software (winsock proxy) to work with anything but MS server).

I might change my Email server to LINUX...especially as its the same box as my proxy.

I certainly run Xserver clients on my PCs to give access to a differen't OS....a multiuser OS....

I use telnet and introduce some C programming as a change to Visual Basic (again....nothing anywhere near as good for LINUX.. and yes, I'd be first to agree that VB has its problems)

You could use CITRIX to deliver MS interface to LINUX clients...but I'd say that was only to be resorted too when really necessary. Sound and moving graphics are pretty slow, and CITRIX is expensive. A Terminal Server Client for LINUX would be attractive but I can't see MS doing/Allowing that.

Add to that the dearth of 'cheap' (sorry) LINUX capable technicians, the dearth of teaching staff that have any familiarity with LINUX (in fact there is dearth of IT capable staff) and the desktop battle is lost - except for niche schools and or workstations within a school.

-- Alan Davies Head of Computing Birkenhead School

J W Philpott Head of ICT Charles Burrell High School, Thetford, Norfolk Sat, 17 Mar 2001 16:37:10 +0000 (GMT)