Firstly, I went to the BETT show on Thursday, and I was really gobsmacked. So many people selling so many things, for so much money, where so many of them are simply "money-grabbing".
From a "technologists" perspective, I found the school admin, print costing, lockdown, no-spam, no-virus, no-billion-dolla-from-nigeria actually rather sad. I've had "locked down, print costed, no-spam and no-virused installs for clients for a long time".
I'd been invited down by SchoolLinux who had a stand upstairs. They have a "cut down, locked down" 50meg CD image, based on fedora, gnome, etc with some really nice additions. They've also got some other neat products too... Although they seemed busy enough, I found it comical the people who clearly looked at the price tag and just didn't consider it at all. Warren (who was wearing his SchoolLinux t-shirt) and I had a look at Microsoft Class Server. MS let us stand about for a good 10 minutes at one of their PC's, without anyone bothering us. Does anyone have any info on MS Class Server? It looked like a dot.net application feeding a Q&A ASP web application, dealing with multiple choice tests etc etc. I know that Smoothwall were also about, but didn't get to chat. There were various bits of Education software that were clearly written by ex-educators who didn't seem particularly commercially minded, which were not extremely polished, but which showed a "love of the topic", which was probably the nicest thing. On an entirely off topic and commercially motivated bent, my second point. Computashop on Tottenham Court Road have now got a linux box, instore, running a customised SuSE 9.2 (as of yesterday). We were responsible for the customisations, and our commercial bent is that we're dealing with the physical install and setup onsite, and the support and alike. I know if we were in just about any other country in the world, being able to walk into a "high traffic" computer shop and buying a machine based on Linux, is old news, but it's good for the novelty value ;) As we're still perfecting the final "default" install behaviour, I'd appreciate it this isn't slashdotted about ... ;) But if anyone is in town today, you can (if you want) drop into 51 TCR, and see "a computer". We asked someone to play with it, and they told me that Word and Excel were good, but that they tried to find the "system32" directory because they wanted to delete it and haven't been able to yet. Thomas Xdevelopment