On Fri, 16 Mar 2001, Administrator wrote:
With regards to the discussion following Ian Lynch's posting I offer the following: 1. The issue of the quality of Linux applications have not been raised. I'm not a Microsoft "bloatware" fan at all but most users would feel that their office applications, at least, work faster, better and are easier to use than the Star Office suite.
StarOffice is, it has to be said, a bit of a resource hog. This is why it is particularly well suited to a thin-client system, where you can use shared memory and take advantage of the higher processor speed. :-)
2. Managed services may be a government priority but school ICT staff will not believe that the issues they face day to day will be able to be sorted within an acceptable timescale or that responding to "in house" cross-curricular development ideas and possibilities could be done at all.
OK: For schools without technicians, managed services offer a cost-effective way to improve the level of support and decrease the often unreasonable demands made on the private time of teachers. For schools with technicians, managed services offer a cost-effective way to relieve the technician of what can be the more tedious aspects of the job, leaving him/her free to spend time doing more productive things such as responding to "in house" cross-curricular development ideas. Technicians and managed services are not mutually exclusive!
3. Using "old" machines as thin clients may be a good idea and an efficient use of resources but saving some money is often balanced against the perceptions engendered in parents and students by the age and the "appearance" of the workstations.
Clean the monitor, buy a new keyboard and mouse (under £5 total if buying in bulk), place the CPU box under a desk. Problem solved.
I'm very happy to see a drive on OSIE and am trying to exploit a few linux boxes for file sharing, web & proxy serving etc., myself. The advent of better guis and more configuration by browsers is reducing "the learning curve" but I really don't see linux desktops and applications on the workstations being common in schools in the near future. At best progress with OSIE may prompt Microsoft to reduce the cost of educational licences.
Some of us have higher hopes for OSIE (and Linux)! If all we aim to do is temporarily reduce the cost of MS software, then we may as well not bother. We will soon be at a point with several schools using Linux on the desktop as well as on the server (there are several systems which we are installing in the next few months). Once these systems are being used, and once we have a set of Linux resources covering the whole national curriculum, OSIE will be in a very strong position. Michael Brown Fen Systems Ltd.