[Charset iso-8859-1 unsupported, filtering to ASCII...]

Dear Hall

We are a 200 strong(or weak) pupil primary school that's run a linux server for the past 4 years- which has never gone wrong (LEA told us it wouldn't work,

Do LEA advisors get special training for the "it'll never work"?

after we installed they came down saw it, said it was great and then still told other schools won't work)

We use very little of the SIMS package because its useless and the pupil data base we use is crap - its a great system - they give out updates (about 3 to 4 a

Are you running on a standalone machine or networked? If the latter don't try and do data entry on more than one machine at once, apparently someone omitted somthing critical (like record locking...)

year) that inveriably(or do I mean always) go wrong then over 300 school secretaries or adminstrators phone up and try to sort it out (superb way of employing people) I used to complain that the database, budget etc stuff was old fashioned - but at least in the old days the old systems worked - people like stuff if it works and saves them a job or gain some extra benefit - which SIMS etc doesnt Can we get something else?

Sounds as though, like us, you have SIMS stuff through the LEA. Which gives the effect of safety in numbers.

We have about 15 computers that will eventuallly (shortly) be Linux - although I have to keep Windows on for some learning software and games (yep A of E

Have you checked out vmware or Win4Lin to run the Windows stuff (even if the programs will work under Wine.) Personally my preferance is Win4Lin since you can set it up to work as a "shatter proof" Windows on either workstations or thin clients.

and we have playstations and gameboys - part of the curriculum old boy - games r good for kids - anybody that doesn't think so needs to play (work with) the games - comments/arguments welcome ho! ho!)

A games console is IMHO a far better device for playing games than trying to get a general purpose PC to do it. No complicated hardware or software loading issues.

recently set up Linux with three thin clients LTSP - guess what -Linux KDE desktop has worked out EASIER

Depending exactly how you have things set up you might find the Gnome desktop is quicker to start up. (Children can be very impatient.)

than windows for staff and children - more options and more user friendly stuff. It seems to be working great so far

What did the LEA people have to say about that, or didn't you bother? (Though the bit about the staff as well is a bit suprising.)

Can anybody give me some sites with good Linux software for education - I can't seem to find any - even off a CD if anybody knows of stuff.

There are plenty of links from www.schoolforge.net Though some of the software is likely to be in American, even Australian, which could be a bit of a pain. (But as it's open source it's at least possible to do something about this.) -- Mark Evans St. Peter's CofE High School Phone: +44 1392 204764 X109 Fax: +44 1392 204763