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[school-discuss] Open source in School



Hi All,
I am the Information Services Manager at Strathcona
Girls Grammar School in Melbourne Australia.

Three years ago now we took a fairly radical step of
dumping WIndows 98Se over the Christmas holidays and
installing RedHat 7.3.  This was done on all the student
workstations, about 200 in all.  At the same time we
installed a LDAP server for authentication (via POSIX)
and an NFS server to automap the user's home directory
on the server to the /export/home directory on the workstation.
This mean that it does not matter where the user logs on they
automatically get access to their home directory.  Their
backgraounds, internet history, screensavers, icon/text 
customizations... all are stored in their home directory and
so are automatically loaded into KDE when they log on.  Works
just great!

We did a complete software install on each workstation, including
applications.  This means that they load up fast without having
to come off the server.  Both the LDAP and the NFS servers are 
connected via GBit ethernet and our entire network is 100Mb 
switched with a Gb backbone so data transfer is very good.

The workstations are all AMD Athlon 1700+ machines or better
with 512Mb of RAM and nVidia gForce graphic cards.  We also have
a selection of P4 2.6Ghz machines.  In all we now have about
320 workstations all running Linux and not a Windows machine in
sight.  We use Sun StarOffice as our productivity suite and have
had remarkably little problem.

It amuses me when I read comments like "is Linux ready for the desktop".
In a School it makes perfect sense particularly in situation where a
large number of kids share a pool of machines.  Managing this type
of setup under Windows was a complete nightmare as you problably all
ready know.

If anyone would like detailed information about our setup and 
experiences let me know and I will be glad to help out

Regards,

Kim Perkins
Information Services Manager
Strathcona BGGS
Email:: kperkins@hyperion.strathcona.vic.edu.au