Hi Matt, Just a comment . . . or two:IMHO, people who look carefully at Open Admin will find that it already meets many or most of a school's needs because Les has designed in response to stated needs of specific schools in Canada. And they use it.
In other words, it is "proven" to be dependable.This is probably more than can be said for the expensive tool you describe below which forced the school into adopting a single OS.
If a consortium were to be grown, they could do a lot worse than to build on OA with Les.
Best wishes, David G --
and another project I continue to watch is SchoolTool. Part of the problem is the combination of high-stakes and niche-market; a school's not going to think twice about something that isn't "proven" to be dependable, and there just aren't enough users of such systems to make it a very exciting place for most of the talented FOSS developers. But, FWIW, I know of a school system that bought one of the most expensive proprietary solutions on the market within the last two years, and already has been forced from one platform (Mac, where it was native) to another (Windows). At this point, if the server goes down this "state of the art" SIS has to be restarted *manually* via a complex multi-step process in a *persistent Windblows(TM) login session*. It's good they shelled out the big bucks for the quality software. *shakes head* I would really, really like to see a consortium of schools/districts/states coming together to fund development of that kick-ax Free Software solution that everybody could then use. The taxpayers would be spending less money overall if this happened and was managed successfully, but this is a type and degree of forward thinking that we definitely don't have at this point (IMO).Agreed! (But there are flashes of light on the map of the globe!)In fact, I would rather see such a consortium come together to fund an existing project (such as the two I mentioned above).A cooperative venture. Between school divisions? Getting along in the technology / teachnology area? Great idea... when has this happened? Very much religious issues with large amounts of ignorance, IMO. If you sketch out the needs of schools on the back of a napkin, it's a pretty short list, in reality. Les Richardson Mr. Open Admin for Schools (LOL!)Enough rambling. As things are now, FLOSS advocates almost always seem to lose this battle, and that's very frustrating. I sympathize, Alan. Good luck. --matt On 10/11/07, Alan E. Davis <lngndvs@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:An update: I have gotten vmware to run on my laptop, still trying to get wireless to work. Wine would be much better. We are using something called, I think, gradequick. The consultant who came to the school was running virtualmachines and demoed it to workshop participants. I think he was running XP,VIsta, and SUSE. He claimed we will be able to connect to the server fromvmware. The wireless eludes me so far. Thank you for the encouraging news.Alan On 10/12/07, Gary Frankenbery <gfranken@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:On Sunday 07 October 2007 09:30:54 pm Alan E. Davis wrote:One of my worst nightmares has befallen my school: a proprietary,Windozeonly administration package is being implemented: Rediker.[SNIP]Do I have a prayer of getting Rediker's school software running on CX Office? Vmware? Is VMWare suitable for basically emulatingWindowsXP in a window, to run this one program? Maybe even Wine is goodenough?I have used Wine? So my question to the list is this: has anyone any clues about how tostartthe latter?Alan, We too use a Windows based proprietary student administration system called SASIxp. The teacher component clients are Integrade Gradebook and CLASS.xp. We run these from our Netware server. These programs would not run under wine until just recently when wine version 0.9.45 was released. This newest version of wine supports Classxp.exeand Integrade.exe perfectly. I have installed ncpfs (netware core protocol file system), and I make an IP connection to our netware server as follows: ncpmount tcp -A 10.5.0.4 -S D7ADM -U gfranken.GPH /home/gfranken/Desktop/HSOFFICE Explanation: tcp - make a tcp connection to the server -A 10.5.0.4 - ip address of the server -S D7ADM - server name -U gfranken.GPH - user name dot context /home/gfranken/Desktop/HSOFFICE - mount point I've set-up an icon on my Linux desktop that runs: wine /home/gfranken/Desktop/HSOFFICE/GPHSASI/SASIxp/CLASSxp.exe Unfortunately, I don't know whether Rediker will run under wine. But there may be hope. CLASSxp and Integrade were the only programs that tied me to running MS Windows. Since I can now run them under wine, my teacher workstation lives in linux all the time, and I'm a happy camper. Of course, in the longer term, I hope to get our School District to jettison SASIxp for student record keeping and go to an open source solution. Regards, Gary Frankenbery Grants Pass High School Grants Pass, Oregon gfranken@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx-- Alan Davis, Kagman High School, Saipan lngndvs@xxxxxxxxx "It's never a matter of liking or disliking ..." ---Santa Ynez Chumash Medicine Man-- Open Source Software Engineering Consultant http://majen.net/
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