Re: [school-discuss] Some questions about OSS in education:

[Gary Frankenbery <gfranken@charter.net>]

On Saturday 14 August 2004 07:04, wen heping wrote:
> Hi:
>     I think it is better to use OSS in school than to use Microsoft's
> product, and i believe that OSS would be the mainstream in education of ICT
> in several years.But i have some questions about OSS in education now:
>     1 Suppose in the future most of the k12 schools us OSS as ICT tool,then
> when we look back,what is mark of the beginning of OSS in education?
>     2 Which Linux distribution is the best for school?I s it Debian? LTSP?
> FedoraCore? Gentoo or sth. else?
For a lab with low-powered workstations, LTSP is very good--the $$$ resources 
go into Servers and network bandwidth, which must be very robust to handle a 
large number of workstations. Management is simplified to the 
servers--workstations need very little maintenance.

For a large school, with several hundred or thousand workstations, or a 
different client-server model, you may want to install Linux on each 
workstation, and have data stored on the servers. Authentication would be to 
the Server via NIS or LDAP, with NFS auto home mount shares. Distributions 
that have both workstation and server versions of their product are good for 
this: Suse, Mandrake, Fedora/Red Hat.

>     3 Which country is the most active in applying OSS in education now? It
> is said that Latin American countries are more interested in using OSS in
> education than the other parts of the world, is that true?
Don't know, but I would guess that the lower financial cost of OSS would drive 
the Latin American countries to use OSS in educaton. The software  in my U.S. 
High School lab now is all dual-boot (MS-Win/Linux). Even under MS-Win, I'm 
phasing in OSS (such as OpenOffice, Firefox Browser, Python) where I can. I 
hope to gradually phase out MS-Win, and do everything in Linux--to be 
completed in 2-3 years.

>     4 Which is the most important paper that advocates OSS in education?
> Those who like OSS always think E.S.Raymond's <<The Cathedral and the
> Bazaar>> as their Bible, is there such a Bible in OSS in education?
>     5 What is the percentage of the k12 schools that use OSS instead of
> Microsoft's product now in your country?
>     6 I heard that Latin American is very active in applying OSS in k12
> education, is that so? Anybody cab afford me some information about
> it?Better in English.
>
>     Thanks a lot.
>
>                                                                    Wen
> 20040814
>
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