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Re: [school-discuss] Educational Materials for Linux

On 2002-12-20 12:25:11 -0500 Nobody <owner-schoolforge-discuss@schoolforge.net> wrote:

Mr. Loss,

I work in network support here at the Lower Hudson Regional Information
Center, located in Westchester County, New York. While doing a search on
Google, I came across your posts to the SchoolForge forum concerning World
Book and Britannica ports to Linux. As I am starting to look into Linux
resources for the classroom, and encyclopedias are an extremely important
component, I was wondering what the nature of the responses from your
inquiries were.

I've forwarded your message to the schoolforge-discuss mailing list and am replying to it both directly and to that mailing list. The only reply I received was from Britannica, and they didn't seem very interested in a native port of their reader software. However, as most encyclopedia CD-ROMs use (I believe) standard data formats, it shouldn't be impossible to develop unofficial readers for them. I don't know of any existing projects to do so, however.

LHRIC is venturing into terminal-server-based computing, but not
Linux-based systems, such as K12LTSP. I am starting to look into a
Linux-based client-server model where there is a single-sign-on to a mixed
network of Windows/Linux and NetWare/Linux servers. However, as you stated
in your posts, an electronic encyclopedia is an essential component of any
educational setting. If publishers offer a Linux ported encyclopedia this
would be a big step in the acceptance of Linux solutions in more schools.

The K12LTSP project has members on the schoolforge-discuss mailing list; I'm sure they'd be interested in helping you if you wanted to try out their system. If you give some more details on how you're thinking of using Linux, there are many people on that list that could provide useful comments.

It's worth noting that Britannica is putting most of its efforts into its on-line encyclopedia, which should be available to any computer with a web browser (including Linux systems). I don't know about World Book, but I suspect they are probably doing something similar. There are at least two other (non-commercial) internet encyclopedia efforts---http://www.wikipedia.org, and http://www.nupedia.com.

Your posts brought up a point that gave me pause. You stated that these
publishers offer a port to Mac OSX, which is underpinned by FreeBSD. Since
FreeBSD is another Unix flavor is anyone, to your knowledge, working on a
Mac-on-Linux solution such as WineX for Windows? Also, would you know if
it could be possible to design a web interface for this type of software so
that it run natively on a Windows server but be accessed through a browser
on a Linux machine?

I'm not sure what you're looking for here. There's http://www.maconlinux.org, which runs MacOS on Linux/PPC (Linux running on a Macintosh PPC system). As to running Mac software on non-Macintosh platforms, that's usually fairly difficult, as Macs (until recently) ran a significant portion of their system software off proprietary ROMS built into the hardware. ARDI (http://www.ardi.com) made a MacOS emulator called Executor which ran on i386 PCs running Linux, but it only emulated 680x0-based Macs (not PPC), and it didn't support the newest MacOS releases (up through MacOS 7.5, as I recall). There are also Basilisk II (http://www.uni-mainz.de/~bauec002/B2Main.html) and vMac (http://leb.net/vmac/main.html), which require an image of a Macintosh ROM to run and have the other limitations of Executor too. There was also MACE (http://macehq.cjb.net/), which seemed like a cognate to Wine for Windows "emulation," but I believe that project is moribund.

If you want to run any software on a Windows system but access it from a Linux system, you will need PXES (http://pxes.sourceforge.net/) or rdesktop (http://www.rdesktop.org/).

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