Re: [school-discuss] Open source in School

[Darryl Caldwell <darrylc@riposte.org>]

Kim,

Thanks for the great story. Keep up the wonderful work, and let us
know if you jump over any other hurdles.

-D

On Thu, Nov 11, 2004 at 07:15:48PM +1100, Kim Perkins wrote:
> 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
>