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Re: [school-discuss] Re: [school-discuss] bootable CDs?

I agree this sounds great too. I'm presenting a talk on K12LTSP at the upcoming Georgia Educational Technology Conference in November here in Atlanta, and I think I too should have a bunch of disks to hand out.

One thing I noticed missing on Richard's disk is the Edutainment OSS with which our teachers have been having a blast: Tuxtypes, GCompris, Childsplay, etc. (The windows versions have fewer games than Linux, but it's still quite functional.)

I'm now thinking for CDs we might give to our parents to take home, we'd offer two: one Linux live CD with all the edutainment and office software we're using at Brandon, and a windows OSS CD like Richard's for folks to install OSS at home easily, especially if they're still using dialup for Internet. Would this be as simple to do as just downloading all the installation files for the windows OSS apps, copying them to CD as well as an html document with links to launch the installation apps and an autorun.inf file on the CD? Or just have all the installation executables automatically launched in the autorun.inf file? My first time at this obviously...

Regards,
Daniel

marilyn@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote: 
Richard,

Your disk sounds like a good one to bring to my presentation as well. I agree
that every school should at least be using the Windows versions of OpenOffice,
Firefox, the Gimp, Blender, LyX, Mozilla Composer, Jazz, Solfege, and
UltraPlayer! :) 

Marilyn

Quoting Richard Houston <rhouston@xxxxxxxx>:

Hi all,

All thought not a boot able CD but along the same lines as the Opencd.org
project, I make a disk I call WinOSSCDRom. The big think about my disk is
that all the software must have both windows and Linux versions. I made
the disk to be a stepping stone for user to move from Windows to Linux.
If a user can move most or all of his daily apps to the ones on the
WinOSSCDrom disk them getting them to move to Linux is only a single step
away. If Linux can not be done at least they get some great software.

If anyone is interested you can get more info and the torrent file see
http://www.rlhc.net/blog/?page_id=71

Thanks!




+------------------------------------+
Best regards,
-Richard Houston
-R.L.H.  Consulting
-E-Mail  rhouston@xxxxxxxx
-WWW     http://www.rlhc.net
-Blog    http://www.rlhc.net/blog/


Suggest y'all look at http://www.theopencd.org/


I give a copy of this CD to each of the Intro Computer students at the
Sylmar High School Magnet, where I teach.  If you put the CD into a
Windows PC, it allows you to install some excellent applications like
OpenOffice.org, Blender, GIMP, and Firefox.  If, on the other hand, you
boot from the CD, your get a live version of Ubuntu, with the above
applications and more.

/francis


---------- Original Message -------------
Date: Fri, 29 Sep 2006 12:29:47 -0700
From: "" <marilyn@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: "" <schoolforge-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: [school-discuss] bootable CDs?



Does anyone else see the potential in bootable CDs?


I used them the moment I discovered them back in 2003.  I was teaching
 keyboarding and Knoppix 3.2 had a copy of LyX on it.  The students
used LyX to write reports for their other classes.  I sent a Knoppix CD
home with every kid at the end of the term.

Since then I've kept up with Knoppix and frequently have used it as my
primary OS, using my hard disk just for storage.  Since my technical
expertise is not at the level of most of you on this list (music
teacher . . . yesterday I spent the day playing "Hot Cross Buns" on
recorders all day), I appreciate that Knoppix usually sees my hardware
and networks easily.  It's much less complicated then messing with an
installation.

Last Spring someone from the schoolforge list sent out a link to
Frozen Tech's
Live CD List.  http://www.frozentech.com/content/livecd.php


Wow!  That was like Christmas!  I had no idea there were so many
flavors!

I found two I liked for school use right away.  I use Kanotix to print
out posters, but the most important for me is Musix.

For the past two years I have been teaching music at an intermediate
school. Musix is a bootable music studio.  I boot from the Musix CD, it
sees the sound card and presto - I've got sequencers, synthesizers,
music notation editors, drum machines, a music theory game and even a
guitar tuner.  I have permission from my system administrator to use
bootables so next week I am taking all of my music classes to the lab
to run Musix.  We will play the music game, play with the drum machine,
and write a recorder song using only five notes.

Couldn't we have a bootable CD for each subject area - math, science,
writing, art?  A teacher can use bootables without the district
adopting a new OS.

We will be using Samba Network Neighborhood to save our work on
district servers.

Of course you all know about Freeduc.  I use that with my little kids
at home.

I am giving a presentation on bootable CDs at our local TCEA
conference on 10/28.  It will be interesting to see if anyone attends!


Later,
Marilyn









--
Daniel Howard
President and CEO
Georgia Open Source Education Foundation