Re: [seul-edu] Re: Unified Front...

["Stephen C. Daukas" <stephen@daukas.com>]

At 01:49 PM 4/25/2002, Alan Chen wrote:
>On Thu, Apr 25, 2002 at 09:36:28AM -0700, tom poe wrote:
> > On Thursday 25 April 2002 08:39, Michael Williams wrote:
> > > On Thursday 25 Apr 2002 10:56:32, Stephen Daukas wrote:
> > > > OK, I'm going to ask a simple question.  If we provided a ISO of the
> > > > top N  educational apps, HOW-TOs, documentation, war stories, got
> > > > permission to  distribute Star/Open Office, perhaps more, whatever
> > > > (what I referred to  once as a package), would that be enough to get a
> > > > district excited and  successful, or must we also include a Linux
> > > > distro?
> > >
> > > Simple answer..NO
> > >
> > > Were is the training and support options? Those are the biggest obstacles
> > > to overcome, desktop or server room. Mailing lists aren't enough. RTFM is
> > > not enough. Unless you tie to a standard distro and provide scripts and
> > > configurations that are pretty much canned your not going to win over the
> > > majority of school systems.

[snip]

> > Hi, Michael and others:  Training and support is a community-based 
> effort.
> > Start with the ability to provide remote support on any setup, and, 
> together
> > with local "hands and eyes", company IT depts, LUG's, Perl Users' 
> Groups, and
> > others should provide ample support and training options across the 
> country.
> > It's the design, and if it's the right model, everyone will be stepping 
> up.

[snip]

>I don't mean to discourage you, but the reality is that school
>organizations require commercial support. Even if the software is free,
>schools expect to have someone on a support contract who is required
>to help fix any problems encounted.  Even with commercial support
>services, my discussions with various school districts say that the
>schools are leery of not having some sort of in-house expertise that

[snip]

I have to agree with Alan and Michael.  While I think a simple, 
self-contained educational ISO is a great place to start (and we still 
haven't defined that content yet), I believe you must eventually make "the 
whole Linux thing" easy to deploy and run to win the hearts and minds of 
everyone in education.

However, we do need a stake in the ground if we are to make any 
progress.  I think a simple offering that can be dropped onto an existing 
distro is something than can be done without too much heavy lifting...  It 
sounds like there is stuff in the pipe (according previous posts), which 
needs a little attention, that could be put into an ISO.  This could be 
distributed in a similar way to Red Hat's once-upon-a-time Power Tools CD, 
and we might get a lot of other contrib if we put the word out.  We might 
even get a lot of help with initial deployment from those groups mentioned 
by Tom that could help get us to the next step.  I would still hope that a 
vendor would pick-up on the ISO and run with it...

Once we know what we need for education (i.e., once the ISO's content is 
defined), we can move on from there!

Steve