RE: [seul-edu] Corbett Elementary School Linux project, and more

[Harry McGregor <micros@azstarnet.com>]

On Sun, 13 Feb 2000, Fredrik Liljegren wrote:
> There is actually right now an active discussion on debians developers list
> of how to make some kind of "Debian Jr"; that would be easier to set up and
> maintain, and to find the possibilities that are available in free software.

I guess I might have a diffent perspective here (BTW Nick Lopez has
monitoring and particpating in a lot of the debian devel stuff for us (the
tucson group that is)).

I started the lab with Slackware.  Moving to debian was done for it's very
low administraive overhead.  Installation can be a bit of a pain, but
managing the system is a cake walk compaired to slackware.

We have scripted shutdowns, script running, etc, so with a a command like
"./downlab "/home/zqc/thisscript""  the script named thisscript in
/home/zqc gets run on every system.  This was done with SSH.
 
> First of all, I'm interrested in what windows apps you are using; to see
> which holes there are to fill.

This is some stuff that we belive in replacing... To the most part
(myself, not speaking for the school), I belive that they have no place in
a lab that is used 45Minutes/week by each student.  The titles are from
EdMark, Baileys, Trudies, and millies (houses, etc).

> Secondly, I wonder what you use StarOffice for, that you cannot do with
> AbiWord; web-publishing or something?

We tried switching to abi, but it's has way too many bugs at this time.
If you spell check more than about 10 items, it can corupt your file, we
had cases of it displaying the source instead of the rendered document.
Also it does not include the charting functionaly (nor should it, and
gnumeric does not have any either) that soffice has.  Also it was dumping
on people way too much.  I have been trying to explain to people that
disapearing is the PROPER way for an app to die (instead of giving you a
system bomb), but they still hate it just vanishing.

I really hate using soffice, it's a huge hog, but it what mostly works
(due to the nfs hacks we had to do, spellchecking causes it to crash).

> What applications are you using besides these; any educational or games?

I will try and get together a full list soon.

> Have you got any small advices on how to make the system more kid-friendly
> and fun reasonably easy?

Well, probably the one major thing we did for usablity is to setup ICEwm
so that it's easy for us to script adding and removing icons, while it is
running (on the "start" menu).

At the second lab (charter school), we use this to add and remove the
games menu in a real time basis.  Also at the charter school we are using
print top, to  make it that the teacher has to aprove the print jobs
before they print.

> Regards, EOF

			Harry