Re: While of on the subject of ideas for programs.

[Rob Bellville <rob@acol.com>]

At 04:29 7/4/99 +0200, you wrote:
>BANNER PROGRAM
<<SNIP>>
>CARDS 'N' CALENDERS
<<SNIP>>
ETC...

As a system administrator for a public school, here is what I feel my
school can use. It is a little askew of simply Linux programs. I am
fortunate to have a number of 386 and 486 donated machines sitting and
waiting for this idea to become reality. Pardon me if I speak as a
demanding customer for a minute. <grin>

I need to take my low end machines and make them do something useful. No
one likes to use DOS or DOS word processors in my school. The staff is busy
trying to educate kids, not learn the old ways of technology. We've
introduced them to Win95 years ago after we took their Macs away and now
that is what they expect to see.

What I would LOVE to see is a CD-ROM and a boot floppy that installs a
small Linux distribution with 6-8 useful programs (~100 MB) that can be run
in small RAM footprint 16 color VGA XWindows session. At the low end, I
don't need to network them (that can come later in version 2 ;), just print
to one of my many dot matrix printers in generic text mode. When my
students boot the machine up, they are prompted for a username and
password. They are then lead to a screen with 6-8 boxes that they can click
on to start a particular program (similar to At Ease). When they quit the
program the "At Ease" screen reappears. Oh yeah, a logout/shutdown button
is needed, too.

Of course, the CD-ROMs would be arranged into groups so the programs
correspond to particular age groups/grades. When a machine gets messed up
somehow, the distribution and applications on the CD-ROM can be reinstalled
without losing the user data/scores. Anyone should be able to re-install
from the CD-ROM. An option for "dummy" mode that could pick up the original
configuration from the HD or floppy would guarantee that the software would
be re-installed properly. A teacher module is also necessary for setting up
student accounts.

Is this too much to ask for? Most of the programs we currently use are
fairly simple. Most of them are drill and practice and my students prefer
to do this on a computer that can flash "congratulations!" on the screen
once in a while than to do it on paper. If they are a little bit more fun
and equally educational than the "old fashioned" methods, then they'll be
considered a success.

Help me put these older machines into useful service and I'd be glad to pay
a small fee so that more development could be done.

<end customer rant>

I use Linux extensively on the server side. But, I am not a
software/programmer person. My expertise is in hardware and networking. I
am also a one man MIS department in a school with over 300 computers and
15+ servers (read: insanely busy!). Make it simple for anyone to install
this "perfect product" and I will sing its virtues to all who will listen.
If you put a slick splash screen on it during startup you can propagandize
Linux to the hilt.

Thanks for listening.

Rob Bellville
Millbury Public Schools
Millbury, MA