[seul-edu] Fwd: Re: Costing for Linux workstations

[Leon Brooks <leon@cyberknights.com.au>]

----------  Forwarded Message  ----------

Subject: Re: Costing for Linux workstations
Date: Thu, 2 May 2002 09:01:31 +1000 (EST)
From: Richard Wraith <rgw@trinity.unimelb.edu.au>
To: Leon Brooks <leon@cyberknights.com.au>

>
http://www.unimelb.edu.au/ExtRels/Media/UN/archive/2001/630/flexiblelearnin

>g.html
>
> Do you have anything to hand documenting the reasons for this,
and/or the
> costings involved in using Linux for the Trinity Foundation
Studies
> teaching laboratory (or anything else Linux for that matter),
which is safe
> to put on a website (if not there already) for the edification of
other
> institutes of learning?
>
> Cheers; Leon

Leon,

Thanks for your message.

Nathan Cochrane from The Age wrote an article about our experience
in June last year. I have inserted the text at the end of this
message. It has dissappeared from The Age site into their paid
archives, but I did find a copy of it online in a mailing list
archive in India of all places:

http://gnu.org.in/pipermail/fsf-india/2001-June/001422.html

We also have a little page we put up at the time to respond to the
queries we were getting. It is here:

http://www.trinity.unimelb.edu.au/it/article.html

If there is anything more you would like to know please do not
hesitate to ask.

Cheers,

Richard

--
Dr Richard Wraith
rgw@trinity.unimelb.edu.au
Director of IT & T and the Trinity Learning Innovation Centre
Trinity College   Royal Parade   Parkville   3052   Victoria
Australia
tel: +61-3-9348 7112      mobile: 0417 361 093      fax: +61-3-9348
7498


Trinity drinks deeply at learning's open source
Tuesday 05 June, 2001
By NATHAN COCHRANE

A non-stop flow of students interrupts the interview in the Trinity
College computer lab.

"You can tell it's popular," system administrator and programmer Tim
Bell says of the lab.

Trinity College, at Melbourne University, threw open the doors to
open source in December last year when it discarded its Windows NT
network. Educators and technical staff wanted a better, cheaper way
to teach the 750 overseas students in its Foundation Studies
tertiary bridging course, which introduces Western concepts and
computing skills.

The old PCs were replaced with Hewlett-Packard e-pcs, referred to as
thin clients because they do not not run bulky software on hard disk
drives. They boot up with the Debian Linux Free Software operating
system either off the network or from flash memory cards.

The biggest benefits to educators of open source are cost,
simplicity and flexibility, says Trinity ITT manager Richard Wraith.

The idea to go with a network-centric open source strategy came to
him after spotting Sun Microsystems' Sun Rays at a Canberra
conference last year. He says after initial scepticism, students and
staff have taken to the network with enthusiasm.

"We saw the idea for Sun Rays, although they missed a fundamental
point,"  says Wraith. "The Sun model means you need a high-capacity
network and powerful servers."

"It needs a gigabit backbone - that's stupid," Bell chimes in. "This
makes sense for Sun because they have these big boxes they want to
sell but ... it didn't make sense for us because our old fibre
backbone will only support 100 Mbps."

Although the lab uses Debian with the GNOME desktop environment,
Trinity was stuck with its Windows 2000 desktop licences. They sit,
unused and unopened, in a cupboard.

After being assured the HP clients would run Linux, "we couldn't get
through to anyone who could give us boxes without Windows," says
Wraith.

By booting from the network, desktop administration is streamlined
as software is deployed from a central server, saving time and
cost.  Clients are swapped in and out quickly, and consistent and
rigorous security is maintained. The result is a lower total cost of

ownership, Bell says.

The transition removed the need for Microsoft's Office. Word, Excel
and Powerpoint were replaced with open source equivalents AbiWord,
GNUmeric, and the Photoshop-like GNU Image ManiPulator (GIMP).
Presentation packages are not taught but if they were, KPresenter,
part of the free KOffice suite, would be the likely candidate, says
Wraith.

The team stresses that software selection is not fixed and the easy
availability of open source applications means the curriculum can
quickly change tack.

"We're educating, not training," Bell says. "The argument we're
talking about here is: `You have to teach Microsoft Word'.

"Why are you teaching people Hamlet? They won't use it in the real
world. You can take that argument and put it in another area and
it's nonsensical. So why do people insist on using it in
computing?," Wraith says.

"We do teach them word processing and spreadsheets and GIMP," says
Linux guru and computing lecturer Mike Williams, "but we're also
teaching the students the concepts behind them." By discovering the
concepts, students are less fearful of computers than they might be
if they were only narrowly trained to use a program, he says.

Williams was brought in by computing lecturer-in-charge Simon
Wilkinson, a self-confessed former "Bill Gates man".

Wilkinson says his transition from complete ignorance of open source
to user and finally evangelist was swift and painless, in part due
to his computer science background.

"The beauty of open source is we could find applications if we
needed to,"  Wilkinson says. "We can go from one word processor to
the next seamlessly.  "We're developing a culture where (students)
are not afraid to try new things, and that was due particularly
because I wasn't scared of anything."

Part of that culture is the free, object-oriented programming
language, Python. It is the first language to gain wide and growing
acceptance since Sun's Java started percolating through businesses
and universities. Python's streamlined syntax is well suited to
education while its object orientation makes it attractive to
commerce.

Dutch mathematician Guido van Rossum invented Python in 1990. It
evolved from a '80s programming teaching language, ABC, which
"subliminally influenced"  Python's design, he says. He has lobbied
Trinity to release its course materials so other educators can
benefit.

Code is interpreted so the feedback loop between language and
student is not slowed by compiling. This speeds the learning process
because mistakes are rapidly corrected and good style immediately
reinforced.

"Since early 1999, I've been actively lobbying for the use of Python
as a teaching language," Van Rossum says.

"Before then, I knew that people were teaching Python to beginners
succesfully, but it wasn't something that was particularly on my own
radar."

Python has spread to schools throughout the world. It sports an
active e-mail list and Web-based materials to support its spread
among educators.

Python runs on Windows, UNIX, Linux, DOS, OS/2, Mac, Amiga and
hendhelds such as Palm and WindowsCE. Vancouver software tools
maker, Active State, is porting Python to Microsoft's .NET
initiative.

Python exhibits all the hallmarks of a modern language - modules,
classes, exceptions, very high level dynamic data types, and dynamic
typing - and interfaces to modern windowing systems such as Mac, X11
and Motif. It supports XML for e-commerce and mobile applications.
Integrated development environments are widely used.

The commercial world has seen the benefits, with Infoseek coding
28,000 lines of its UltraSeek Server search engine in Python.
Google, Nortel, ABN Amro, Real Networks, and NASA are among hundreds
of commercial and research users.  Animators at Industrial Light and
Magic used Python to code parts of the new Star Wars trilogy. Disney
animators and games designers code multimedia sequences with it.

Van Rossum says Python teaches object-oriented programming without
the intellectual overhead of other learning languages.

"Pascal totally misses the trend of object-oriented programming,
which is essential for building or using today's large systems.

"BlueJ is Java-based, and the main problem I have with Java as a
first language - although it's much better than C++ - is that the
students have to memorise a lot of meaningless details in order to
do the simplest things.

"Every time there's an opportunity to get a weird compilation error
due to a missing or misplaced semicolon, teacher and student time is
wasted finding, explaining and correcting the problem that could be
better spent learning the fundamental concepts of programming and
algorithms."

"We don't have to deal with vendors or licenses. From a management
perspective it's so compelling," says Trinity's Wraith.

"We'd rather have skills in-house and invest money in our own people
rather than other companies' people. If you're tied to a vendor it
takes the control out of your hands."

LINKS

trinity.unimelb.edu.au
www.python.org
www.hp.com/desktops/epc/

-------------------------------------------------------