Re: [Fwd: Re: [seul-edu] RE: [why schools don't adopt OSS]]

[Roger Dingledine <arma@mit.edu>]

On Tue, Nov 27, 2001 at 10:45:13AM +0000, Jim Thomas wrote:
> I still think the community needs to come out with an Education
> Distribution to ease installation.  As I see it, there are three types
> of installations required in an edu environment: student machines, staff
> machines, and servers.  When you install RedHat, it prompts for the type
> of installation and suggests Workstation, Server, etc.  This doesn't
> make sense for an edu distro.  

There are a number of problems with doing a separate distribution, not
least of which is that we need to keep up with new versions of everything
plus security, ensure that QA is good, etc. With a separate distribution,
we need to duplicate all the work that Red Hat and other companies do,
*AND* do the work of maintaining good educational packages.

I think steps 1 through 8 below don't need to be solved by having a
separate distribution. I think they can be solved wonderfully by having a
repository of packages which are well-built (eg have correct dependencies)
and come with all the packages they depend on.

> Right now it is no easy task to set this up.  The packages are
> available, but not on a CD.  The installation procedure goes like this:
> 1) Choose one of a myriad of available installations
> 2) Install it, choosing packages from a tremendous list of confusing (to
> the uninitiated) options (what does ypbind do?  do I need it?)
> 3) Locate educational packages
> 4) download and attempt installation, only to discover dependencies
> 5) Figure out what those dependencies are
> 6) Locate the package that will satisfy the dependency
> 7) Go back to step 4, and repeat as more dependencies are discovered.
> 8) Confiure the application
[snip]
> I have installed Linux at a private school, and the effort has largely
> been successful.  Linux has still not achieved acceptance by the staff,
> but I'm still working on that.  I'd like to introduce linux to other
> schools too, but managing the one I'm involved with now still requires a
> huge committment on my part (and I'm just a volunteer).  

Does that mean that you did the above steps for your school? Do you
still have the pile of educational packages that you found and used?
Can I have them, so we can start making them available to other people
and save them some time?

You can ftp them to ftp://ftp.seul.org/pub/seul/incoming/edu/ or let me
know if there's a more convenient way.

I think a major step in solving the problem is to have them all sitting
in one convenient place. Then down the road distributions might choose
to include them, thus saving us the work of needing to do that.

--Roger