Looking at Edubuntu

This week I attended a session on open source solutions for schools. It was hosted here in Tauranga by Technology Wise who have largely made their name supporting local businesses with open source solutions. The keynote was presented by Don Christie, president of the NZ open source society.

The presentation really got me thinking about Linux again and this week Kelvin and I have begun experimenting on our network with Ubuntu to see how it will go with reasonably astute teenagers.

Our key points are that it must be able to be imaged easily (well G4L will do this easily) and that there must be some way of it integrating with our existing active directory.

At present at Katikati College we run 110 Desktop Windows machines, 130 Windows laptops, 140 OSX Desktops and 90 OSX Laptops. A number of the Macs are now eight-nine years old and still running Tiger hence they are very much at the end of their life so we are looking to replace these and a similar number of the Windows machines are about five-six years old. We are interested to see if running Linux will give us a bit more life in some of these machines and as I tried last year it wasn’t hard to get Ubuntu on an old iMac, for the Windows machines it will hopefully mean that one lab can continue to run comfortably for web-apps and office apps leaving the rest of the school as is.

I don’t really see a need for us to dump Windows as an OS, I personally don’t have a problem paying for software if it is good. I know that if the school Microsoft deal doesn’t roll over that there may be some cost issues but then we can just add some money to the Windows machines we buy and have the OEM license. Much like paying the Apple Tax we will pay for a user experience if it makes people more comfortable.

Where I guess my own ideas on this are conflicting are on the office suite of products. I have not used MSOffice for a number of years now and really don’t see why we are paying for product that we don’t use, not to mention getting parents as a flow on effect to buy 90 plus excel functions when they may only ever use eight but that’s just a personal axe I grind.

MSOffice may be industry standard but as I proved in a little experiment I conducted where instead of installing Office 2007 I put on Open Office Three and the user noticed no difference ( I know it was sneeky but I had to prove a point) we may have missed a very easy time to switch as people are now familiar with the ribbon interface.

So.. what next, well we have had Open Office for a while in the OSX labs due to the MS Schools agreement not covering them for Office and really our kids don’t notice a difference. The real key is getting adults to break the apron string.