Re: hmmmm....

[Nate Reindl <reindlnr@apci.net>]

Quoting Tighe Schlottog <emry@icephyre.net> inline:

> Now, I was sitting here thinking again, I have been doing that alot lately
> and the pain seems to be only temporary from doing that.  ;)

Hmm... I often blurb a word or two of German or Dutch when thinking in the 
middle of a class while a teacher is lecturing.  Heh.  I've done been kicked 
out of my second hour for doing that too much.  ;)

> But anyways, I was thinking that with the recent attempted fleecing of the
> schools up in Washington by M$ and with the "audits" run by the BSA, now
> might be a good time to start talking to the local schools about free
> software and the benefits that you can get from it.  Schools where they are
> paying a pretty penny to be able to use products such as Word or Excel could
> easily be replaced with StarOffice or OpenOffice with some ease.

This sounds like a good idea, actually, and OTHS is jumping to OpenOffice under 
Win2000 because the licensing for MS Office is too expensive.  They still use 
Citrix for the school administration stuff, but they're thinking about using 
the suite I wrote at the beginning of the year once their current setup becomes 
a 1.0 release (it's still alpha, so I have a long way before getting recognized 
for it...).  

Hopefully, when they seem ready, they'll switch to Linux, or possibly something 
like FreeBSD, even.  Most likely, however, graduation will have hit me in the 
face by then, so I'll miss out on using the new system on a daily basis.  
Boohoo for me.

By the way, there are a good many workstations at my school running pirate 
copies of Win2000.  Micro$h1t evidently doesn't care about them as nothing's 
happened yet.  They've never been audited, either.  Though... all of their 
legal purchases aren't site licenses or anything of the like.

> With the recent advances in the stability of the windowing systems within
> linux and the unixes, it would be rather simple to setup something that they
> would be able use in a quick amount of time.

Yeah, but you get users like me who like custom WM setups.  What would you do 
about those people?  Write a custom .xsession for them in their homedir?  I 
personally like using a WM called PWM because everything (well, most 
everything) is keyboard navigable, which makes things easy on laptops with lame 
pointing devices.  Piss on desktop environments.

> Also, the LTSP project looks to be something that they might want to do.

The LTSP looked interesting for a good while when I was hellbent on installing 
little 9.5" LCD touchscreen panels in the house to control lighting and whatnot 
because you wouldn't have to have a hard disk in the boxes; thus, causing power 
supply to the machine be minimal.  Eh.  I didn't like the idea anymore and 
scrapped it.

The school might want to build little book-sized PCs (like the one I have) and 
not put smaller disks in them and boot off the network.  There're possibilities 
to expand the idea, and certain groups would get access to certain tools and 
whatnot.  I've been thinking about this myself, actually.

> The only problem would be those schools that use specific programs that
> require a windows enviroment to run, such as the Mavis learning series or the
> Rabbit typing series for example.

Hire some programmers.  'Nuff said.

> Now, here is the call to arms.  Who amoungst us would be willing to help out
> in such an endevor?  I would be more than willing to put my time into the
> ring to make such a thing happen.

I'm willing.  Hell yeah.

> In doing this we could also bring the teachers and the students further into
> the world of technology by teaching them how to admin these boxes.

Good luck there, Tighe.  *chuckle*  /me ducks and runs!

> This would be an added benefit and quite possibly a leg up for students who
> will be moving on into CS or another computer related field.  Or it could
> just breed the next generation of sysadmins.

New breed of sysadmin!  w00t!

> In any event, proprientary and costly software in schools could be replaced
> with a GNU/Free solution fairly easy in my mind.  The only part that will
> take some time will be the retraining of the teachers and students to work
> with the system.  But, with students like Nate at the schools it should be
> fairly easy to populate the campus with those who are imbued with the
> Clue(tm).  Sorry to make this so long, but I am looking for a project to do
> and I was wondering if anyone else would be interseted in this?  Bleh, back
> to the nap.

Wow!  I have a positive comment for once.  Come back to OTHS, damnit.  I'm 
interested and willing as there are more people who need The Clue(tm).  The Clue
(tm) is a Good Thing(tm).

--
Nate Reindl  <<  OTHS Web Mastah  <<  Resident Luser at Large
 '---> email:  why don't you just ask reindlnr at apci dot net?
==
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