<!doctype html public "-//w3c//dtd html 4.0 transitional//en"> Sean wrote:http://www.freshmeat.net/news/2000/03/18/953441940.htmlI'm definitely interested in this. But...
(from yesterdays freshmeat.)
This is a link to advocacy of linux in schools. Its well written and
features neat links to various projects which might be interesting to
those not even involved with education. (Visual TCL/TK comes to mind.)
<rant>
...unless it becomes a little easier to setup and administrate Linux I don't see how this will happen. LSD had an entirely Novell 3.12 and Mac environment until a couple years ago. While the Mac servers *may* survive the Novell almost certainly won't. LSD started a shift to NT almost two years ago. I don't want anything to do with administrating NT but unless I can *demonstrate* that Linux is a viable alternative, NT is the way it will go - possibly even for Mac services. The school district (currently) has 43 buildings of which seven or eight (elementries) are either completely or partially mac. All the high and middle schools were moved to NT. The remaining elementries are Novell 3.12. One of the guys that would need to be convinced works here in the shop with me and watches while I struggle to try to make things work. He has been mildly impressed with how Linux works for the things I have been able to make function but I can tell he's put off by the hours, days, or weeks spent in getting it to happen. Linux works well right now as a windows file manager using Samba, at least in our shop with only three workstations. We are also using it as our router/gateway to the internet - for that it works great. We're using it for DNS so we can assign names to various resources inside the district WAN - that works very well too. It's working fine as a print server for our HP OfficeJet too. As I said, he likes what I've been able to make work but he's of the opinion currently that it is too difficult to administrate to scale it up for use in even an entire school to say nothing of 43 of them. There needs to be a better way than smbpasswd to setup users/passwords for a few hundred users - many of which change every semester. I've been working most of last week with Sean to get Mac services working and can't figure that out. I haven't even tried Novell services yet. The condition and usefulness of Linux How-to's to anyone who has not been involved with Linux for a decade is limited at best.
</rant>
I would really like to further the success of Linux, and do it right here where I work. But the bottom line is that I need to apply some polish to how Linux works day in day out and I don't know enough yet to do that. And when something new is added (like the mac services that came up last week - and mail services that have been hanging out there for a couple of months) Linux needs a set of resources that work for the typical people that will be trying to use them coming from the windows mindset. Windows may indeed be, and I think is, broken - but they make it look easy.
Sorry for the long rant but Sean's link definitely hit's a nerve here.
Mike Rambo
Lansing School District