Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

internetworkers - Re: MS Goes After Schools Evaluating Linux

internetworkers AT lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: Internetworkers: http://www.ibiblio.org/internetworkers/

List archive

Chronological Thread  
  • From: Paul Cory <paulwcory AT yahoo.com>
  • To: "InterNetWorkers" <internetworkers AT franklin.oit.unc.edu>
  • Subject: Re: MS Goes After Schools Evaluating Linux
  • Date: Wed, 24 Apr 2002 15:00:02 -0400


As an example, the Wake County Schools
(27th largest school district in the country, 2nd largest in NC) has
something like 16,500 desktop/laptop computers now. How many computers
per TriLUG member is that? :-)

A lot, but given a managed changeover during summer vacation, it's
do-able.
A point for your consideration, at least in regards to school systems like Wake that have a large number of year-round schools. Summer vacation is only 6 weeks long. :-) While not an impossibly hurdle to overcome, it does make the enterprise more difficult.
Plus we have tricks to configure multiple machines
simultaneously with near-identical configurations *grin*. Three TriLUG
members (Mike Johnson, Jon Carnes, Hunter Mathews) have some serious
experience configuring large numbers of machines quickly and efficently.
Given the goal, I bet they'd have something that could be done
school-by-school by a much smaller group than you project.

Interesting.
The hardest part would be organizing. This would have to go beyond
TriLUG, and I, for one, would solicit volunteers from the entire area if
I could. It would also be time consuming, but it's do-able. more
importantly, if we used one or two schools to train a subset of the
systems IS staff, they could do it themselves for an even bigger
savings. Plus they'd be ready to support the new systems, and could pass
the training on to other staff members.

Here again we hit the staff rub - no the IT staff, but the general staff. They'll need some training as well. Plans will have to be made to get them up to speed: space located, classes scheduled, trainers found, materials made, duplicated and distributed. This is a LOT of work: as an example, we are attempting to train our teachers to use the new NC WISE system which we plan to have active in every school this year: training just about every workday and running our qualified trainers into the ground and using almost all of the available training labs, it's going to take us 9 months to get all our teachers trained. Implementing Linux would take a similar training effort.
The problem is procurement policies and other regulations that state
that M$ software is required for compliance.
While that makes sense from your prospective, what idiot wrote into law
that a particular software package and not general skills would be in a
test of that nature?

Didn't say it made sense from my perspective, although knowing just what a hole DPI is in in terms of manpower, I can understand the rationale behind it. :-) Dealing wth this means getting into a debate over the state of computer training in this state, and I don't have the energy for that right now. I'll just say that you wouldn't ask a C++ programmer to write and administer a test for English competency and expect it to be very good, would you?

The point is not the silliness of the tes, but that local school systems have to work with mandates from further up the political chain, and sometimes those mandates don't allow for a non-M$ or an Open Source option.
I agree with both points. Not only is there a lot of waste on the System
Administrative level, there's also a lot that could be done to run a
school more efficiently at the School level that's prohibited or just
not-doable at this time. Cutting IT costs are the least of the worries,
when waste in other places would be better addressed. And unless M$
decides to go after one of the local school systems, this issue won't be
addressed with out a lot of effort on the part of interested parties -
like myself. *grin*
Yep. And constructive criticism is always appreciated (if not always followed or followable). :-)

Paul



_________________________________________________________

Do You Yahoo!?

Get your free @yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com







Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.

Top of Page