[Abarbarian]

Yes I know it should be in the Linux section but I wanted folk to read about this.

http://desktoplinux.com/news/NS9272932512.html

Brazil's Ministry of Education ("MEC") is installing Linux in labs used by 52 million schoolchildren, reports KDE developer Mauricio Piacentini. Piacentini's blog post describes MEC's "Linux Educacional 2.0" as "a very clean Debian-based distribution, with KDE 3.5, KDE-Edu, KDE-Games, and some tools developed by the project."

http://www.desktoplinux.com/news/NS2824724304.html

Calgary, Alberta-based desktop virtualization vendor Userful announced what it claims is the world's largest deployment of Linux desktops. Working with the Brazilian government and virtual terminal vendor ThinNetworks, the company has won a contract to deploy 356,800 virtualized "Userful Multiplier" desktops to Brazilian schools.

Compared to offering a similar number of individual PCs, Brazil was able to save 60 percent in up-front costs, 80 percent in annual power savings, as well as additional savings in administration and support costs, says Userful. In addition, the Brazil deployment will save more than 170,000 tons of CO2 emissions annually, or the equivalent of removing 28,000 cars from the road, claims the company.

Stated Tim Griffin, President of Userful, "Userful is very happy to have been selected to participate in this historic opportunity to help millions of children get the computer education they need in a sustainable way."

Stated Luiz Ferreira, President of ThinNetworks, "This project will bring access to information technology to almost every young student in Brazil."

http://desktoplinux.com/news/NS7546509093.html

NComputing announced this week that its multi-user virtual desktop software and low-cost virtual PC terminals will be used to equip every school child in the Republic of Macedonia, formerly part of Yugoslavia, with a Linux desktop. The national undertaking will standardize all schools around a single technology platform, the "Computer for Every Child" project of the Macedonia Ministry of Education and Science. All together Macedonia will deploy 180,000 NComputing-enabled workstation seats, enough to provide virtually every elementary and secondary school student in the nation with his or her own classroom computing device.


The company claims that setup is simple, and begins with software on the shared PC that creates multiple virtual user desktops. Standard monitors, keyboards and mice then plug into very low-cost, highly reliable virtual PCs (also known as access terminals). NComputing terminal use between one and five watts of power for each added user, versus 115 watts for a typical PC.

http://www.desktoplinux.com/news/NS8141249791.html

Japan has been considering Linux for use in its schools since 2004, Gyaku noted. An investigation conducted in Spring 2006 found that more than 400,000 computers at schools in Japan were running on Windows 98 or Windows ME -- systems no longer supported by Microsoft. The cost of replacing these machines with newer models, as well as the rising price of proprietary software, prompted teachers and administrators to propose switching to open-source software, Gyaku said.

http://www.linux-watch.com/news/NS4224026697.html

The site claims that schools around the United States and the world are discovering the benefits of open-source software. In Indiana alone, over 100,000 students use open source software every day. Not only does open source save money, it allows schools to extend the benefits of technology more broadly, affording a better education to students.

Read it and weep Microsoft.

Penguin Power for Poor People.

[Urmas]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_T...Server_Project

[Abarbarian]

I followed Urmas's link and it led me to here,

http://wiki.ltsp.org/twiki/bin/view/Ltsp/SuccessStories

I read a lot about how Linux is not yet ready for the mass market. How difficult it is for folk to get used to and use. How wonderful Windows is in comparison. How Linux may be ok for folks in the future.

Well what a surprise this site is. Some of these folk have been employing Linux for 7 or 8 years with very little trouble if any at all and a much cheaper alternative to Windows. You may be surprised at how many USA organisations are employing this Linux technology.

Take the time to read down the list at least. It really is time for folk to wake up and abandon the one horse Windows race and set the web and the world alight with the opportunities that Linux can offer.

Ambience Properties Ltd., Hyderabad, India

The organisation was faced with the dilemma of investing in IT to upgrade its facilities. Investing in M$ $oftware meant throwing away all existing hardware (some date back to 1996). The overall cost was proving to be prohibitive. Upon invitation, I created and installed LTSP on a Red Hat Linux 9 running on a Powerful Destkop machine (AMD 2000+, 1GB RAM, 40GBx2 Linux RAID). A total of 8 systems were connected to the server using D-Link 10/100 Switch. Since PXE cards are not easily available, PXE boot floppies were used. Most vexing installation issues were related to NFS & XSession using UDP. On a HP 10Mbps hub, the clients would occasionally drop the session. Users would occasionally get locked out. Gradients & Wallpapers really slowed the display and caused huge CPU Usage spikes on the Server.

With minimum investment (10/100 Mbps Switch, Realtek 10/100Mbps cards), these issues were ironed out. At only 1/10th of the cost (of upgrading to M$), desktops that would have been otherwise sold for scrap were given a new lease of life.

-- RajibGhosh - 26 Aug 2005






Handsworth Grammar School - England

We have 90 LTSP terminals deployed in the Computing Department. We use standard PCs as servers. Our clients are very cheap machines - we recently bought a batch of second hand PIII 533MHz machines for 17GBP (about $25) each - so we are looking at running local apps. We have recently been involved in a TCO investigation with Becta (http://www.becta.org.uk) - the Governmennts ICT Education agency and been shown to be about half the price of proprietary offerings We have a MoinMoin wiki at http://www.openhgs.org.

Next year we will be installing many more clients.


Skegness Grammar School - UK

Skegness Grammar School is on the east coast of England and has been running LTSP and Open Source software for 3 years now. We have over 100 terminals on 4 application servers arranged in two main teaching rooms and several clusters and individual machines throughout the school. All the curriculum teaching is done using LTSP Terminals from KS3 to KS5.





Local Net Solutions installs 7 school LTSP pilot for Atlanta Public Schools

Atlanta Public Schools, an urban school system with nearly 100 school campuses across metropolitan Atlanta, Georgia contracted with Local Net Solutions to implement a large scale pilot of LTSP for use by K12 students for the 2006-2007 school year.

• 4400 students
• 2200 thin clients
• 233 classrooms
• 31 servers
• 6 months
• 4 engineers
• 1 HUGE success

In the end, the teachers are very pleased and the principals are reporting that student math scores are noticeably improved. Currently, Atlanta Public Schools intends to use this model for all future technology refresh events for all of the remaining 90+ schools

This last story is what it is all about. Not in the third world but here in the affluent west. Poor people helping themselves. No need for handouts from the moneyed Monopolies, no need for the latest unaffordable kit. Just some old fashioned virtually thrown away hardware and some FREE and adaptable software. That is all it takes to give some folk a chance in life.

JC Cerberus - Hengelo, The Netherlands

JC Cerberus is a place where young people (aged 14 to 28) can meet, play, get some help with their homework or with their personal problems. Cerberus is run by volunteers only and receives no funding from goverment or other institutions. With the aid of (RedHat/Fedora) Linux and LTSP we managed to set up some ten computers which are used for internet, chat, making homework, playing music or organising parties. The costs were so low (1 x AMD 1800+ server and 10 x Pentium I 90Mhz), it's cheaper to run this 10 terminals than 1 MS Windows system.
Our most used applications are:
- Mozilla 1.7 (thinking about switching to FireFox 1.0)
- aMSN
- OpenOffice 1.3
- xmms
All running on Fedora Core 2.

Starting this new year we're going to experiment with two items:
- NX clients (have it up and running, but no visible performance gains yet)
- x11vnc (also up and running, now working on some pretty scripts)

For more information (in Dutch) see: http://members.home.nl/jccerberus/trapveld.html, or send a mail to: (E-Mail Removed)


-- MarkLeeuw - 3 Jan 2005





Hope you enjoyed reading.







Penguin Power ! Powerful persuasion.