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Building a Linux Computer Lab for Schools?
Posted by
Cliff
on Thu Feb 24, 2005 02:12 PM
from the penguins-in-education dept.
from the penguins-in-education dept.
joseamuniz asks: "After giving Linux classes to Secondary School Teachers, I got in touch with a non-profit organization called UNETE. This association has donated 1,523 computer labs to public schools in Mexico. I told them about Linux, and they are interested in equipping a beta computer lab with this Operating System, with Intel PIII, 256 MB RAM PCs. The more they like this lab, the higher chances to include Linux in the new labs donated by this institution." What hardware configurations and software packages would you install on such a machine to show off the real power of Linux in an educational environment?
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Wow .. what a coincidence.... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Wow .. what a coincidence.... (Score:5, Informative)
The major cost was time in getting it set up since all the computers have a different configuration.
BTW, VectorLinux hardware detection on these old machines is awesome. Let's just say that after setting up nearly 50 of them, I've only had to edit the XF86Config-4 file two or three times. Also, no problems with strange cards. Also, VL, being Slackware based, is extremely FAST on old machines and boots into IceWM nearly as quickly as it takes my new 1.8 GHz Athlon to load KDE. (Please no flames about how KDE is bloatware, we've all been there.)
Point of the matter is that if you have the time and you have old hardware, setting up one of these labs is a snap.
Parent
Re:Wow .. what a coincidence.... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Wow .. what a coincidence.... (Score:3, Informative)
Skolelinux (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Great, but... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Great, but... (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Great, but... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Great, but... (Score:5, Interesting)
I'd suggest having some simple programming languages, like Logo or BASIC, and some games that run under those languages. Text games that require simple arithmetic or planning ahead to win are great. If the students manage to figure out how to use the languages to start modifying the games, or making their own, then that's a bonus.
Parent
Programming language (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Re:Great, but... (Score:5, Informative)
I'm not sure what you're looking for exactly, but off the top of my head (and a little freshmeat help):
Primary school level: Gcompris [gcompris.free.fr] is great, has a large bundle of games targetting everything from spelling to geography to math, and is easily extensible.
Astronomy: Both Celestia [shatters.net] and Stellarium [stellarium.free.fr] provide great tools for teaching kids of all levels about our universe.
Mathematics: You can use basic spreadsheets if you like, but there's also Octave [octave.org] for vector and matrix mathematics and Maxima [sourceforge.net] (and several others that I can't recall right now) for symbolic algebra.
Chemistry: There's stuff like Ghemical [www.uku.fi] and Gperiodic [welho.com] which aren't half bad for exploring various chemistry concepts. Then there's stuff like GenChemLab [www.uku.fi] which is pretty neat.
Physics: There's physics simulation software like Physics3D [freshmeat.net] , and there are others around if you care to look.
Computing: Well, you've got all the programming tools you want, but also things like DrPython [sourceforge.net] to make it easier/fun for students (even at lower school levels).
General knowledge: Wikipedia is accessible from anywhere.
Okay, there's a science bias there, but it's not a bad start for what I can think of, or find in 2 minutes of freshmeat.
Jedidiah.
Parent
Re:Great, but... (Score:3, Informative)
Kinda surprised Bill Kendrick hasn't allready been promoting this.
Linux Leters and Numbers [sourceforge.net]
Kstars and other regular software like OOo or Abiword or Koffice.
Re:Great, but... (Score:3, Interesting)
Sure you can.
It's called WAREZ.
How do you think India became a pseudo-power over the past 10 years, on retail copies with legit licenses? NOT!
Like the folks at AutoCAD or Microsoft could give a damn about a bunch of twelve year old impoverished school kids in the middle of Mexico using their software.
Software to be included... (Score:3, Funny)
Security? Control? (Score:2, Interesting)
Morphix-lightgui (Score:4, Informative)
Either that or I'd run K-12 Linux terminal server project. which is a fine network absed distribution.
Well, to start .... (Score:3, Insightful)
First things first... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:First things first... (Score:5, Informative)
Then send the students home with one of these [sourceforge.net] disks.
Under no circumstances should it ever be a requirement to teach kids brand loyalty.
Learning computers in school should be about concepts. Not the latest features of some proprietary Office suite.
Parent
Re:First things first... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:First things first... (Score:3, Interesting)
Oh, I dunno; I remember back in the 90's, when MIT had these rooms full of "public" workstations. There was a sign up on the wall reminding people of the root password. They were all the same, of course. If you thought it was insecure, well, they invited you to try to use the password to damage anyone's stuff other than your own. (Every once in a long while, someone actually succeeded.
If you think this is "certifiable" behavior
Doesn't show off the power (Score:5, Informative)
I've personally used some of these for school, and they are quite good. For example, "Logo" is replaced with KTurtle, and there are a few maths programs (KPlot for graphs and Kig for geometry, among others). There are quite a few language tools too. There is an impressive chemistry program which lists the periodic table and information about each element, too.
So KDE includes a great base. More schools should use it (especially when combined with KOffice)
computer lab software (Score:2)
John Sauter (J_Sauter@Empire.Net)
K-12 Linux Project (Score:5, Informative)
Re:K-12 Linux Project (Score:3, Insightful)
What makes you think that would ever be necessary?
Seriously. The admin doesn't even have to do this. Just install the distro hook up the clients, create accounts, and you're done.
Hard disks are cloned so that a PC is exactly the same as the other. So installation will actually just based on one manually installed computer.
This is much easier with LTSP. Thin clients don't even need hard drives.
Distro (Score:5, Informative)
Also, you can get free CD's from them. Just request 100 or so and have them shipped to where ever that organization is. Technically you only need one, but you can give them out to the students if they like it. It comes with a livecd, so they don't have to destroy their home PC.
Catch up.. (Score:2)
Rus
easy (Score:2, Informative)
http://theopencd.org/ [theopencd.org]
and GNUWin II
http://gnuwin.epfl.ch/en/index.html [gnuwin.epfl.ch]
Though the included software is all relatively recent, developement on maintaining GNUWin has halted as of Nov of last year. They are currently looking for contributors who are motivated enough to help lead and continue the project.
First, protect the investment. (Score:5, Interesting)
This means you'll probably need a more beefey (at least in hard drive space) server that this lab will live off of, but I assume you already knew that.
distro (Score:4, Interesting)
What OS are they deploying now? (Score:2)
wont work that easy (Score:5, Insightful)
K12LTSP (Score:5, Informative)
Maple (Score:3, Interesting)
Take a look at TJHSST (Score:5, Interesting)
mmm, my high school used linux... (Score:5, Interesting)
They didn't have a big budget for the computers, so they used the old 386 (true, I've used them!) and a bunch of old machines, bought a dual Xeon 733 MHz server, and ran LTSP on the whole thing. They had a special file server with a quota of about 1 Gig for students in their home directory, which was plenty, and a separate mail server.
I think that if you install those PIII with LTSP you'll be missing out on responsiveness, so instead maybe install the same distro on all of them, and use a NIS domain for login (with gdm, or even better, Entrance, which is prettier than gdm to look at!) and getting one machine with several drives to use as NFS server for the
Then if you want to start a multimedia class, it turns out a lot of people are actually thrilled when using Blender [blender3d.org]. A whole bunch of people active on Blender forums right now are not much older than 13. I've basically taught my Linux professor at Gould to use blender, and the Advanced Linux class at the same time.
I think that's plenty of things to show eye-candy and the real horse-power you can get in the managing of such a lab with linux.
Also, most of these programs have spanish localizations, iirc.
My 2 cents. (Score:3, Informative)
Libranet Linux, stripped down from install.
Install KDE and Gnome. Run the system with one of the 2, your choice.
Then, install:
KDE's educational packages
Gnome's educational packages
Abiword, Openoffice, Gnucash, Gnumeric.
Kstars also works.
Also include some games, like:
Tuxracer (if their 3d will support it)
TuxPaint
Pingus
FrozenBubble
Tetris/Tetri
whatever else seems appropriate.
Also find out from the school what kind of educational software they use and find some decent clones of what they have. Then make 1 machine, image it, and push the images to the other ones.
School Linux distro (Score:3, Informative)
Take a look at the Skolelinux project at http://www.skolelinux.org/portal/index_html [skolelinux.org]
#1 is running smoothly (Score:5, Insightful)
Concentrate on the fact that you have slow machines running undocumented software that are being demonstrated by people who do not know the software. Every one of those issues needs to be resolved, and if you want the lab to be a real success then aim for the goal of making everything run smoothly every time.
The machines will feel slow, so you will have to work around this somehow or choose a light wm and cope with the added complexity it brings. The software is mimimally documented, and what documentation exists will need to be rewritten for your target level and language. Think howtos with step by step screenshots -- the reason cheesy computer courses use those is because they work... And the teachers need more than just a training course if you expect things to go well, they need a depth of experience.
So to start with the hardware. Linspire does not run well on a typical 500MHz machine because it needs more ram. Decide for each major choice (distro, window manager) how slow it is, and if it will feel better if you choose the fast but hard option or the slow but easy option. Generally, people who haven't used 3GHz computers cope with slowness more, so decide based on their experience rather than yours. If the machines have high ram I would go with KDE, low ram and I'd go with enlightenment or similar.
Next, concentrate on making sure every single thing these people want to do will work flawlessly first time. Make the documentation perfect. In many ways, the docs will be more important than the software.
Now you have the computer side working, concentrate on teaching the teachers to the point that they feel 100% comfortable. It is important at this point that no changes happen to the software. If the teachers just know how to do their lesson but don't feel comfortable then that discomfort will show strongly.
I hate to say it, but this sort of project is a lot of work even with awesome software running on blazingly fast machines. You're not targetting geeks who will overlook details such as user interface or docs because a program is cool. Of course, if you drop your standards and just deliver something that will appeal to geeks, well that's pretty easy with linux.
If you do manage to get the software, training materials and educators all working smoothly, then don't change a thing. Say openoffice 2.0 comes out and would fix a number of issues, ignore it! You can only retrain geeks fast, not people. You'd break your howto with items shifting menus or even just icons being tweaked. You'd upset your educators who don't have the depth of experience in software to cope.
Oh, and please publush everything at this point -- collaborative development doesn't just apply to software.
Good luck.
Make them easy to wipe (Score:3, Insightful)
I used to help admin a high school windows lab, and let me say this:
1) Most edutainment software, while entertaining, is really kind of a silly use for the systems. The only place it really helps is to get little kids used to using a mouse.
2) You almost never find specialty software useful after elementary school.
A good high school workstation needs:
1) A web browser - Firefox or Konqueror
2) An office suite - OpenOffice.org
3) A graphics editor - The Gimp
4) A code editor - Take your pick. I'd say something a bit easier to use for a beginning coder/HTML writer, though
Moreover, there should be a few systems in the school with
1) A dv movie editor - no idea on linux
2) An audio editor - ditto
3) Science tools for conducting lab experiments
If someone else wants to fill in those gaps, go ahead.
These obviously go where you'd need that specialization.
That's about it. What's *more* important for a lab is a system to deal with the fact that KIDS LIKE TO MESS WITH COMPUTERS.
They will change the desktop, delete important files, install crap, put keyloggers on just to play around, etc, etc.
There are a few ways to fix this:
1) Use restricted users or special software to keep them from doing any of it.
2) Have a script to re-image the machine every night.
I strongly recommend a combination of the two, leaning toward the second one. It works a lot better, and doesn't constantly annoy the students either.
I'll leave it to the linux gurus to suggest how you actually do this in linux, but I know that it can be done reasonably, and that these are the most important aspects of a high school computer lab. I think that any install recommended for this purpose doesn't need to show any flashy about linux, or how the students can compile their own kernels (although that is fun), but how it can set up an easy to use and maintainable lab much cheaper and simpler than doing the same thing in windows.
Especially push the "no MS Audits" thing. We used to waste *SO* much time worrying about those. According to my teacher, if we got caught with one unlicensed copy of anything on a system, they were legally allowed to confiscate the entire lab (although I was never entirely clear on who "they" were). Not having to keep track of MS serials sounds like plenty of reason for a switch to me, especially since you never use any of the special capabilities of Word or excel in high school that make OpenOffice migration difficult in the business world.
Some thoughts on how to set this up. (Score:3, Insightful)
Second, the best distro would likely be Fedora Core or SuSE, as these are "friendly" and geared towards the non-technical folk. Maintenance is relatively easy, stability is generally good and security seems to be fairly well taken care of.
Third, you absolutely, definitely, without question need software that can interact with Windows software and systems. That means you want Samba installed (probably as server as well as client), Open Office, Terminal Services, Evolution and readers for the various Microsoft codecs. If you want a lot of web-based activity, you'll want to make sure browsers support PDF, Flash, Shockwave and preferaby JScript.
Depending on the age-range of the student, and the activities they'll be wanting to use the computer for, you will likely want to install software developed by a variety of Universities, research laboratories and scientific institutions. What you ideally want to do is ensure the students come away with the feeling that Real Stuff can be done on any home computer, even if it is slower than NASA's latest supercomputer.
(This is vital. The biggest single turn-off in education is to come across as irrelevent factoid-pumping or useless trivia. It doesn't matter if the students end up using the programs in class or afterwards, what matters is that they don't feel they're wasting their time learning about - or with - computers.)
If you get the chance, I'd suggest installing either grid software or clustering software, plus a demo that wanders from screen to screen. That is likely to hold the attention of brighter students, who will likely want to learn how that's done so that they can do better. Again, it's all to do with interest levels.
The key with students is that you need to make a subject or a technology a drug of choice. They must want to get hooked on it and must want more so badly they can taste it. That is how you get them engaged and that is how you get them to do more than sit around like stuffed dummies.
Of course, you COULD treat them like stuffed dummies. At that point, you could save yourself time and effort by installing empty boxes rather than computers. They won't notice the difference, in that state.
Re:No Xwindows (Score:3, Funny)
Re:This is bad for the students (Score:3, Insightful)
An example: My secondary school had a lab full of Apple IIs. By the time I needed my own computer, I bought a Macintosh. % of specifics that weren't obsolete: zero.
I would argue exactly the opposite (Score:5, Insightful)
Force them them to use something else, and they no longer just know how to use windows, but how to use a *computer*.
I've heard it said that the best way to learn how to learn language is to learn many of them. This is why we teach spanish, or why a good CS program should involve several different programming languages.
The concepts for using any OS are the same, and that's what should be taught in school, not exactly where to find what button in Word. You wouldn't say that kids should skip reading Shakespeare because every newspaper in the country is a 100% modern English shop, would you?
Parent
Re:I would argue exactly the opposite (Score:4, Insightful)
Force them them to use something else, and they no longer just know how to use windows, but how to use a *computer*.
I totally agree. If you're going to be teaching "computer literacy", it's better if you can incorporate multiple operating systems, not for the sake of being a politically-correct geek or pro-Linux advocacy, but because it will help them understand computers better.
For one thing, I don't consider a person "computer literate" because they can start MS Word and type a letter. If someone don't find it easy to sit down in front of any one of the more popular modern GUIs (Gnome, KDE, Windows, or OSX), find the word-processor, and type a letter, save it, and then find the saved file, they aren't computer literate. All of these DEs use common interface elements, and they should be figure-out-able even if you've never used them before so long as you *actually* understand how to use any of the other DEs.
In addition, seeing how the different DEs handle things would be helpful in understanding what's actually going on. I know lots of Windows users who don't really know what the start menu is. I mean, they use it all the time, but they don't know that it's a convention created to make your programs easier to find, they believe that it's as simple as "If I want to access Microsoft Word, it comes up when I click on start." Since they've only been exposed to Windows, they don't understand that a computer could exist without a start menu. It would be a useful training technique to stick these people in front of a Mac, for example, and point out that the Dock serves a similar purpose-- easy access to your apps along the side of your screen (default bottom). The applications aren't actually located there, but it's just a shortcut. Likewise, you can compare Windows Shortcuts and Macintosh Aliases, or the menu along the top of the screen vs. attached to each window. Understanding the differences and similarities should demonstrate that, though each of these conventions serve a purpose, they are conventions that can be understood rather than a memorized interaction.
Now before someone jumps down my throat saying, "We're talking about basic computer literacy, not trying to force people to be computer geeks," it's not as though I'm talking about making people build Linux from scratch. All I'm saying is that you give people an introduction to some of the major desktop environments so they can see what's different and what's the same. Comparing and contrasting two things is a great way to understand both things better. Many computer UI elements are conventional, some of them arbitrary, some of them even changing. The start menu from Windows 95 is not the same as the one from XP. Files are located in different places. Menus have become self-ajusting, and features have been added/removed/altered. But all of them have similarities: files, shortcuts/aliases, menus, heirarchical file systems of directories/folders, a program to browse the file system (nautilus, finder, explorer), etc.
I'm not asking that users understand how, exactly these things work, but I also think that even a Windows-only user should understand these things well enough to sit down in front of KDE or Gnome without too much confusion before we call them "computer literate". If you want users to be "literate" enough to deal with the differences between even different versions of Windows, they really need to have *some* idea about how things work, and why they are the way they are.
Parent
Re:This is bad for the students (Score:3, Interesting)
You havn't been to the College of Computing computer lab at the Georgia Institute of Technology then. It has about 75-100 computers and dual boots RedHat and Windows 2000. Interestingly, most of the time you will find that the students actually prefer RedHat, and if you want to boot into Windows you will have to restart. Granted, this lab is mostly used by CS majors since it is located in the College of Computing, but Linux obv
Re:This is bad for the students (Score:3, Insightful)
Helloooooo have you ever been to Mexico? (Score:4, Interesting)
I live in Mexico City and we're SURROUNDED by "ducky" schools teaching you to be a "computer technician bachelor", and they teach you Windows, Word, and all that crap.
You can find cybercafe's every 2 or 3 blocks.
People in here use MS Word to use their homeworks. Go to a cafe and you'll see thousands of "Learn Word" books, booklets, magazines, etc. You can buy the tutorials off the streets.
Children in elementary already use Word for their homeworks. Most kids I know already got a MSN account (just don't ask me about their grammar or *shudder* spelling).
In other words, no, we don't need any more Microsoft training, thank you.
And with the current trends, Linux will be much more popular 10 years from now. Want to prepare them for the future? Teach them Linux.
Parent
Re:This is bad for the students (Score:3, Insightful)
So, negative moderators of the parent post, please explain to me how Mexican students are served by being force-fed a marginally-used OS in favor of one that is used by almost everybody in the business world?
Re:Hardware configurations (Score:3, Interesting)
Just for fun about a year ago I installed Linux on an old 486 SX my in-laws were throwing out. There is something surreal about combining software with up to the minute security and bug fixes with a ~10 year old computer and a ~6 year old network and sound card, and then turning around and using pretty much the same software to in