UNIX-based solutions in schools.

Hi folks!

I'm looking for persons how can give me reflections on how UNIX-based solutions in schools work out. My school has always been running on windows/novell solutions and now I wonder how the UNIX-solutions get along.

How does people without good computer-experience get along with the systems? Does it take them long time to get into the system?

Are there any problems with computers that "crashes" or whole systems that do so? Are there alot of downtime? (I suppose not, but you never know..)

What are the main advantages/disadvanteges? Why?

Happy for all answers!

good post legend. I'm curious to see this myself.

That's funny, there is a project going on in Norway where these guys have created their own disto based on Debian. The distro is specially made for the norwegian schools and will be very easy to use for newbies.

Well, since your're a swede you might want to look at this norwegian site. It might give you some answers to your questions.....

The link

Hey, I found a similar project for the schools in the US. It's called K12Linux. Interessting... These people should really get credit for contributing to socitety! They put in quite a few hours, and they do it for free!

The costs for a school to service UNIX servers is significantly higher than that of novell or microsoft. Especially microsoft due to the popularity of the MCSE certificate which has now really lost its market value due to the abundance of people with it. There for thanks to good ol' capitalism, when supply is high and demand high, prices are LOW.

My school runs WinNT/Novell/Red Hat/Mandrake and Suse.
We have a huge server room with Linux DHCP servers and Linux Firewalls and allso a few computer rooms running Mandrake for the students. They can do everything that any wintel machine can.
Surf the web with Netscape and make reports/presentations with StarOffice.
In 1 year they want the entire school powered by only Novell and Linux.
Microsoft has raised the prices for schools and educational institutions since the Euro arrived

Are you talking highschool or college? Not that there would really be that much of a difference.

When I went to Grand Valley, the mojority of the campus was windows machines. We did have 4 seperate labs though. Two Mac, one unix, and one "data com." The mac labs were obviously for the graphics peole. The unix lab was for CS/IS, and the data com lab was for special projects.

You had to have permission to use the unix systems. We started with about 30 NeXT machines. When I graduated, we had 4 NeXT machines, and 40 HPuX machines. Anyway, most of the students that had access to these machines didn't have to much of a problem. They were configured to work like any other point and click device when you sat down at it. Of course once you were comfortable with it, there was a lot more the point and click, but you didn't have to know unix to use the machines. Like I said, the lab was all CS/IS majors, but most of us had never used any unix before. This was also back in 93/94, so not many people had linux experience either.

BTW, the "data com" lab was a small room set asside for networking projects. IT started out as 3 sun machines. Eventually (1996/1997), 4 of us put up another 1/2 dozen linux boxes in the room and encouraged more people to use them. We ran different projects about distributed computing, programming, and even a few security/hacking projects. Well, the current room is described here: http://www.csis.gvsu.edu/ITL/ If I can figure out where I put my picture of it, I will put a link for that also.