Stories related to Linux use in education.

 Aussies give open source golden crumbs from Microsoft table, Aug 28, 2009

Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has begun fulfilling a promise to give every high school student a laptop, offering Lenovo machines with Windows 7 and some open source applications.

If you need a break from Windows land, then linux-for-education.org provides a wealth of learning tools, both for the open source community and educators in general.

In today's recession-troubled times, companies, small businesses in particular, and schools are looking to drive down overhead costs. Usually this is achieved by releasing employees (in businesses) or cutting educational programs (music and art - never sports). An overlooked aspect of overhead costs are the ones associated with Information and Communication Technology.

The proceedings of the Linux Symposium 2009 provide wide-ranging background information on Linux

Teachers and school administrators who have to be creative about acquiring affordable educational software will find plenty to choose from in the world of open source.

Recently I had a bit of a run-in with my daughter’s high school. She was undergoing an eShool class over the summer titled “Computer Applications” and it turns out the class only actually “covered” Office Suites - namely Microsoft Office. Now in our household we do not own a copy of Microsoft Office. Instead we use OpenOffice and have never had an issue - that is, until now.

Red Hat is sowing the seeds of open source software development among college professors.

A National Science Foundation grant project developed largely by graduate students at the University of California, Santa Barbara, has resulted in Eucalyptus Systems, a three-month-old startup which has produced new open-source cloud infrastructure software that is a key component in Ubuntu 9.04 and its upcoming 9.10 edition.

Berlin's art colleges are completely switching over to Linux.

Open-source software in schools isn't just a good idea, it's becoming a financial necessity if we're to keep enough teachers for our kids in classrooms. So, it's particular good timing that Sugar Labs and openSUSE have released free Linux distributions expressly designed for education.

The University of Toronto's SciNet consortium, which provides supercomputing oomph for colleges, universities, and research hospitals across Canada, will today announce that it has selected IBM's iDataPlex servers using Intel's new "Nehalem EP" Xeon 5500 processors to create the most powerful supercomputer in Canada.

The $369 version weighs 2.9 pounds and runs Ubuntu Linux 8.1 on an 8-GB solid-state disk (SSD) drive with a three-cell battery that lasts 3.5 hours.

The "open" characteristic of open source tools helps enhance, rather than complicate, the teaching process, say its exponents.

The Linux desktop is in danger of extinction. There's still a glimmer of hope in the unlikeliest of places: Schools.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation reported over the last couple of days that a Boston College computer science student has been targeted by BC police largely on the basis of using Linux. Boston College police seized several items, citing his use of Linux as probable cause supporting their actions.

The Dutch ministries of Economic Affairs (EZ) and Education, Culture & Science (OCW) find it undesirable that students in the secondary vocational education system (MBO) are only being taught to use closed software systems from a few companies. Current ICT courses within the MBO schools have now started to pay attention to open source material. Heemskerk writes that they are negotiating with Novell on free support for the open source operating system Linux within the MBO schools.

It comes as both a surprise and not a surprise that the New South Wales (NSW) state government chose a "safe bet" of Lenovo and Microsoft to supply many thousands of taxpayer-funded laptops to secondary school students. Was Linux ever on the short list?

Ubuntu has reached an incredible state of maturity and schools can quite happily use it without fear of obsolescence in 6 months.

Educational institutions are consistently cited as one of the best places for open source to take root and flourish.

The U.S. has a new stimulus package that is set to change much of the face of the national. Like it or hate it, this "bundle of funds" is headed into a number of critical sectors of the US economy with the idea of jumpstarting our economy – including schools.

Do I use Windows XP Home or Edubuntu for the classroom?

My oldest son is a fairly typical 15 year-old end user. He’s on the computer all the time, has a decent idea how to get things done, and is largely not interested in the inner workings of hardware or operating system. He, like most other users, just wants the computer to work.

For two large school districts – in Canada and the U.S. – Linux and other open source software is the plat du jour on the education menu.

Linux has a lot to offer cash-strapped education departments. It’s free, for one thing. It is naturally secure with distinctly non-privileged accounts and it is easily centrally administered. However, the experiences by schools that have gone this route are a mixed bag. Let us investigate some and see what lessons there are.

Anyone who has thought that, as nice as the Linux-powered One Laptop Per Child computers are for the target market of third-world children, they'd also make a lot of sense for U.S. kids too, is in good company. The mayor of Birmingham, Ala., Larry Langford, had the same thought and the result is that the city will be deploying 15,000 OLPCs to its school system.

Educational institutions will increase spending on open-source software and services over the next few years, but that doesn't mean proprietary software will be left in the dark, according to a new report covering 14 countries.

A British educational report suggests the upgrade would increase costs and create software compatibility problems while providing little benefit.

Human-powered computing team supplies a supercomputer with enough juice to model a nuclear fusion reaction.

It is hard to believe that my 10th and 11th Grade Vietnamese and foreign students at the American International School in Saigon have been using Linux for about one month now. I am very impressed at how fast they were able to use Linux in a short period of time.

For nearly a year, Fresno Unified school officials searched for a laptop that wouldn't clutter a student's desk.

Video Furnace has licensed its MPEG-4-based video distribution system to OSTN, a student-produced video network. Video Furnace System 4 uses Internet2 or private, multicast-enabled Ethernet networks to deliver multicast feeds to desktops, regardless of the operating system, browser, or plug-in.

With its new affiliate, the Linux Professional Institute (LPI) intends to promote the certification of Linux professionals across Europe. LPI-Central Europe will be responsible for Germany, Austria, Switzerland as well as for the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg.

The UK computer agency Becta is advising schools not to sign licensing agreements with Microsoft because of alleged anti-competitive practices.

“Software distributives, developed on the basis of Linux and tested within 2007-2008 might actually be installed in schools by 2009 end”

Many other countries are turning to Linux and open-source for their school-house computer needs, and now there's a conference for those who want to bring it to schools in the U.S.

The One Laptop per Child's XO, better known as the $100 laptop, gets most of the headlines but NComputing is showing in Macedonia, with its Ubuntu Linux based servers and virtual PC terminals, that there's more than one way to get inexpensive Linux desktops into students' hands.

France’s ministry for education has migrated 2,500 servers across its 30 local education authorities to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, in line with the ministry's open-source investment strategy to avoid problems associated with vendor lock-in.

A German state has signed a major contract with Novell for the supply of Linux server and desktop products to 33 universities.

The Electronics Corporation of Tamil Nadu (ELCOT) is deploying Suse Linux Enterprise across 30,000 desktops and 1,880 servers in schools in southern India.

In a first for South Africa, Linux Holdings have launched a full-time Linux Training Academy.

An experiment is underway in a number of St. Petersburg schools to install Linux OS in computer rooms with by September 1st. However, it is not clear so far who will be funding the program. A number of computers with Linux OS already appeared in Alexander Ponosov’s school.

Designed as an add-on “EDU-CD” to accompany the upcoming 10.3 release of openSUSE, the so-called “SLEducator” is designed to “[ease] the installation and configuration of an educational network and student desktop.”

The dead hand of monopoly has fallen on our schools. According to this morning's Herald, it seems that supposedly vast Vista profits aren't enough for Microsoft. Now they're taxing Apple computers too.

The San Diego Unified School District has selected Novell's SLED 10 (SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop) as the standard platform for its "Always-On Learning Initiative," a mobile computing initiative intended to help students achieve academic success and prepare them for life and work in the 21st century.

While experience tells us that Linux, no matter how light the distro, will not turn an old computer into a modern screamer, this will certainly be a step up for students who would not have otherwise had access to a PC at home.

The technology audit and firing come as the district attempts to transition many of its computers from the Windows ME operating system to a Linux operating system.

Each computer will also include a free set of software which will include a word processing application, a photo manipulation application and a few games along with a Linux operating system.

While there are several different distributions of Linux specifically aimed at educators and students, they are not all created equal. Most, however, bear striking similarities -- both in the basic code and in the assortment of software offerings bundled into the distribution. Though each flavor of Linux has its own pros and cons, that variety may actually work to a user's advantage.

The group wanted to make a point that Open Source software works on Windows machines, not just on computers running a version of GNU/Linux, a popular alternative operating system.

In short, the absence of high-performance commercial desktop software hurts Linux.

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