RfD: FSFe-education [FSFE projects]

Lord Alistair Davidson, part time deity lord_inh at yahoo.co.uk
Tue May 22 02:28:22 UTC 2001


Olivier Berger wrote:
> 
> This solves the problem of  system adminsitration, but not of the
> educational applications, that teachers and students really need.

Well, at my sister's school they currently have a WinNT server with
Win98 on all the boxes. They use MS Office for most things, and Visual
BASIC for teaching programming. I believe the art and music departments
have specialist programs too.

Now, getting GNU/Linux on to the servers shouldn't be hard. The
engineers who were setting them up wanted to use GNU/Linux, but the
council told them to use WinNT instead (this is hearsay, but I believe
it to be true).

The trouble after that is the desktop. There is a very powerful argument
that says that the students should be learning to use Windows, because
that's waht most of them will use at work.

However, if we can overcome that then it's easy-ish. IIRC Star Office is
libre, so that can easily replace MS Office. The Gimp is as good as any
other art software out there. I don't know what GNU/Linux has in the way
of music software, though. There's a number of options for programming.
There's a project right now to make a VB-alike called K-BASIC. There's
the GCC of course, but it doesn't have pretty pictures like VB. Borland
are porting (have ported?) Delphi, but that's not Free itself AFAIK.

A GNU/Linux + Star Office + the Gimp + [programming language] + [some
Free music program] would be a lot cheaper than a comparable
windows-based system. Considering how cash-strapped schools are in many
places, selling that to them shouldn't be hard.

-- 
Lord [INSERT NAME HERE]
"I can't do everything / But I'd do anything for you. / I can't do
anything / 'Cept be in love with you." -- Dire Straits, Romeo and Juliet
"She's a moonchild / Gathering the flowers in a garden. / Lovely
moonchild / Drifting on the echoes of the hours." -- King Crimson,
Moonchild



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