In my opinion running Linux on the server(s) is a great idea, but perhaps not on the desktops. Maybe giving the option, a dualboot or suchlike. But the reality is when you leave school you're gonna be required to know about Windows apps. Even though Linux is becoming more common I don't think it is at the point where you could suddenly switch all the students from Windows to Linux (maybe that should be that the students aren't at the point). Especially when alot of the students are not very computer literate. I know that for a fact having left school this year.
This is often touted as being the big problem, but I'm not really so sure myself. Schools aren't supposed to teach products. If you want in-depth training in a particular package, do a course in that package. The point of a school - and a university - is to provide an education in the concepts required, not the tools required. I know that one of the largest complaints from Photoshop users about The Gimp is the retraining time needed. Without going into the fact that you can get The Gimp in win32 anyway, or without discussing relative merits of the two applications, if you are doing a course on graphic design, and The Gimp will do everything you need, then why not use it? Likewise, if you are doing a component on spreadsheets, you dont really need to use Excel. Especially as Gnumeric is pretty damn close to feature-equivalent to Excel, the only thing it misses (ha!) is VBA support, and it has perl, python, tcl support instead. Again: Schools should not be about products. There is no real reason for a school to teach anything at all using proprietary products *if* a feature-suitable open source one exists already. Do *NOT* let this argument stop you using OO.o or Gnumeric/Abiword instead of MS OFfice. Do *NOT* let it stop you using The Gimp instead of Photoshop, and *NOT* let it stop you using Linux on the desktop instead of Windows. Of course, if the NZQA requirements state that MS software must be used, then the NZQA requirements must be changed. The reason I'm not running Linux on the desktop yet, is the vast library of educational software my school has (primary school) that is windows only. If all we needed were word processing / spreadsheet / publications / graphics editing / email / web browsing, then we'd have a fully linux network already. My 2 cents. :P Daniel