On Fri, Aug 22, 2003 at 07:46:36AM +1200, Terry Cole wrote:
Folks, With all the MS problems/virus as well as Exchange problems I have been having, I am keen to try a Linux option at our high school. I have RH 9 Web server that performs great, no downtime. I have spoken with our board chair who is also on my side.
For workstations and server what OS and Apps should I use? We need 'Office', 'Corel', 'Internet', 'E-mail', 'Publisher'.
I want to put a small network together to show the staff.
Any suggestions would be great. I know nothing about linux + schools, so feel free to ignore me :p I think there are 2 separate angles here... firstly the general "linux on the desktop" stuff, and then the education-specific stuff. For linux on the desktop, I don't think there's much to add over the normal suggestions... show that the apps can (mostly) interoperate with Microsoft clients, eg gnumeric/openoffice/kspread can all handle excel files pretty well (apart from macros), and same with word documents. For the education specific stuff, you could have a look at the DebianEdu project, which is dedicated to putting together apps with some educational value. While you might not use their packages, you can at least see what sort of educational software is out there for linux. http://wiki.debian.net/?DebianEdu If you want something quick and dirty to show off (I'm not sure if these would be too advanced for most high school students or not): 1) you might try the "molecule" xscreensaver - it shows the makeup (in 3d) of molecules such as poisons, drugs, alcohol and chemical warfare agents, as well as "more boring" compounds like anti-freeze, insecticides and DNA and the nucleotides. 2) "lightspeed" is a small program that shows what an object (by default a cube) would look like due to relativity effects if you were travelling at arbitrary speeds (eg 0.9 the speed of light). Hint - click on the speed units to change the units to "c" - speed of light. 3) gnuplot (for plotting functions and data from files) $ gnuplot # plot a sin function and a cos function, between x=0 and x=3*2pi gnuplot> plot [0:6*pi] sin(x)/x, cos(x) # draws a spiral, calculating x and y from the single "t" parameter gnuplot> set parametric gnuplot> plot [0:4*pi] sin(t)*t, cos(t)*(t**2) Not sure if they're the sort of suggestions you wanted, but that ya go. John McPherson