Ryan Hayle writes: > Linux is the best choice for any > school computer lab--I just hate to see our funding-starved schools > wasting money on MS licenses. MCFS offers a 32-seat PIII Computer > Lab for $8700. Imagine what percentage of that is MS licenses! Must > be 20% at least! You're wrong and are spreading FUD. MS licenses for schools can be dirt cheap. I recall Windows and Office being available for around $10 each. Linux is certainly not "the best choice for any school computer lab". Here are just a couple of reasons why: Programs that are used in the real world often only run on Windows. These programs might include MS Office, CAD, circuit designers and testers, etc. While the difference between Microsoft Office and other office suites may be negligable both to a casual office user and to a power user, the differences can be huge to both a heavy office user and an average computer user. If the purpose of a course is to teach how to use a specific application, then you need to be able to run that application. Linux is not the easiest OS to fix. Schools often have to rely on teachers to fix problems with computers. Giving them something that is difficult to fix means there will be less computers for students to use. From a reliability and TCO standpoint, Apple might come out ahead. Promoting Linux is fine, but start thinking about why Linux is a better solution from all standpoints. > Anyways, I thought I would see if this topic has ever been brought up > before, either with this organization or as an independent project. http://www.lfsp.org/ > Setting up Linux labs for schools has been a big interest of > mine--especially setting up Linux Terminal Server labs on old > hardware--this alone could save schools thousands, or at the very > least allow them to open additional labs or provide a terminal in > every class. What do you think? When I was in middle school, we had 386s. They ran DOS applications like Microsoft Works just fine. Do you really need ten times more computing resources to run a word processor? The next time you have an old computer that seems like a piece of junk that can't run anything think about this: When it was new, there was a lot of software available for it that ran great. Does modern software do that much more? -- David Phillips <david at acz.org> http://david.acz.org/ _______________________________________________ TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota http://www.mn-linux.org tclug-list at mn-linux.org https://mailman.real-time.com/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list