Re: K12 KLUG possibility: Demolinux possibilities

[Adam Tauno Williams <adam@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>I love this listserve!  Great response to my mailing.  Bruce started it off
>with some excellent points.
[ ...snipped....]
>>>Interestingly enough, the temporary replacement person has almost no
>>>LINUX experience and the system he inherited operates all its servers
>>>with LINUX (RH yet)!  So I shall play a larger role in the new regime
>>I hope this person is very "temporary". Drag him to some KLUG meetings.
>Great idea except that he runs his own educational consulting firm which
>gives him little free time.  His wife is a teacher in my wife's school, 
>by the way. Actually by working with him, I should be able to convince 
>him that LINUX is a great system and get him to recommend it schools for 
>whom he consults.

I take it he is an "IT" consultant?  Is he a NT guy, or does he have general
UNIX experience (but not specifially Linux)?

>>>and may be able to persuade the school  system to look closely at the
>>>advantages of converting most of the operating systems to LINUX.  It
>>>would be great to allow teachers to choose from their 'own' classroom
>>>computers which operating system to use.
>>I don't know, it could make it impossible to support.
>Yeah, guess so.
>
> >
>>>I had thought WINE would be
>>>an ideal way to implemement such a system.  I'd appreciate any
>>>information on the effectiveness of using WINE to make both MSwindoz and
>>>LINUX easily accessible on a networked classroom computer.  Maybe
>>>DemoLINUX would be a better way to go.
>>There's little point in installing Linux and then emulating windows 
>>(I know, I know, WINE is not an emulator,  blah, blah, blah....)  
>>What do they use the computers for?  There is a fair amount of "
>>educational" software for Linux, and certainly lots of utility/officy 
>>stuff.
>Good question.  Mostly word processing and spreadsheets.  The school has
>very little equipment for projection of a window onto a wall, etc. so I 
>suspect little use is made of 'educational' software.   I'll find out.

If you need max-features Star Office is certainly a workable solution.  If you
need basic functionality and machines are older gnumeric/abiword is worth a look
at this point.  I have played around with gnumeric and it has almost every
feature of excel and works great.  Abiword is currently quite a bit more spartan
but for simple documents it works.  Inter-application integration is still a
little off until the Bonobo components are more robust (very soon, gnumeric is
already quite component-ized, abiword less so, at least as far as I can tell,
documentation on the component system is rather lacking).  

Can you describe the architure of the school more completely?  Are the machines
networked? how powerful is the "server farm"?  What services to the servers
provide?  What inter-service name space to they use (LDAP, NIS, NYS, NTdom,
etc...)?  What class of machines are the clients?  Answers to these questions
really determine how easy it will be to do various things?

***If some knows a URL where is says how to actually USE the gnumeric components
from another app I would LOVE to know!!!

>There is one computer class in the middle school with a new teacher who is
>learning with the students.  I'll work on him after he becomes more
>comfortable in his new teaching assignment.

Systems and Network Administrator
Morrison Industries
1825 Monroe Ave NW.
Grand Rapids, MI. 49505