06.23.09
Linux Options
Get creative! Think of novel ways to incorporate Linux systems into the existing school with Windows-centric technology infrastructure… Here are some strategies/tricks I’ve done to bring in Linux through the back door and onto the campus.
"Be verwy quiet…. huhuhuhuhuhu. " Whoever said that Elmer Fudd wasn't an Open Source strategist! He saw the writing on the wall and now you too can devise a sinister plot to infiltrate the dread world of Redmond, be tricksy, my preciousssss. Here are some strategies I've used so far to bring Linux onto my high school campus:
- If your school accepts donations of older, useable computers and the donor did not included the original Windows licensed CD (with the holographic license info), what choice do you have but wipe the drive and load a Linux distribution? Someone may try to remind you that M$ has an amnesty program of sorts for PCs donated to schools–the PC has to be able to run Windows 98. Whooo-boy!
- School libraries can always use an extra OPAC/card catalog search workstation. This is easily setup if the OPAC system has an optional web interface: install Linux, set up an auto-logon account, autostart a web browser with a home page pointing to the web opac software. You could also play with WINE to see if the Windows-based OPAC software can run on the Linux system.
- Set up a Smoothwall (or IPCop) firewall system with two network cards: one NIC connected to a campus network port and the other NIC connected to a small network switch or hublet. Plug a wireless router into the hublet and have the Smoothwall box provide the IP address and DNS (via DHCP) for anyone connecting to the wireless network. Have the Smoothwall box do transparent proxy to the content filtering system for the District. Have the wireless router use MAC deny/allow access–students, faculty/staff, visitors have to fill out a form, provide the MAC # to a library personnel. Plug the MAC # into the wireless router with the option to allow connections to known, MAC-address registered systems. Cool thing about Smoothwall is that also provides proxy caching so you can also look through the web activity going through the firewall box to the District.
- One of the coolest, best uses of Linux and older hardware is setting up a computer lab with a K12LTSP server/thin client configuration. A "thin client" is an old PC (or a PC set up as a "terminal"), no hard disk, minimal amount of RAM, low-end processor (486 or Penium 1–really!) and either a network card (a 3COM 3c905c works very nicely) that can boot to a remote server via PXE code on the NIC or with a bootable floppy disk that has the PXE boot code written to it. The "server" is a fairly beefy box that has two network cards (one for the school network, another that connects to the lab network infrastructure, i.e. swtich or hublet), 50 MB RAM for each thin client that will connect to it, good sized hard drive to store the settings and data for each client system that logs in. The thin client systems boot up and connect to the server. The server sends down enough of the Linux kernel to have the thin client start up an X-Windows session. The client gets a logon screen and the user logs in with a predefined user account. The client saves files (OpenOffice.org files, AbiWord files, or KOffice Project files) to the server, accesses the Internet through the server–all at astounding speeds! K12-LTSP is based on Red Hat Linux, but others have set up LTSP for education environments using a Debian-based server.
