Mexico School with edubuntu

[James Call]

Hello, I see that you are doing a study about the use of thin clients
in schools.  I just took over the computer lab at my children's
bi-lingual(spanish/english) school here in Mexico.  We have a pretty
limited budget and need about 30 workstations.  To go with Dell or
something like that we figure that we need about $500 USD per
workstation giving us a grand total of about $15000 USD.

I ran into edubuntu a LTSP install of UBUNTU and we bought a dual core
AMD 4200+ with 4 gig of memory that cost about $1000 USD and we
already have 6 donated PII from a local middle school.  We have some
others who are donating old PIII and PII computers to use.  We will
buy some off of ebay.  With monitors, computers, mice, keyboards and
all, we expect to spend about $3000 USD to get the whole lab up. 
Financially it makes a ton of cents.

Now what about kids and linux.  Children and computers work like
children and dogs.  You just put them together and it works.  Since we
got the first 7 computers working, the kids all want to use them.  We
are using OpenOffice, gnu paint, and the basic install from edubuntu. 
The older kids like celestia.  Now we just need to get our proxy set
up to limit to only whitelisted sites and we are going to let the kids
use the internet on about 100-200 sites. We are also struggling to get
edubuntu to configure our HP laserjet 1020.

The kids love having their own login and all of their preferences are
saved.  We have only beed working for since the beginning of the year
2006.  I expect to have it all up and running within the next 4 weeks.
 I would definately recommend edubuntu to anyone who needs to get a
school setup.


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Thanks, James