[Ubuntu-be] Flemish ministry of education distributes Ubuntu

[Philippe De Ryck]

On Sat, 2006-11-18 at 19:05 +0100, Toni Van Remortel wrote:
> On Fri, 2006-11-17 at 20:34 +0100, Philippe De Ryck wrote:
> 
> > Are there any other people on the list working in education? Maybe we
> > can team up to provide useful information or something?
> 
> I am a sysadmin @ Hogeschool Antwerpen. I tend to provide an open
> alternative for every requested software package, and I provide some
> usefull (free) tools too.
> Second, I send a (personal) request each year to the teaching staff,
> asking then to review some open alternatives for their requested
> software. This already showed off some results:
> - 3D animation: from 3D Max to Blender
> - Project planning: from MS Project to Open Workbench
> - PDF became the standard for all documents [at least better than MS
> Office documents].
> Linux is used on 40% of my servers, but as Windows starts acting weird
> last weeks, that number will increase.
> 
> And as far as I know, is there only 1 student (and female) that uses
> Ubuntu each day. She will write her thesis in LaTeX (by using Kile).

That's nice. Since I work at a high school (and only work in weekends),
I don't know about the students. My servers are linux, except for a
domain controller to manage the clients. I'm planning to move all
services except Active Directory to linux machines, but that's not for
anytime soon. Clients on xubuntu are a job for the coming weeks ...

> What info do you want to 'provide'? Open source on Windows is already
> collected in lists about 100 times.

I haven't given this topic much thought yet, but I was definitely
thinking about the usage of linux, not windows. Maybe some specific info
for schools (where good sysadmins are scarce) about the specific
advantage of linux (price, stability, flexibility) over MS windows. I
think a lot of people are scared by linux, which may not be
necessary ...

This can maybe be solved by providing complete and up to date solutions
that can replace a specific windows situation. For instance, the linux
alternative to share a folder with some specific permissions. Of course
a lot of this info already exists on the net, but may be to elaborate
for small use.

Also listings of educational and field-specific programs. Maybe a list
of programs that run in wine (and how). I'm working on one program these
weeks, but hope to get a lot more running on wine.

Don't know if it makes any sense, this is just a quick braindump :)

Philippe