Convincing a school district to migrate from OS X to Ubuntu orEdubuntu

[Mark Haney]

NoOp wrote:
> On 11/19/2008 06:26 AM, Chan Chung Hang Christopher wrote:
> 
>> You just need to be able to replace Powerpoint and you are good to go on 
>> Windows. OO handles word processing and spreadsheets well enough and is 
>> compatible enough to replace Word and Excel for probably 80% of the 
>> users of Word/Excel. Once a Powerpoint replacement gets up there...it's 
>> rip out M$ Office time. For now, I install OO so that it can open files 
>> that Word/Excel won't open. The best part being that those files were 
>> created by the same Word/Excel programs that refuse to open them.
>>
>> Since we moving to Ubuntu desktops...we are blowing M$ Office away. No, 
>> no M$ Office under Wine.
>>
> 
> Ummm... OOo Impress will open .ppt files, and save as .ppt.
> 
> 
> 

We regularly create presentation in OOo Impress and export them as PPTs 
if needed, or just use OpenOffice on our laptops.  In fact, my wife (a 
4th grade Teacher) has refused to use the school's desktops because PPT 
doesn't do what Impress does for certain things.

In fact, sadly, my oldest daughter nearly failed a computer applications 
class because, while I do have XP at home (for games), I haven't used 
Office in years and the last version I have is a pirated Office97 disc).

The organization I work for (ERC Broadband...shameless plug) works very 
closely with K-College educational systems in Western NC and one of the 
biggest jobs we have (and the most questions we get) are how to get away 
from MS.  Sadly, the reason is more because 'Vista sucks' than anything 
else, but anything to get open source in the door, IMHO.

Colleges, not so much really, but we do spend a lot of time designing 
systems in linux and *BSD for research projects.  With the Public 
schools it's more about saving money and getting something that 'just 
works'.

The good thing here is that more and more IT people are talking it up 
and the desktop is finally starting to get to a good point for casual 
users now.

Personally, for the schools use I recommend RHEL servers and Fedora 
desktops.  NOT because they are better (to me it's insane to use 
anything but Gentoo....) but because I have many many more tools, 
scripts, what have you that I know work on those OS's than I do anything 
else.

Just my $0.02 as the husband of a teacher.


-- 
Frustra laborant quotquot se calculationibus fatigant pro inventione 
quadraturae circuli

Mark Haney
Sr. Systems Administrator
ERC Broadband
(828) 350-2415

Call (866) ERC-7110 for after hours support