I go to a programming school, where there were computers running ancient windows 8 and some were on windows 10, they ran really slow and were completely unrelaible when doing the tasks that are required, those computers in question had either i5-4750 (I think?) or i7-4970 so running windows 10 with all its bloat was not going to be an easy task for em, so long story short I decided to talk to the principal about it explaining why linux is so much better than windows and gave him reasons why linux will be better for us for education and he agreed after considering it for a bit, he let me know that some students play roblox or minecraft in middle of the lesson and he asks if linux would stop em from doing that, I stated that as long as they dont know how to work with wine/lutris or know any specific linux packages that run windows games on linux they should not be able to play in the middle of lessons. he gave me the green light to do it, so I spent like 3 days migrating like 20+ computers to linux (since I had to set them up and install some required applications for them) in the last day where I was doing a last check up on the PCs to make sure they are in working order, there was a computer having a problem of which where it didnt boot, I let the principal know about this to get permission to work on it, he said yes, so after some troubleshooting I realized the boot order was all screwed, so since Ive worked with arch before I knew how to fix it, I booted up linux mint live image, chrooted, and fixed the boot order and computer went back to life, prinicipal came in checked on everything to make sure everything works, told me to wait for a bit, and then came back and paid me for his troubles (was a bit of a surprised since I expected nothing of the sort), the next day I came to school, sat down, turned PC on, noticed something was in the trash bin, opened it, found “robloxinstall.exe” on it, told the principal about it, he was pleased with it, so now 2 weeks later he seems now to be confident about linux, as he told me there is another class he is considering to move to linux.
so my question here would be: does this mean linux now is ready for the education sector?
(considering now, that I got a win win situation, I get to use an OS that I like in school, students gets to focus on the lessons instead of slacking.)
There is way to do this that works with even older computers and is easy to manage.
That’s with Edubuntu and thin-client computing using the Linux Terminal Server project, LTSP.
In that model, you install Linux once on a server. Each computer in the lab is set to boot over the network from the server.
This way there is one computer to maintain, the users can’t access root and all the storage is centralized.
Even old computers with low CPU and RAM and no hard drive can make good thin clients.
A number of schools have been using this approach for 15+ years.
15+… I was there, Gandalf… We had these kinds of setups 25+ years ago. How time flies.
Before that, it was often XTerm style systems. The local machine only booted an XServer and then connected to a central UNIX system. All programs ran on the UNIX server, and were rendered on the XTerm/XServer you were sitting at.
The original XServer systems were efficient enough to run over serial lines, not just Ethernet.
Another setup was to put multiple monitors/keyboards/mice on a single UNIX/Linux tower and have it launch multiple XServer sessions so you could have a single computer with up to six people sitting at it.
I also managed a Rembo lab for a bit. It used a PXE shim OS to get a menu from the Rembo server. From there, you could boot the main OS, or download a new hard drive image from the server. I would build new drive images and upload them to the server, then updating the lab would mean rebooting the computers and clicking a “grab latest” button. It actually worked very well for distributing OSes. We had both Linux and Windows images students could pull down.
Lab management at scale is a continual struggle to keep everything functional and patched.
Woohoo, some hacker kid is about to install Sober and Prism and will be the hero for everyone.
My kid’s elementary school has a computer club handling all the PCs. The other day they were surprised to hear that the PCs they were playing GCompris, Ktuberling, Pingus, Super Tux, Tuxpaint and Tux Kart on are running Linux.
another example of: one of the best ways to teach children is to trick them.
try to force them to use linux and the terminal? booooring, hell no….
give them linux computers without games?
they’re 1337 haxors in two weeks… with skills that will help them for life….
especially if they ever get locked in a building with velociraptors….that’s how I learned firewalls and networking lmao
couldn’t access my games, so I found ways around the firewalls and network blocks, just to play on coolmathgames lmao
Same. School firewall blocked based on host names, so we all learned a lot about the hosts file so we could manually set all of the IPs Minecraft needed to authenticate.
Ooh clever. I was able to get around mine by opening sites in an iframe, I made a bookmarklet for it
Just a funny story, but, I use an Ubuntu laptop as my work computer as a teacher, and once, while I was helping another student with work, a student opened my laptop and began trying to install Roblox. She got far enough to figure out it wouldn’t work, and started searching for how to install it. When I came over she was trying to figure out how to set up Wine. She got pretty close to getting it working before I came over. I was secretly pretty impressed with how fast she figured it out. It couldn’t have been more than a few minutes.
that’s actually an interesting story, makes you wonder if kids nowadys do get exposed to linux first and not windows, would actually learn it faster than having to unlearn windows first?
you’re lucky to have an open-minded principle
Principal*
Not being pedantic, just thought I’d let you and others know there are multiple ways to spell this word.
I will be pedantic. There is only one way to spell each word; principal and principle are different words (though they share a root).
lol I thought this was a guerrilla IT warfare post where you snuck in and did it, but you actually did it with permission… 😂
Linux was always ready for the education sector. I think already for 10 years now.
Now I want to attend your school!
