Some personal comments on Linux in education:

At PVCC, for our Linux classes, we're using WBEL (White Box Enterprise 
Linux), a free, clone from source, of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). 
The students install it on their individual workstations.

Pros: It's a purposefully stable, well tested, not on the "Bleeding 
Edge" distro. It's very simple to install and the YUM updates are dead 
easy (MUCH nicer than RPM). It also has a very active user group.

Cons: The Gung-Ho hobbyists are put off because WBEL stays somewhat back 
from the Leading Edge of Linux development--its current version uses the 
2.4 kernel. (It's been almost 18 months since RH announced RHEL, so the 
next release (w/ 2.6 kernel) is expected "soon".

Open Office 1.1: While it is worlds better than the original Star 
Office, when compared to the current MS offerings, it is basically 
"adequate". Having taught for several years, I had 100+ MB of fairly 
complicated Word & PowerPoint documents built up. Most have now been 
converted to OO.  Pretty nearly all required some tweaking. There is 
some learning curve--Open Office is not MS Office and many things are 
done differently. Not wrong, just different. BTW, OO also has a Windows 
version which works very well. Although OO can read & write documents in 
MS Office formats, documents in its native formats are often 1/3 to 1/6 
the size of their MS Office counterparts. This can be a significant 
advantage.

-mj-

der.hans wrote:
> moin, moin,
> 
> I had a paper proposal about Free Software in education accepted by a
> conference. Now I need to write the presentation. I would like to enlist
> assistance from PLUG in order to have a better presentation.
> 
> Here's the outline I proposed. There's room to play, especially if we can
> come up with better software to use as examples.
> 
> ###
>         Present, via slides, several Free Software applications, such as:
>                 Linux
>                 KEduca
>                 OpenOffice.org
>                 Firefox/Mozilla
>         Explain the basics of licensing for Free Software
>         Explain the benefits of Free Software
>                 Open Standards and electronic inter-opereration
>                 Very reliable
>                 Excellent security
>                 Easy access to developers for feature requests
>                 There are no licensing costs to bear
>                 Due to lack of licensing costs and licensing the software
> can be use at home as well as at the school
>                 Choice
>         Demonstrate several applications
>                 Knoppix: will be using it for the presentation
>                 OpenOffice.org: will be using it for the presentation
>                 Firefox/Mozilla: current Free Software darling
>                 KStars: good eye candy
>                 Blender: great eye candy demos
> ###
> 
> I think I can handle covering GNU/Linux and web browsers.
> 
> I need some good educational software to present, though. Keduca looks
> interesting, but it's not something I use.
> 
> gcompris was recently suggested to me in a conversation about educational
> software.
> 
> I can cover what OO.o is, but I'm certainly not an office suite power
> user and I've never really used m$ apps, so I can't talk to much about
> what OO.o does or how it compares to m$ apps w/o some help.
> 
> I think i can handle licensing and the benefits of Free Software :).
> 
> Ideas for good demonstrations are most welcome.
> 
> I might move to Ubuntu rather than Knoppix for the presentation, but that
> doesn't matter as long as whatever I use works :).
> 
> I also want to have CDs there for people attending. Likely they will be
> either Knoppix or Ubuntu for the GNU/Linux stuff and then either the
> OpenCD or GNU Win II for the m$ side of things.
> 
> BTW, I'm planning on doing this presentation for the Feb east side
> meeting so I can get some practice :).
> 
> ciao,
> 
> der.hans
> 

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