Stories related to Linux use in education.

 UK Government criticised for stifling open sauce in schools, Dec 23, 2006

OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE is being kept out of schools through government policy which "stifles innovation and locks users into high cost software," open sorcerers claim.

I'm writing this post using Fedora Core 6 on my new laptop. I've been running some flavor of Linux for a while now and I think I've finally settled on Fedora Core since it's doing such a nice job with both multimedia and office productivity tasks.

The NSW (Australia) Department of Education and Training (DET) may increase the penetration of Linux on its 165,000 desktop fleet because open source is "clearly an industry trend".

It looks like the education space could be the first, real place where Linux could grab beachhead in the desktop PC market.

In a bid to increase the number of Linux users in the CNMI, Northern Marianas College faculty member David Rumptz will be giving away at least 20 desktop computers to interested Linux users.

With 4,000 students and just 21 computers, the Cotton Hill Girls High School in the south Indian city of Trivandrum wouldn't appear to be at the vanguard of anything related to information technology. Yet the 71-year-old school is abandoning Microsoft (MSFT) Windows software in favor of its free, open-source rival, Linux.

A B.C. post-secondary institution said it intends to grow the number of Linux machines in its data centre as it replaces older hardware infrastructure with blade servers.

Today, the consumer can walk into almost any retailer selling electronics and buy a computer with Windows (and usually MS Office) pre-installed — no muss, no fuss. Finding an Apple retailer is much more of a challenge but at least the consumer knows about Apple and can find a retailer if they are looking. How easy is it to find a Linux workstation retailer?

The CMS committee began to look at open-source projects in earnest, Hitlin said. It appraised Bricolage, Mason and OpenCMS but deemed them not quite right. Plone soon came to the forefront.

OpenLab, a Linux distribution widely used in education environments, today released a beta of the forthcoming OpenLab 4 release.

A Welsh county council has brokered a deal to provide open source email to up to 40,000 pupils and teachers.

After the cola ban, it is now the turn of Microsoft to log out of Kerala. Children in 12,500 high schools in the state, India’s most literate, will not be taught Windows. Instead, instructors are lining up Linux for them. This is because Kerala has chalked out a plan for migrating its high school students to free software platforms in three years.

Developers from the Debian, Ubuntu, and Sword Projects have been working since 2005 on Ichthux, a GNU/Linux distribution aimed at Christians and ministries.

Hargadon Computer will get a lot busier in about three weeks, after kids are back in school and teachers and school administrators realize they need to do something with their outdated classroom PCs.

Based on the successes of the tuXlabs schools Linux project in South Africa, the team members have started a company to continue the work.

The rules of good panel etiquette get kind of twisted at places like LinuxWorld, where audience members don't so much raise questions as share, ahem, points of view. But actually, that's a good thing.

Nigeria has officially ordered and paid for one million of the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) devices, according to the Nigerian Vanguard newspaper.

I asked before about success stories of schools using Open Source Software. Here's a few examples with dollars attached.

A Toronto high school teacher who had been running a Linux lab for five years was forced to close it down last week by the school’s administration following the implementation of a Microsoft-based, school board-wide computing initiative

How many MIT scientists does it take to build a Linux cluster? Just one, at least in the school's Department of Chemical Engineering.

Naturally, you'd expect widespread Linux use at MIT. Over the past few years, MIT's Information Systems & Technology (IS&T) group, including Reed's team, have streamlined the process of installing, updating, and running Linux on student's and faculty machines.

My sister Erika's second grade primary school class had a problem: it had four old computers running Microsoft Windows 98, and no educational software for the computers. The computers were used mainly for viewing children's educational Web sites, and playing simple Macromedia Flash games. I decided to introduce free software into her classroom. The results were heart-warming.

I'm an art professor, and last semester I embarked on an exciting new adventure by erasing Mac OS X from nearly all of the Macintoshes in our digital media lab and installing Ubuntu in its place.

The Korean government plans to pick Kwangju this month as the nation's first ``Linux City,'' where open-source software will become the mainstream programs.

Linux may be struggling to gain a foothold in the primary and secondary education market but one Sydney school is setting itself higher grades - all without Microsoft.

Trying to convince schools that open source software won't be a management headache is proving an uphill struggle

The government agency has been accused of excluding open source software from its educational software databases, despite highlighting the money that could be saved

The Korean government plans to select a city and a university late next month where open-source software like Linux will become the mainstream operating programs.

Head teachers from across the country are visiting a school in Essex to see its IT infrastructure, which includes a fully open source computer suite that was built for under £1,000

Kalibonca is packaging free Linux educational software on disks that let PC owners bypass the Windows operating system.

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