Good news, I successfully installed freeduc 1.3 on all the computers of the schools Jean Moulin in blagnac (it's my kid's school) This school if a primary school for 6-10 years old.
Before going on the technical side, first, let me describe the organisation. I have convinced the head of the school using gcompris as an introduction. They wanted to go further and provide more educational content for the kids. I did demo freeduc CD and they were very impressed, it's much more software than they have and no more CDROMs to manage.
Last, I offered to demo the new Software environment to the 'end of year' show where all the parents are invited to the scool and the kids make a show. They agreed and I even make a public announcement for that.
I had burned 10 freeduc CD and offered to sell them on behalf of the school. I fixed the price to 6 Euros and kept 1 Euros for the CD. They were all sold and I give back 50 Euros to the school. The money will be used to buy memory for some PCs. I had more request for them and one teacher proposed to give parent the opportunity to buy CD on request in september.
The parents realy appreciate that they can have the same software that the one used at school. They were impressed by the demo and were always asking me 'but I also have this software, it's on the CD, excellent, and this one also...' It also pushes the computer admin to go further and study very well what freeduc provides. He is afraid that the kids may know more than he does;). More seriously, it gives a good oportunity to show to the parents that their kids are in good hands and they are 'using' the computers.
Now on the technical side, they have 7 PC with the minimum configuration being PII233 with 3GB hard drive. My first plan was to install abuledu but I have been unable to raise the fund to pay a descent server. This option out, I tried to install a Mandrake Linux and keep windows in place so keeping 1.5 GB for Windows. It works but I had no more space left to install anything usefull for the kids. I decided to go further and convinced them to install freeduc and swap out Windows. They agreed !
First, I installed freeduc 1.3 on one PC using knoppix hard disk install script (knx-hd-install as root in ctrl-alt-f1 console). Then configured it well for my purpose.
The main issues once installed is the default language that I wanted to be french and xfce/freeduc menu as default. I was lucky to have a LAN with an autonomous ISDN router so that I had intrnet acces easily.
I did some customisation by :
Once ready, this first PC becomes my Master Hard Disk. I remove it and go to PC 2, plug its harddrive in place of the CDROM (master on 2nd IDE bus), plug the Master HD in place of the master ide disk on 1st IDE bus. I boot the PC on the Master disk, log in freeduc go root and run dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdc bs=512k (bs is blocksize and is important to speed the copy.) It takes about 15 minutes to copy the Disk. I copies all the partitions and its really a disk clone. In my case all HD have the same capacity, this is important.
I reboot on the new PC, I log in and configure the network using the knoppix netcardconfig utility (netcardconfig as root) I specify a hostname with 'hostname pc3' as root.
And I can use my master HD to duplicate this on all the PC.
Now they have freeduc with about 40 well organised application. They will use abiword for the word processing since openoffice.org do not start on freeduc and anyway, abiword is more than they need and much lighter.
Still missing, I have not been abble to setup the printer. I try the knoppix menu for that but cups was not installed. trying apt-get install cups brings me to a 'no way' from debian who says is no more there ?? Help needed there.
They also have a scanner on parallel port (it seems supported on Linux), but starting xsane, it detected nothing. Help again. WHAT IS THE BRAND NAME/MODEL OF IT? I KNOW WELL EPSON GT6000 on // port
The great news is that schools are waiting for us to help them make a better usage of their PCs. I found out freeduc to be excellent for this. The duality school and home usage goes beyond all my expectations. It's like if parents, teachers, sysadmin were all waiting of this. Now we are ready, let's put back the freedom in our schools.
Hope this experience will help you do the same to the classroom near you.
Bruno.
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