Episode 87 - Interview with Cory Jaeger

[Chess]

In this episode: an interview with Cory Jaeger, Network Manager at D.C. Everest School District about Linux and open source software in education; three audio Listener Tips, one on Gutsy Gibbon tweaks, one on changing hypertext links in OpenOffice.org, and another on recording with command line tools such as sox.

Cory also provided a long list of additional helpful links located here.

http://www.linuxreality.com/podcast/episode-87-interview-with-cory-jaeger/

[davijordan]

That was an excellent interview! Having worked in a college school district for almost 10 years, I highly recommend his suggestion about soft-pedaling linux and let whomever see the benefits as it happens. We were mostly a windows shop and talking linux to IT professionals  who have invested themselves in only Microsoft was a losing cause for me. I will use and support any os, but I prefer linux.

I also highly recommend looking at ltsp even for home if you have several computers, .  Just one benefit alone is time savings in software support man hours is unbelievable. I may spend 1 to 2 hours a month on doing updates with no disk imaging or ghost required (i do back up the server, but the only big backup job is the home drives). I can not say that  about where I used to work. That is pretty much all we did was disk-imaging and replacing bad hard drives. Although we had citrix and use of thin clients was limited. The way the thin clients  were set up you still had to image them and do updates for xp constantly. With ltsp no hard disk is required for the thin clients and the os is loaded from the server.  I am not saying ltsp is the answer, but you have to judge for your self. Ltsp has a cousin called mille-xterm which is supposed to support thousands of thin clients.

Trixbox(canned distro of asterisk) and  Mythtv (linux media center, mythubuntu, mythbox, knoppmyth, and mythtv) are also awesome..

We love Moodle also. there is a lot of open source educational content that can be imported into moodle so you do not have to reinvent the wheel. Moodle  is on the same apache web server as the calendar application that we set up from Chess's great podcast.

[k12linux]

That is pretty much all we did was disk-imaging and replacing bad hard drives. Although we had citrix and use of thin clients was limited.

Same here.  When you're supporting roughly 500 Windows PCs per tech (which is still better than some schools) there isn't much time to do anything else.  I think if we could do wonders if we could move to k12ltsp or a distro that we could push updates out.  The time saved would allow our techs to spend more time actually helping teachers use the technology we have and less struggling to just keep it all working.

The thing I can't stand with Windows that I have yet to see with Linux is mystery problems with no apparent cause.  What I mean is that I can take a lab of 25 PCs with identical hardware, copy the hard drive of one of them onto the other 24 and end up with 5 that don't work the same.  What's up with that?

[davijordan]

I personally use an older version of k12ltsp, but i want to try the new edubuntu to see how it works, The one thing i like about k12ltsp in addtion to all the other goodies is that i can use new world  g3 macs as diskless thin clients and  I could not do that with edubuntu. Imacs are perfect for this. So even if the older macs are not supported anymore. I can throw pc-usb keyboards on my g3's and you really don't notice the difference from using an intel client. Talk about increasing you return on investment!!

We had systems management software and could push out updates and whatever to clients, but that was sometimes problematic. The hard drives and motherboard on the models of dell that we were using at that time were  always going bad. I had to spend a lot of time dealing with that. Allegedly, they no longer have that problem. We had at least 2000 machines on our campus alone. Mostly the school used those overpriced fine Dells. Older working machines were sent to auction to at least me for no real reason. Most of what the staff did use was done via a browser on a 1000-1500 dollar machines.  I can not say what I think about all that.   Recently, I did learn that they were going to leasing so they did not have to deal with all that anymore.
 
To answer an earlier question about imaging machines not being consistent. Most hard drives are not exactly alike.  What I found was that the existing software on the market for imaging has a hard time with drives that are not exactly alike (That may have changed by now). Also, most imaging done is with data being sent to clients almost blindly. If you have a lot of erroneous traffic on the network, it could cause problems. I always tried to do imaging at nominal times. On dual boot images, it is even more fun.  I usually had to boot to linux safe mode from cdrom and rerun the boot manager such as lilo or grub and that would usually solve it till the next time. Rarely did I have to re-image except on a system with a failing drive.. 

[snixon]

Content filtering. If you want a free quick and easy way to filter content I suggest using OpenDNS.org. You can serious have it up and running in a few minutes. I free bad for this guy having to search the internet for porn so he could test the filters. 

[asgard_command]

I really enjoyed this episode, which surprised me didn't think this interview would be nearly as interesting.
My wife works in a school and though she has no involvement with IT provision. It always bothers me when I hear she has had to call out IT support to fix something on her windows box, and it really bothers me when I hear them talking about upgrading to the latest windows or ms office. After all it's our taxes that are paying for all this.
I know the interview was mainly covering the use of out of sight services not desktop use, it is a great start and some decent money being saved which can be directed to other things.
It would be great if open source could start to be introduced to students. Just to make them familiar with the programs available. So they aren't tied in to the thought that word processing means Microsoft Word, and internet browsing means IE, giving them the chance to make informed choices in the future.
One of the best ideas mentioned that I liked was the way students could use a pc at school, but then if it was open source based all the software they got used to using could be supplied to them on a custom distro respin. Then even families with an older hand me down pc could install this Linux distro and have all their education apps and software that they used at school available at home.

Anyway another great episode.

[k12linux]

It would be great if open source could start to be introduced to students. Just to make them familiar with the programs available. So they aren't tied in to the thought that word processing means Microsoft Word, and internet browsing means IE, giving them the chance to make informed choices in the future.

That's our argument exactly.  We should be teaching general spreadsheet use, not Excel.  General word processing skills, not MS-Word 2003.  Portable skills are more valuable.  What happens if you teach MSO 2007 program specifics and the student goes out and employers are still running 2003 (or vise-versa?)  Or if the employer has decided to switch to OpenOffice? 

People like to say that MS Office will always be the standard.  HA!  Just like WordPerfect was going to always be the standard?  The earlier the grade we're talking about the less certain they'll even need to know how to use MS-Office programs like Excel or Word.  Google Docs might be more relevant by the time a 6th grader graduates for all we know right now.

One of the best ideas mentioned that I liked was the way students could use a pc at school, but then if it was open source based all the software they got used to using could be supplied to them on a custom distro respin.

What we've been handing out is a copy of The Open Disc which is full of Windows versions of FOSS apps.  (Many of the same apps we have installed on desktops.)  Three of our schools have been switched almost entirely to OpenOffice with plans for more.  All PCs are supposed to have a recent copy of OpenOffice on them to ensure that documents created in one building will open in any and also to give everyone a chance to use it.

An even cooler idea I saw when speaking at the NSBA conference in October was a school that is handing out 1Gb USB drives to students.  The USB drives have portable versions of many FOSS apps.  (Windows apps that can run direct from the USB drive with no install needed.)  This is WAY cool in my opinion.  If we can find sponsors in the community to pay for the drives we might start doing this.  Not only could a student install free apps at home, but they could use any computer (such as at a library) and run the apps they needed for homework.

And another great side benefit is that most FOSS apps have been ported to Windows, OSX and Linux.  The more FOSS that gets adopted in our district, the closer we get to a seamless upgrade from Windows to Linux.  Even if we never did it at least we would be in the position to do so if we choose.  If a district uses all Windows-only apps they have no choice.  They have to stay on Windows and if they want security and other fixes they need to stay on the upgrade pinwheel too.