-tictech message:
(from Tony Hand <tghand@seattleschools.org> - ma)
----------------------
Dear Folks,
As I've been struggling to make sense of our license situation - basically
proving that our legal software is legal software (when compared to a
faulty inventory - what a mess) I've also been working on a project to
create computers which have no license fees.
We have a very promising prototype in operation which you may peek at:
http://hale.ssd.k12.wa.us/compu_pics/windux.htm
Sitting down to this machine and launching an application, a casual user
might barely notice that they are not on a Windows machine. See screen
shots at the link above.
There are several reasons for attempting this at this time:
1) The linux KDE desktop has just released version 3 which includes a
Kiosk mode. Adding a few tweaks here and there makes this the most secure
system I've seen out-of-the-box. All file and network browsing is
prohibited and all settings are locked. Students are only able to do the
5 things was want them to be able to do.
2) The 1.0 release of Open Office makes a surprisingly reasonable
replacement for our other standard office package. It loads and saves in
Word, Powerpoint, and Excel formats in corresponding applications which
have identical menus accross the top to their Microsoft counterparts. It
feels very familiar to a user of our usual software. Open Office is
avialble on Windows, Linux and soon on Mac OSX.
3) The 1.0 stable release of Mozilla, the open source version of Netscape
has also been released. It is identical in appearance to Netscape, but
lacks the commercial junk (AOL etc... ) and has a better underlying
architecture than 6x.
All the above software is very good, very familiar, and very free.
We also hope to include a feature we used for our OSX prototype: having
the entire user directory recreated from a ghost image at each bootup.
That way, a user would be unable to save over and damage local
configuration files (or anything else for that matter).
This coming Fall, we plan to replace parts of our Open Lab with
these Linux machines (configured to run on Levy Dells) as a test. My
prediction is that they will be much more secure than their Windows
counterparts, and more stable as well. We'll see.
*** tony
============================
Tony Hand
tghand@seattleschools.org
tonyh@hale.ssd.k12.wa.us
Computer Systems Coordinator
Nathan Hale High School
Seattle School District
===========================
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