[ILUG] RedHat give Linux free to UK schools

[Philip]

Trevor Johnston's [tjohnston at oceanfree.net] 30 lines of dribble included:
> On Fri, 14 Jan 2000, Albert White wrote:
> > Apart from the article on Naas CBS by Gavin O'Gorman, does anyone know
> > if many schools here are using Linux here?
> I know our school is - with some 1,300 students, Saint Oliver's Community
> College in Drogheda is one of the largest schools in the country, and its
> computer system is run entirely by a Linux server. Every student and
> member of staff has their own login and email address, which makes us the
> most "wired" school in the country.
> 
> Past attempts at this setup with a Windows server were nothing short of
> pathetic, but during the summer of 1998 our Linux server was installed and
> it has been running solidly ever since with - to my knowledge - not one
> crash or glitch. I'm a sixth year there right now, and it's really quite
> amazing the difference it's made to many areas of school life. Just three
> weeks ago we had to upgrade to some 27Gb of disk space, which shows how
> much everyone is making use of it.
> 
> Look at our web site, which of course is run by Apache on that very same
> server:
> http://www.socc.ie
At my old secondary school in Longford, they bought 20-30 computers out of
their own budget and then got a company (I can't for the life of me think
of the name) to come and network them up with a main server. I did
try to impress upon them the use of Linux as the main server and then 
combining that with maybe windows 98 on the "client" computers.
He said that since he had spent this much money on the computers (it came 
from their own funds and not government funding - just for the record they 
got ONE sole Gateway from the Dept Education) that he might as well pay
for "professionals" to come and install the network and ask their opinion 
on the matter. Of course their preferred choice of OS for the server was
NT. End of story. 
The fact is he was sorta scared to let a student run amuck on computers 
they spent a lot of money on. Plus he wanted the network up and running
and with no problems. Ironic thing was he had to keep bringing the guys
back to repair this and fix this and show him that.
Philip.