My school has diversity. :)

[kaldor]

I walked into my tech lab today at school, and was suprised; the teacher had a new Mac set up in the class (Mac OS 9.1, not new, but new for us) as well as a few new computers running Ubuntu Gutsy.

My school now has a computer lab open to all students, with 3 different operating systems: Windows XP, Mac OS 9.1, and Ubuntu Linux 7.10

Has anyone else seen a school do something like this?

[Sealbhach]

Lucky you! You've got enlightened teachers.


.

[LaRoza]

Lucky you! You've got enlightened teachers.


Probably GNOME.

Most computer labs don't have much diversity for technical reasons. My school had a Windows setup and all the user accounts were from one server. Adding another platform to the network wouldn't work (in the user account sense. Any computer could be used to connect to the internet, but you wouldn't use your student account).

The school did have other computers in the labs in the IT classes though.

[picpak]

Our school computers have GIMP and Audacity installed...good enough for me.

[ChanServ]

naw, my school has all xp, which convieniently gets reset everytime we log out ( guest accounts ). but my teacher did mention linux once this year, which is more than i can say for the last 2 years. :P

[smartboyathome]

What school you go to? Whichever one it is, the techs have got to be in on Ubuntu, or else it wouldn't survive there. That setup certainly wouldn't work for all colleges though, as it is a pain to maintain 3 OSes, let alone the-one-that-shall-not-be-named.

[kaldor]

The teacher installed Ubuntu on the PCs due to wanting to learn more about computers and also allow students in on other systems. He got the Ubuntu CD from me.

[OutOfReach]

Wow, you are really lucky.
In my high school computer lab, most computers have Windows 95/98. There are only 4 or 5 computers that have either Windows XP or Vista.

[t0p]

When I was at college, about 16 years ago, we had PCs running Windows 3.1, Apples, some things called Archimedes, and a few boxes running *nix of some sort - possibly BSD. Back then I had little interest in computers, I just used them to type my essays, reports and dissertation. If I was there now, I'd live on them *nix boxes... I mean, back then that stuff was so cutting edge it made your eyes bleed!

[lukjad]

Oh man! Let me pack up my bags and move in! Where is this school? :D

[nowin4me]

Lucky you... What school do you go to?

[nick09]

My school is all XP but the MYERS education center I go to for the last half of the day; have Macs in the my Information Technologies class. We will be installing Ubuntu in a few weeks more or less to get more experience with more OS's.

[Ellipsis]

When I was at college, about 16 years ago, we had PCs running Windows 3.1, Apples, some things called Archimedes, and a few boxes running *nix of some sort - possibly BSD. Back then I had little interest in computers, I just used them to type my essays, reports and dissertation. If I was there now, I'd live on them *nix boxes... I mean, back then that stuff was so cutting edge it made your eyes bleed!

The general university has a few dozen Windows labs, 2 Mac labs and one Linux lab (scientific Linux). The CS department has all four of it's first year undergrad labs running Windows 2000 (I am currently taking two first year CS courses so you can feel sorry for me). The other 6 labs and servers are all slackware Linux.

My Highschool on the other hand was all XP. Though my grade 11 physics teacher was a Freesoftware advocate and come to think of it he was the first person I really heard about Linux, OpenOffice and Firefox from.

[eeeandrew]

Our University tech guys are from IBM so we don't get anything like that. There are several of us using our own laptops and having small linux rebellions in the corner of the computer lab!!

The best of which was the windows poster they had just put up which said "The ultimate steal: Office 2007 for only £49.95 on student license" a few minutes later while no one was looking someone added "or get it free at openoffice.org"

us uni students have wild times:lolflag:

[cardinals_fan]

Our University tech guys are from IBM so we don't get anything like that. There are several of us using our own laptops and having small linux rebellions in the corner of the computer lab!!
Eh? IBM is actually one of the largest (arguably THE largest) supporters of Linux in the corporate sphere.

[Nepherte]

My university has a dual boot windows xp/ubuntu 7.04 on all computers but the ones from the electral engineering and computer science department. The latter ones are strictly linux (CentOS and Ubuntu).

[billgoldberg]

I walked into my tech lab today at school, and was suprised; the teacher had a new Mac set up in the class (Mac OS 9.1, not new, but new for us) as well as a few new computers running Ubuntu Gutsy.

My school now has a computer lab open to all students, with 3 different operating systems: Windows XP, Mac OS 9.1, and Ubuntu Linux 7.10

Has anyone else seen a school do something like this?

It's a good start, but why are they using ancient versions?

It would be better if they were using the latest LTS Ubuntu version (Hardy Heron), OSX Leopard and Vista.

[lukjad]

How is Gutsy "ancient"?
I still use Feisty at school because that's what works.

[LaRoza]

It's a good start, but why are they using ancient versions?

It would be better if they were using the latest LTS Ubuntu version (Hardy Heron), OSX Leopard and Vista.

Funny how the ancient Ubuntu is newer than Vista :-)

[vishzilla]

at school we had started with Windows 3.1 and ended with Win 98. I finished school in 2001. After that in College we had XP + Fedora. Plus we installed Ubuntu 6.06 in some workstations w/o permission :biggrin:

One funny instance, once the entire n/w was infected with a malicious virus. Only the computers with Linux got the alloted bandwidth of internet, the XP machines were crawling. :)

[billgoldberg]

Funny how the ancient Ubuntu is newer than Vista :-)

I was actually mostly talking about XP and OS9.

But since Ubuntu has a 6 month release circle and Gutsy is almost a year old, yes it an old version.

Surly for a school Hardy, being an LTS, would be better.

[DrMega]

I walked into my tech lab today at school, and was suprised; the teacher had a new Mac set up in the class (Mac OS 9.1, not new, but new for us) as well as a few new computers running Ubuntu Gutsy.

My school now has a computer lab open to all students, with 3 different operating systems: Windows XP, Mac OS 9.1, and Ubuntu Linux 7.10

Has anyone else seen a school do something like this?

I think that is great. Teaching computer studies and the likes should be about the technology and principles rather than a specific proprietary setup. People should learn early on that while MS Windows is one choice, it is exactly that, one choice and not the only way to do things.

I've seen something you'd like. I work for a huge corporation (all Windows PCs on the desktops). We pay a fee to a specialist disaster recover firm (they have huge server rooms and computer labs sat empty, waiting for one of their client's to have a catastrophy and need to move quickly to alternative premises for a while.

I took part in one of the disaster recover drills one year. The (mock) scenario was that our building had been rendered inaccessible due to a terrorist threat. Off we all went down to London with backup tapes etc. We had 48 hours to get our business up and running again (it was already up and running, it was a drill remember). The disaster recover firm showed us to one of there labs, and off we went.

It turned out that they had Red Hat installations connected to the Internet, but the Windows installations were not. The Red Hat and the Windows PCs had no direct connection to each other. They did this in case we needed to grab anything off the internet. It was considered that in a business critical scenario in a race against time, it would be unwise to expose a Windows PC to the internet because it would not be as secure as Linux, and could compromise the whole plan.

[Nepherte]

I was actually mostly talking about XP and OS9.

But since Ubuntu has a 6 month release circle and Gutsy is almost a year old, yes it an old version.

Surly for a school Hardy, being an LTS, would be better.
It's understandable that some schools/universities still have older versions of Ubuntu running. You can't expect them to keep their systems up to date with the very latest Ubuntu release when they have to manage all the computers in the campus. If they were installing it for the first time, I agree with you.

[billgoldberg]

It's understandable that some schools/universities still have older versions of Ubuntu running. You can't expect them to keep their systems up to date with the very latest Ubuntu release when they have to manage all the computers in the campus. If they were installing it for the first time, I agree with you.

True.

However, it is in their best interest to use an LTS version for obvious reasons.

[frankleeee]

I walked into my tech lab today at school, and was suprised; the teacher had a new Mac set up in the class (Mac OS 9.1, not new, but new for us) as well as a few new computers running Ubuntu Gutsy.

My school now has a computer lab open to all students, with 3 different operating systems: Windows XP, Mac OS 9.1, and Ubuntu Linux 7.10

Has anyone else seen a school do something like this?

The college I attend has all three systems and a Linux mirror and 2 different Linux only labs.

[Gutt]

My Geography teacher uses Kubuntu on his comp. at school. Every year he does one class on Open Software and Linux to a couple of people (I was there once, pretty good, maybe I'll try to help him do it this year :) ). Besides that, my sports teacher is sponsirsed by Apple and does Mac OS classes for other teachers once in a while :-P

[ELD]

My old college had GIMP instead of photoshop, was cool but they made us use crappy corel for some reason. No linux or mac anywhere though heh.

[uberdonkey5]

Don't know why schools don't use ubuntu? I mean, as long as the computers aren't really old, updating to hardy should be really easy, no (easier than updating a windows machine... just connect to the internet, rather than having to put in requisition forms etc etc).

At my first school we had one BBC micro (32KB):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Micro

eventually I got a 48k spectrum at home and programmed in basic to make rubbish games:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinclair_Spectrum

Not sure about other people, but I still look in awe at 4GB pen drives. I mean 4GB! thats 80,000 times more memory than on my spectrum