Greetings

[Will van der Leij]

Hi Abe,
Welcolm to edubuntu. I'm sure your experience and skills will be of great
help to our growing community.

Regards,
Will van der Leij

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Abraham Rolick [mailto:ARolick at fillmore.k12.ca.us] 
> Sent: 17 November 2006 12:11 PM
> To: richard.weideman at canonical.com
> Cc: ubuntu-education at lists.ubuntu.com
> Subject: RE: Greetings
> 
> Richard,
> 
> We are primarily a Windows shop at our district with 
> workstations running Windows 98 or Windows XP and servers 
> running Windows 2003 Server.  Active Directory is used for 
> all authentication and ties in nicely with our content filter 
> and our Exchange 2003 servers.
> 
> I didn't come out and say it before, but in general I am a 
> big open source advocate.  I would like to see more BSD style 
> licenses than GPL, but we won't go there for this discussion 
> ;P  As such, I have managed to get some OpenBSD servers 
> running on our network doing things such as IDS/IPS and 
> monitoring network utilization.
> 
> Having a ton of these Windows 98 computers out there is a 
> real pain in the neck for several reasons.  Obviously, there 
> are no more security patches being released for 98.  Our AV 
> software absolutely crushes the older hardware making it 
> barely usable.  And there's no real security (we currently 
> use Deepfreeze to "protect" the computers from malicious users).
> 
> And of course, everyone knows that we don't have nearly as 
> much money in education as we need, so it's far from feasible 
> to consider throwing these older computers out and have them 
> replaced with cutting edge workstations.  I would really like 
> to see these machines turned into useful tools for the 
> students.  As it is, they probably are counter-productive, 
> turning students off from using word processing and using the 
> internet because it's so painful trying to do something 
> simple like launching applications or switching windows.
> 
> Our I.T. department is severely understaffed (officially I'm 
> the network administrator but I am also the help desk, PC 
> tech, database admin,
> etc.) so I don't have much free time to experiment with the 
> things that I would like to, but I am really devoted to 
> seeing something such as this project help out our district 
> and potentially other poor districts.
> I would love to also contribute some of my personal time to 
> the project to see where it can take us.
> 
> I'm not terribly good at keeping things short, so I apologize 
> for the novel above, but I sincerely think that this project 
> is a really good idea and am really excited by it.  I'm 
> looking forward to giving it a whirl and hopefully gaining 
> interest from the students and teachers in the classrooms.
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Abe
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Richard Weideman [mailto:richard.weideman at canonical.com]
> Sent: Wednesday, November 15, 2006 5:03 PM
> To: Abraham Rolick; David Trask
> Cc: ubuntu-education at lists.ubuntu.com
> Subject: Re: Greetings
> 
> Hello Abraham,
> 
> Thanks for the mail ... and positive comments.
> 
> David Trask should be able to give you some good first hand feedback.
> 
> David was at our Ubuntu development conference last week, 
> held in sunny California, graciously hosted by Google in 
> Mountain View.
> 
> David is an enthusiastic teacher and keen user of Edubuntu, 
> and is helping influence the future features and direction of 
> the product.
> 
> As a matter of interest, what do you currently run in your school ?
> 
> Regards
> Richard
> 
> On Wed, 2006-11-15 at 16:36 -0800, Abraham Rolick wrote:
> > Greetings all,
> > 
> > My name is Abe and I currently work for a smaller K-12 
> school district 
> > in the Sunny Southern California.  I've just recently installed
> Kubuntu
> > at home (it was suggested by a friend of mine who is 
> helping develop 
> > some parts of KDE) and was very impressed with how clean 
> the installer 
> > was and how quickly I had my system up and running.
> > 
> > I've run several Linux distributions in the past including 
> Slackware, 
> > RedHat, Debian, Gentoo, etc. and also FreeBSD and OpenBSD.  
> (I should 
> > probably admit that I am a big OpenBSD user and advocate.)
> > 
> > I just today learned about Edubuntu and would like to give it a shot
> in
> > some of our classrooms.  We have many, many older machines which 
> > currently run Windows 98 and probably wouldn't stand much 
> of a chance 
> > running XP.  So I would like to see how well an installation of
> Edubuntu
> > will perform on them.  Can anyone share some of their 
> success stories 
> > with this distribution in the K-12 environment?  I noticed 
> that there
> is
> > great multi-lingual support which would be a great benefit 
> to us here
> in
> > SoCal where a large part of the population speaks both English and 
> > (sometimes primarily) Spanish.
> > 
> > Regards,
> >  
> > Abe
> > 
> --
> Richard Weideman
> +27 (83) 321-2233
> richard.weideman at canonical.com
> 
> Education Programme Manager
> Canonical Ltd - Linux for Human Beings
> http://www.edubuntu.org
> http://www.ubuntu.com
> 
> 
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