[plug] suggestion: PLUG 4 Schools

[Denis Brown]

Thanks for your input, Stephen.

It would be valuable to have some idea of the nature of these programmes 
(finance, curriculum) so that we could explore realistic alternatives.  On 
the finance side for example, perhaps the current solution is a spreadsheet 
running under Excel although if that were the case, I'm sure you'd have 
mentioned it :-)

I think that a background of small budgets and maintenance issues would 
benefit from an injection of Linux rather than be hindered by it.  Indeed, 
being able to remotely log in (ssh, etc) would open the doorway for trusted 
admins at other school sites to assist in admin tasks when the local admin 
is flooded with their normal work.  And trust me, it isn't only the 
"schools" (primary, secondary) that feel the budgetry pinch on the IT 
side!!  NT and Novell probably also allow for shared remote admin but I 
cannot comment from experience.

This I suppose adds weight to the concept, as someone else wrote this 
afternoon, that the configurations would need to be standardised.  But I 
doubt that they'd all need to be Debian sites, or all Red Hat or all 
SuSE...  Sure, the details change (Debian's apt-get system for .debs, RH's 
rpm system, slightly different directory structure, etc) but from the 
interactions on this list we have people helping others regardless of their 
Linux flavour.

I agree there are lots of issues through which to work, as people on this 
list have highlighted (highlit?) and from what I've read so far at sites 
such as the K12LTSP and Leon's reference this morning.  Question: is it 
reasonable / ethical to start a "to do"-type page on the PLUG website where 
mission-critical applications / conditions are listed and against which 
people can report OSS alternatives?  For instance "application = word 
processing, critical condition = compatibility with Word version X" to 
which people might respond "StarOffice, OpenOffice, ...."  That's an 
example only, I had in mind more esoteric applications like timetabling, 
groupware, student records, library management, etc.

Cheers,
Denis