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Linux flunks high school

Posted on 22 Nov 2005 at 15:13

David Moss dons his teacher's hat and looks at the cost of switching from Windows to Mac or Linux at his school

I can't think of any business that likes the idea of downtime - hell, we get ratty when our all-singing, all-dancing networked photocopier/fax/printer jams. Selling the idea of wholesale retraining and all the downtime that it would incur (when people forgot how something worked and so on) wasn't quite what I wanted to think about.

Putting the adult working population to one side for a moment, I also had to consider the impact of this change on the pupils. At first glance, you might think this would be quite limited, especially with the younger ones, as they'd happily slip into any new system, would enjoy the experimentation and experience the joy of discovery that marks a happy learning environment. While that's true, looking at the specialist software I've been using right through the Junior school made me realise there's no way I could contemplate a move to Linux unless I was sure I could somehow run those programs in some kind of application compatibility layer. Even if I could do that, there was still a cost element to consider, as while the compatibility layer might be free I'd still have to pay new licence fees for the software. Given that those licences don't come cheap - not everything in education is cheap by any means, and some companies clearly see schools as a giant cash-cow to be ruthlessly milked of government subsidies - and given that we ourselves don't get any government subsidies, being an independent charitable trust, I was going to need a lot of convincing that I could do this in a seamless manner.

I made my way to the Wine website (www.winehq.com), home of an open-source implementation of the Windows API that can run on X and a variety of x86-based Unix OSes including Linux, Solaris and FreeBSD. What I saw there didn't fill me with great joy: the Gold and Silver lists of software that would work 'virtually flawlessly' or 'could hopefully be made to work' weren't overflowing with names or versions of software I used at the school, on either the admin or school networks. Don't get me wrong, I'm not knocking Wine, but I have to take a hard-nosed approach when I have my system admin hat on. Noting that, for example, Microsoft Access 2000 was the only Office component to appear in either list - and that at the bottom of the Silver list, which is for applications 'we hope we can easily fix so that they can make it to Gold status' - didn't give me the warm comforting feeling I was looking for.

Perusing other Wine sites didn't make matters much better either. There was clearly a lot of work being done by a lot of people, but if I wanted to be sure my software worked under an OS it was going to have to be the Windows OS, and the only platform that provides a really good compatibility layer for Windows software is the Mac, via the excellent Virtual PC. But that doesn't help me in the cost area at all, and there would be no guarantee that all those specialist school applications would run happily inside it anyway.

It might surprise some people, but schools run a wide range of specialist software - well, mine does anyway, and so do many others I know of. Aside from word processors, spreadsheets and databases, we have paint packages, vector-drawing and CAD programs, branching databases, film and music software, DTP, programming, photography, encyclopedia, turtle control and flow control software, data-logging and interactive whiteboard software, science-, geography- and maths-specific software, and more besides. It's probably a much wider selection than found in the average SME office environment.