[lug] Linux for K-12 school

[Davide Del Vento]

Hi,
I haven't direct experience in that, but here are my 0.02$.

>      - Finding replacements for currently used software

I believe this is gonna be the key point. I helped a (tiny-tiny)
no-profit with a windows/linux migration, and it was only partially
successful, because they were using Google Sketchup and Adobe
Illustrator. At that time the only option was Xara, and it was bad
(Ipe and Dia were already acceptable, but not good for their needs).
So that part, which was their core activity, remained in windows. If
they are going to reconsider the migration now, with Scribus and
Inkscape, it'll  probably be a different story.

I recommend that you evaluate carefully what they are going to
accomplish, and which software they are using. I recommend that you
give them time to evaluate your "alternative" software on their
current systems, BEFORE committing the migration.

I wouldn't bother about IE-only web sites, since firefox is the love
of all web developers: it's highly unlikely to find a IE-only site
(except in some obscure intranet of a red-taped company, but that's
another story).

For distributions, everyone has his/her own preference, but for a
school project I strongly recommend Ubuntu LTS (maybe "edu"-buntu?
never tried that), which has a pretty long support for security, but
with really decent modern software (unlike RedHat EL or SUSE EL). So
you do not need to reinstall or upgrade the systems every year or so
(and when you will need to reinstall, you'll have a pretty long time
for that, not the tiny 1-month of overlapping Fedoras, if you upgrade
yearly) and the users will not complain about grossly outdated
software (I'm complaining right now about gcc-3.3 on several RHEL
which I use but don't administer :-)

Bye,
;Dav