[geeks] Q: Regarding Linux in K-12 education

[Patrick Finnegan]

On Sunday 17 January 2010, Lionel Peterson wrote:
> On Sun, Jan 17, 2010 at 6:51 PM, Patrick Finnegan
> 
> <pat at computer-refuge.org> wrote:
> > On Sunday 17 January 2010, Lionel Peterson wrote:
> >> I also have serious doubts there are any really large (1,000+)
> >> Linux desktop deployments outside the Linux software industry...
> >> Not POS or server deployments, but desktop, end-user general
> >> computing deployments.
> >
> > One word: Universities.
> 
> Patrick,
> 
> In your experience, do there tend to be large deployments or lots of
> smaller deployments? What I mean is, are the 1,000+ computers in one
> "domain" (for lack of a better word) or little department roll-outs
>  in labs and selected classrooms? I suspect the latter, but wonder
>  what your experience is...

Both, really.  There are some (usually small) computer labs and 
standalone machines that are maintained by individual (smaller) 
professors, or departments, though smaller departments tend to not 
deploy Linux desktops.  

Engineering's IT group (ECN) has widespread deployments of centrally 
managed Linux and Solaris computer labs and individual workstations 
(both are managed using the same tool, and in fact the same global 
configuration, developed in-house, called "IGOR").  According to my 
source that works there, they maintain about 700 of them.

Purdue's central IT maintains a number of Linux computer labs that 
recently replaced Solaris X86 labs (which had replaced Solaris on SPARC 
labs not long before that), which are managed using a locally maintained 
version of rdist and something that looks like a *BSD ports tree.  They 
run quite a few less Linux desktops than ECN does.

My group runs just a handful of desktop machines, but they're Ubuntu 
machines that are run using the same configuration tool that we maintain 
our clusters and servers with (cfengine version 2.2).  There's no reason 
that we couldn't scale that out to a much larger base.

Pat
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