My kids and I are 100% Linux at home. (My wife has a Mac, which none of us touch unless we absolutely have to.) At school, it is unfortunately obvious the kids use Windows. Also, starting in middle school, the school expects every kid to carry a USB drive back and forth so they can work on projects.
I've had some problems providing support for this, to put it mildly. For something like a paper, the solution is obvious: write in plain text and dump into Word at the last minute. (The solution is obvious, but no child of mine has listened to me yet. That's something I don't think GNHLUG can help me with.) But for something like PowerPoint, the solution isn't so obvious. They have to be able to edit it in both places, during in-class work periods and as homework. I don't know what the school expects people to do if they can't afford Office at home. However, I just had an idea. You can get 128GB USB drives on ebay for ~$20 now. Why not install an emulator-based (as opposed to bootable) "live CD" image on there that they can then mount the rest of the USB drive with and edit their work in Linux *even at school*? They probably won't be able to get on the network with it, which is fine since the host Windows OS could handle that. Transferring documents (for printing, say) may be a problem, although I assume the live CD images somehow manage it. Oh wait, to reap the benefit you'd have to print *from Linux* which probably won't work even if you had the right printer driver set up. Well, print at home, I guess. I don't think security would be a problem unless there's now some way to prevent someone from starting an app off their USB drive. The only real issue I can think of horsepower: Does the school hardware have the oomph to support this hack? I'll have to ask my kids what the school has. _______________________________________________ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
