On Wed, Nov 21, 2001 at 12:37:31PM +0000, Roger Horne said: > A more difficult one to counter may be that, this being a fee-paying school, > the parents are going to be well-off and a high proportion of them are > likely to have Windows machines at home and will wonder why their little > darlings don't use the same at school.
That's easy. They *have* Windows machines at home. They *know* how to use those. They're unlikely to be learning how to do guts and internals and networking so, superficially, they'll be the same if you install $window_manager with a Window's-a-like scheme. Everything else (word processing, powerpoint, excel, programming) it doesn't matter whether they're on windows or *nix and in most cases it's better for them to be on *nix. Other points : Mr Cantrell, I believe, has a system whereby he has installed a *nix box at his parents' place. I am thinking of doing the same for the reasons that : o it's free software o it runs on cheaper hardware o I can stop them messing with things that they don't wanna o I can get it mail me with logs or wot not when stuff goes wrong o I can set up PPP so that if anything b0rks I can dialup, poke around and fix it in a school this would be even better (especially price of software plus hardware) and because cos kiddies are notorious fiddlers *cough* plus o you wouldn't need to dialup because they'd be on the network o you can have all config files in CVS somewhere so all machines can look the same and can be easily reinstalled o homedirectorys and /usr/local/bin and stuff NFS mounted for EaZee BackUp Goodness [tm] and true hot desking. Good people to talk to this about would be Uni computer departments. Imperial used to do this a lot - http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk. I think Mike Wyers (linux admin there) still lurks on this list. Simon -- : apparently, cheese isn't scalable
