Hello all, I thought I'd share with you a successful k12ltsp story from the mainland. I was inspired by the HOSEF's work in Hawaii after reading an article about them on Slashdot a few weeks ago.
I'm a math and web design teacher in Keokuk, IA. I was promised 20 new computers for this school year, but by the time the year started, I was stuck with my 20 Pentium 233MHz, 64 MB Ram (they'll only take 96), running Windows 95. If a student went to just one wrong site, the machine was filled with spyware and slowed to a halt. Most classes, students spent waiting for the computer to crank along. I reasearched the idea like mad. I read everything on K12LTSP, subscribed to this list, and read over HOSEF's website. I shopped on E-Bay, and found a Quad Pentium III Xenon 550 MHz with 1 GB RAM that I picked up for just under $500 including shipping. I spent all last week setting up the server (it really only took that long due to a hardware conflict that I finally resolved). Yesterday, with the help of my students, I've got 18 machines running off of the server. 18 run only a little slower than one machine, and even fully loaded, the machines are running so much better than Windows 95. I was afraid that 1gb ram wouldn't do the job. I brought the principal down, and he's willing to reimburse me for the server, as well as purchase more ram (I'm hoping to get my machine up to 4gb). I plan to have details and pictures up on a web site soon. Thank you so much HOSEF for helping me find working machines, and helping me spread the word of open source. Eric Brown Keokuk High School
