Long time
lurker first time poster (how cliché)
As the father of a young inquisitive and rebellious tacker with one in
NSW , I agree with the "opportunity" part of the debate.
It's annoying reading about the penalties outlined in the user
agreement for "improving" the netbooks, but they will still be useful
when the contract between the education department and the students are
complete.
If one is determined, I can't see why you wouldn't wubi or VM a linux
distro just for the educational aspects of the exercise :-) ymmv
Chuck
On -9/01/37 05:59, Senectus . wrote:
On 25 May 2010 07:35, ha...@ipunix.com
<ha...@ipunix.com> wrote:
Ubuntu-AU'ers I see a lot of time being spent on the Australian Ubuntu
LoCo structure and now the wiki.
But what is happening around us and in particular in my area
(Strathpine Queensland). I now see year nine through 12 student running
around with mini notebooks (also called netbook) supplied through their
school under the Australian Federal Government's Digital Education
Revolution (DER) program. From my early findings it looks like that
notebooks will be distributed to eventually every year nine through 12
student. They are all to receive a mini notebook with windows 7
installed by the completion of the rollout in 2012.
This is a big blow to the Linux community as for example 267,000
Windows 7 based netbooks that the NSW Government alone has started
rolling out to high schools will come pre-installed with open source
software. From information gathered they were certainly looking
seriously at Linux platforms, but vendors didn't provide the answers or
comfort they were looking for.
I think part of the problem with the Linux tenders would have been that
they were represented by hardware vendors pushing Linux to increase
their profit on the units, rather than pushing Linux because they
believed in it or had the right answers. If they had gone with a Linux
based system they could have saved the country (tax payers) close to a
$1 billion in licensing fees.
All this points out that we the Linux (Ubuntu) users must be active not
only within our own group(s) but engage direct with the community in
general, visit schools, educate hardware vendors and lobby with the
Australian Federal and State Governments.
Cheers,
Harry Degenaar
ha...@ipunix.com
It's also a huge opportunity..
All those new machines going out to students that are naturally
rebellious and inquisitive.
Time to really amp up a "Linux install Day" again...
--
It's just a 2000 year old book of desert tribal myths.
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