My IT students have fun learning networking by playing with Ubuntu but we dont run it on everything at our college. Here is a list of the splendid things we put into our tool kit of software and experiences for college students.

Linux runs on some servers and sweetly enough on the netbooks, library and SunRay terminals. The only app once kept on breaking was Cambodian. It is not supported with Windows without a obscure hack but now happily runs with OpenOffice thanks to the tireless efforts of the splendid KhmerOS team. (I believe we are the only secondary school in Australia to teach Khmer).

Nothing is token, everything is valued and has a place including the freedom to run FLOSS and commercial software.

We use Final Cut Pro .. and dont need (and could hardly afford) to run it on anything more than our studio Power OSX computer. We no longer use ClickView. It's a cute product but we saved our precious dollars for a MythTV setup that suits our needs and is free. The 2Touch IWB doesnt need any software, just plug, play and go with any computer in the school. We dont use much Adobe sotware, instead investing in an HUGE A1 printer with archive ink powered by Gimp and Inkscape and a class set of digital cameras for students. Ok, Flash was briefly nice but bringing home a free 1 x 3 m panorama visualisation of your design / artwork or photo can really kick butt. We use Garage Band in the Mac lab .. Sibelius in the Windows lab .. OpenOffice and Pencil 3D animation software in both.

When all you have is a hammer, all your problems look just like a nail.

Microsoft seems to have been putting pressure on Asus to favour Windows XP over Linux with moves to promote Windows XP among manufacturers of ultra low-cost PCs. These cost effective ULPCs, often come with Linux pre-installed. In some emerging markets like China and India it seems that Windows XP Home is being priced as low as USD 26 for this hardware

This did beg the question ... what is it really worth? When I mentioned this in passing to a commerce teacher, I should have anticipated the obvious reply "It is worth whatever consumers are prepared to pay." Does this mean the value of Windows XP is falling or had it been artificially inflated?

For many years, competition in the desktop computer operating system space was practically non-existent, with one platform from a single supplier commanding most of the market. Australian consumers lost out with this softare monopoly.

With Linux Desktop nipping at the heels of all the players, everybody is going to be a winner .. even those who use Windows XP. :-)

Retailers are playing some silly games with retail prices and offerings on the new eeePC. I choke when I read that ASUS claims the license fee for Windows XP is offset by the smaller SSD and then proceed to charge $50 extra for the larger SSD and a free Linux based OS!

It is worth reading some of the blog posts on this page. Offering to pay less for something and more for nothing does not make any sense.
     http://apcmag.com/windowsbased_eeepc_cheaper_than_linux_one.htm

I am really quite sick of major food retailers in Australia that exploit my "customer loyalty" by bundling discount petrol dockets with my purchases. Even blind freddy can see that we all end up paying for higher grocery prices to get this discounted petrol. The only winners are those that play this silly game or those that leave to find another shop.

I value honesty and integrity in all my business dealings. I have little time or patience for these silly games.

On the Open Education Disk was a copy of open-source software for video editing called Avidemux. To date I have used the Windows based VirtualDub so I was curious about this software that has been ported across to Windows from Linux. Hard core video coders might be interested to read this detailed Excelcia review that compares both packages. Think of these more as power tools for splicing, trimming and converting videos, not something to edit and mix tracks to make movies.

It only took me a few min to download and install this onto Windows XP from SourceForge. Of course Ubuntu Linux users have an easier approach by just automatically installing this from available repositories. From what I can see, it comes jam packed with all the codecs you will probably ever need. 

I was able to quickly use it to open an MOV file, recode, crop and trim it into crisp smaller MP4 video version that I could send by eMail or upload to Moodle for my students to play on their portable players or iPods. In another couple of minutes, I was also able to create a SWF or FLV version.

Cross-platform applications that run on Linux, OSX and Windows are a preferred option for us so we will probably make the switch to using this powerful FLOSS tool on our school network, adding it to the next base computer images for Windows and Ubuntu.

Flip Video is impressive and robust little unit for schools for video or stop motion animation. Whilst it is not yet available for sale in Australia (yet) .. this device will probably only cost around $150.

Here is an interesting NY Times Flip Video review by David Pogue posted onto YouTube that includes some comparison footage with traditional camcorder.

I notice that FlipVideo:

• comes with an underwater housing (we have a surf-life saving squad)
• comes with an action mount and protective silicon skin (sports students will love this)
• even works with Ubuntu, even our Linux flavoured school eeePC's.

Don't laugh about giving students small cameras.. students with an OLPC XO computer in third world countries are already posting videos onto the web from their cheap laptops, such as this one that records a cow birth.
     http://olpc-ceibal.blogspot.com/2007/08/birth-of-cow-in-villa-cardal.html

This is going to be a valuable ICT eLearning tool for schools to acquire .. even as a class set. :-)

We live in exciting times.

I have one minor brag with a computer that takes under 30 sec to boot up and login. Imagine a student collecting a laptop computer from a class box, returning to their desk and immediately using it. Joy!

The ASUS eeePC uses solid state disks for permanent data storage device with no movable parts. The highly customised operating system (Linux Xandros) is compact and polished and very usable. Check out this YouTube for a sample bootup video.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9PePNQLGCQ

To date, these laptops are much loved and used by our integration students.

There is currently is a huge computer rollout in Brazil schools - a total of 29,000 labs serving some 32,000,000 students! (read the article for even more impressive figures for 2009). Interesting is the use of multi headed displays, something that Dan was looking into the other day.

     http://aseigo.blogspot.com/2008/04/deploying-kde-to-52-million-young.html

 "In a word, it is humongous."

I was impressed at these huge numbers. I suppose it is going to be the same when India and China come on stream. Anything we do will pale in comparison to their efforts and any claim we might have to being an IT leader is very probably only fleeting.

I did manage click on the impressive list of applications that they are deploying or building with this KDE Linux desktop rollout. I hope that some of my Portuguese speaking students could help me translate and read these pages at the school breakfast club.

Graham proudly showed me his Apple notebook computer following his upgrade to Leopard. Although nervous about losing any of his files, he was quite pleased with some of the new effects when browsing for files and all up, felt that the upgrade he purchased was good value for money.

Oddly enough, I had also upgraded my computer but it didn't cost me a cent. Following this prompt from the upgrade manager on my Ubuntu desktop, I started the upgrade on my computer operating system to Gutsy Gibbon.

After all the necessary bits were automatically downloaded, the installation went quite well. The kids helped out by pressing the enter key to move onto the next step.

It is now running Ubuntu version 7.10 and I am really curious to see what has changed :-)

Our school council supported the notion that college needs to consider the sustainable disposal of old hardware. Tossing it into the domestic rubbish or dump master was no longer an acceptable option. If there is no residual value, I can now pay for computer equipment to be recycled instead of pretending that the heavy metals do not exist and tossing it into landfill. We do a shuttle run to a merchant that disassembles the broken hardware.

If we accept the notion that the supplier has a responsibility in the waste cycle, then schools need to consider the final destination for their old hardware. We already see this with printer cartridges and mobile phones. The prickly issue for me now is, should we take back old or obsolete hardware that was donated or sold in good faith to students? If we don't accept this responsibility, then we have to accept the practice of dumping toxic electronic waste in third world countries that don't have in place either the technology or systems for correct disposal.

I must admit, when a student turned up with a "useless old computer" that refused to work, we managed to build a working Xubuntu Linux system he took back home as a second family computer. In an increasingly disposable world, the notion of "No hardware left behind" is appealing. Golly, I even remember many years ago whenJohn Widmer managed to get the Internet running on some donated IBM XT computers.

I am greatly pleased and encouraged by the efforts by Kevork to spend those extra hours in his own time to build up a batch of working systems and taking responsibility for its decomissioning, instead of tossing it all into the dump master. The return may be small but the investment in the future is priceless. Well done :-) Our sister school in the Cook Islands doesnt want any more junk as throwing it into the sea is no longer an option. They are just looking to extend the life of the hardware they buy and the hardware they have. This is why they are exploring stuff like Xubuntu, where we picked up the "No hardware left behind" message.      http://www.xubuntu.org/

Chap from GreenPC that I spoke to indicated that they established an Info Timor enterprise in a tin shed and trained six East Timorese students for six months in Australia to run a purpose-built IT Centre is being designed to allow more Ubuntu Certificate-level training to be delivered. I was really proud to read what they are doing to help empower a community with this free libre open source software and the donated hardware.
     http://tulundili.infoxchange.net.au This link to the computer recycling Byteback page from Boroondara council is fantastic and an outstanding example of what every city council should be striving for. Sounds like a good letter campaign that IT student can initiate to encourage a similar service with their local council. The guess the thing we need to emphasis to the college admin is that it is now never an option to fill the school dump master with toxic eWaste. If it costs the school money and time to correctly dispose of this waste, then so be it. I might use some of the new suggestions posted here to update the VITTA eWaste position statement
     http://www.vitta.org.au/pubs/infonet/view.php?id=250 (may need VITTA website login)

I was able to get Squeak to work within my browser on Ubuntu.

The problem that I had with the Firefox browser plugin was registering the client application to the browser. I managed to find the details on how to do this with a quick Google search on this e-mail post.

Now that I can get some of the eToys working on the SqueakLand website, I can explore some of the work by other students.

Nice way to spend Software Freedom Day. :-)

Following the installation of GameMaker version 7 on my computer system, this program alert flashed up on my screen and the program terminated. As with my previous tests with GameMaker on Linux that i have reported back to my ASISTM cluster, the computer is running Ubuntu Feisty Fawn 7.10 and this software is running on Linux with the support of Wine.

The software installs fine but reports this alert message "XtreamLok Alert. DLL loading problem or Debugger detected or Integrity violated" then stops.

XtreamLok is apparently some kind of copyright protection software that prevents software being reverse engineered. Hardly in my case as I was just trying install and run GameMaker version 7 on my computer. Was I doing something wrong, was this a threat, was I being warned, whose integrity was being violated?

I wondered if others are aware of this feature that added by YoYo Games to GameMaker and saw no mention on their website although it seemed from this GameMaker forum discussion that the software is potentially spyware or at the very least, part of the DRM movement that threatens to prosecute me if I look at or circumvent it.

YoYo games of course has right to protect their intellectual property including GameMaker software. I still have some serious security and privacy reservations about undocumented features, spyware, DRM by the back door or loss of freedom. When the doors to a house are welded tightly closed and the alarm is turned on, trust me only goes so far.

I have promptly removed GameMaker from this test computer. Commercial, closed source software is now making me feel increasingly nervous.

Two years ago I had some fun reading the lunar journals. Here is a good story that has done the rounds over the past few weeks. It was about the NASA Apollo lander module, size of the computer and 64 kb of memory! Both the blog entry by David McMahon and the full story by the ABC Science Unit are worth reading.

Although the computer was slow, the MIT team developed a robust, real-time multi-tasking operating system (long before Linux). The system worked, but almost caused the first moon landing to be aborted in the final minutes before the touchdown. For recognising the error code and >making the critical decision to continue, the mission control expert back on Earth later received the US Medal of Freedom along with the three Apollo astronauts. It is a true story of some hard core programmers and technicians on a voyage of discovery.

Apollo 11 Astronaut Niel Armstrong gave a conference speech on the role technology played in the race to the Moon. In it he described the tiny computer that he used for the Gemini missions. "Changing orbits, rendezvousing with another spacecraft, returning to earth to a pre-determined landing spot, all with a primitive, little, 4K machine."

.. beats holding up your thumb or taking a squiz out the window.

I found and installed a BOINC manger for my Ubuntu OS powered computer, a free Linux distribution. Now I can use up those spare CPU cycles to continue my participation in some distributed computing projects such as SETI@Home and Climate Predicting.

This is a fascinating way to solve complex problems. Large problems are divided into many small problems which are distributed to many computers. Later, these small results are reassembled into a larger solution.

Wikipedia notes that on September 2006, the BOINC platorm has over 475,000 active host computers with an processing capacity averaging over 615 terraFLOPS. The fastest supercomputer today performance peaks out at one petaFLOP and a basic hand calculator grinds along at a few FLOP (FLoating point Operations Per Second).

It is exciting to be part of this worldwide "quasi-supercomputing" solution and work to help solve some real-world problems.

An report that I submitted to WineHQ describing my tests on an old CDROM software application that I successfully tested with my Ubuntu 6.10 Edgy Eft Linux distribution has been accepted. It is now part of the Wine HQ application database that lists what . Cool. :-)

I had some fun playing about with Wine to install some simple Windows apps, it was time to tackle mounting and installing some more challenging software. Wine is an Open Source implementation of the Windows API on top of X and Unix (I now see that it is not an emulator). When I rummaged deep into my shoebox of old CDROMs, some worked although it was disappointing to find that some required old versions of free commercial software that were no longer supported or generally available.

I had give up after too many problems with a kids game CDROM that was continually checking that I had correctly installed Apple Quicktime Version 2.0 that refused to install.  Imagine being locked out of your old car because you were not wearing the free branded slippers that they gave away at the launch.

I made a mistake downloading the Kubuntu installation instead of the Xubuntu ISO file that I was really looking for. Anyway, I had a go at installing this Ubuntu EdgyEft sibling to try it out. Installed nicely into a VMWare virtual machine.

The interface has been built using the Debian KDE desktop system. For a Linux newbie like me, it was intuitive enough to navigate myself around, create this desktop screengrab image, fire up a Konqueror web browser then upload it to Flickr.

All in an idle evening playing about with Ubuntu. :-)

It was encouraging to read this blog post Yo Mamma likes Ubuntu. A mother who liked Ubuntu on her laptop so much that it was installed on all the other home computers. No slowdowns. No viruses. No spyware. (sigh) Yet another reason why Ubuntu is the Linux Poster Child.

A hypothetical for developers of open source software projects that I have adapted from a comment by a flickr user.

"Consider a typical busy software user called Adam. Perhaps he is familiar with the Macintosh computer, smart, but has no technical background. Adam downloads the open source application, installs then starts to use it. Adam notes that important parts such as importing and exporting were not completed. In addition, the application works and looks very different to applications on his other computer. Adam has trouble finding out how to do things as the documentation is incomplete, there is no clear support page or help forum. Adam gives up and vows never to use this application again in business."

Putting out a 'nearly finished' product is a good start although failing to maintain the momentum, support and upgrades is not. Groups need to watch out that they do not treat any new users from the Linux desktop with a narrow minded "stay tuned until we get back to you." attitude. Busy customers have a long memory and short patience.

In this way, Ubuntu got it right. The kid-friendly, polished suite of Ubuntu desktops does more than just serve the self interested tinkering needs of some geeks (unlike this funny flash animation that pokes fun at Linux powered super dudes). It looks good, feels good, is good.

I have just finished reading World Domination 201 (thanks kattekrab), a fascinating article that tries to grapple with our computing future. Mention is made of some new actors on the stage including network games and on demand video. There are some good pointers about the way that the open source and Linux community could push ahead. Off the top of my head, it is vital more effort is put into support for 3D and multimedia on a Linux desktop .. but I can also see the dirty, political battle it has become with copyright, codec and DRM lines hastily drawn in the mud to confuse and confound us. The very last sentence about public choice theory is very important.

We face two very different futures at the start of 2007.

How open minded are you? Whose interests will you serve?

Over the past few months I have tinkered with Ubuntu using a swag of different environments ranging from full installations, dual boot and virtual machines. I notice some blog posts by users that have struck some grief when they have attempted a dual boot Windows - Ubuntu setup. Although they often have a good technical background it seems that they still strike the odd problem with the grub, NT boot loader, drivers etc.

If anybody is interested in exploring or tinkering with a Linux installation on a laptop or work computer, I would highly recommend that they start with a virtual machine installation with software such as VMWare.

With VMWare, tapping Ctrl-Alt-Enter on my laptop keyboard switches to a full screen mode, tapping Ctrl-Alt switches between the two operating systems on the fly. Even just plugging in a plain old USB key allows files to be swaped between the two operating systems. A virtual computer HDD file can be copied to another computer, launched from an external USB HDD or recovered from a previous state with a snapshot restore.

Playing about with an operating system this way is a great way to learn without the fear of messing up an existing computer system. Running an operating system this way has also helped me to better appreciate the power of virtual computing.

Donna posted this good bit of news from linux.conf.au about the conference next month about the OLPC (one laptop per child), children's machine or $100 laptop project that run an interface called Sugar.

http://www.computerworld.com.au/index.php/id;1775295474;fp;2;fpid;4
Chris Blizzard of Red Hat and One Laptop per Child fame will speak next month at the world renowned linux.conf.au "kids - especially young ones - learn from each other as much as they learn from a teacher. If you let kids show each other interesting things, let them share and work together you'll end up with an effect that makes teachers more effective and lets kids start to educate each other.

Seymour Papert, a leading pioneer of ICT in learning  has worked hard to embed some sound educational principals into  the OLPC project. Whilst attending a conference in Hanoi, a suprise news report indicated that he was gravely injured in a motorbike accident whilst attending a conference in Hanoi. His condition is now stable but still critical.

To support Seymour and his family, a virtual bunch of flowers has been created at www.flowersforseymour.com and a virtual get well soon card at http://papert.media.mit.edu