Deepings School, Peterborough
From Schoolforge-UK
The following post appeared in Slashdot on 7 July 2005 in response to this article about FLOSS in UK schools:
I've just left (about a week ago) my school after 7 years. Last year a new business studies block was built with two Linux suites in it. They both have about 30 thin clients in each, which run off of one server. They are using Suse (9.1 IIRC) after Fedora Core 2 kept struggling. All of the teachers were complaining that they didn't know how to use Linux, but of course now they've found it's just fine, because with KDE they can use it just the same way as windows. By using thin clients the school has saved a lot of money on hardware as well as software. The Linux machines are also a lot more stable than the Windows network, and everything is much more up to date (the windows network is still 98 with IE 5.0!). If anyone is interested its the Deepings School near Peterborough in the UK.
We'd love to have more information about this FLOSS installation
WikiSysop 09:10, 8 Jul 2005 (BST)
We, the IT staff, had been looking at Linux for quite some time, with a view to offering the school a viable alternative to Windows. A donation of surplus PCs from a Peterborough company presented an ideal opportunity to run a proper trial. The trial suite consisted of nine Compaq Pentium 600MHz client machines using etherboot and a Twin Athlon MP 2000 server. K12LTSP V4.0 was installed, and in May 2004 the room was handed over to our unsuspecting users.
Needless to say, the pupils had fewer problems adapting to the system than the teachers. During the 14 months that the suite has been in use there has been virtually no administration other than adding or removing users. The user base was limited to pupils with "challenging" behaviour or other special needs.
In October 2004 a new Business and Design block was completed, within which were four IT rooms. To get best value from the available budget two of these were designated for Linux use.
In order to service thirty clients per suite, fairly good Terminal Servers are required. Each of ours comprises of an Intel SE7501HG2 main board with twin 2.4GHz Zeons, 3GB RAM, and a single U320 SCSI Drive.
The client machines are VIA Epia M10000 mini ITX main boards housed in Cubid 2699 mini-ITX cases with VideoSeven 15" LCD monitors. The Epias use PXE boot.
A third server was built for NIS. This is an Intel SE7210TP1-E Board with a 2.4GHz Pentium 4, 512MB RAM and SCSI U320 Hard drives. All the servers NICs are gigabit and the network switches have gigabit uplinks.
Given the quality of hardware being used, it came as a nasty surprise to find after loading K12LTSP V4.1 (Fedora Core 2 based) we suffered some system instability. Even under light loading there were occasional crashes. Scouring the logs and The K12 user group message boards did not help, nor did going to Fedora Core 3.
With nearly 800 users now experiencing Linux for the first time, we could not afford to mess about and so it was decided to give Suse Linux Enterprise Server a try. One of the terminal servers was loaded with SLES 9 and LTSP and the mob was let loose! Thirty kids all logging on and then opening their various programs at the same time is a good test of any terminal server, believe me.
Happily, SLES 9 proved to be rock solid, and the other server was also loaded after a short period. During the past few months we have had no instability whatsoever.
The total spend on equipment for the two Linux suites, printers and servers came to about £20,000. This was about 60% of the cost of the two (RM) Windows suites fitted out at the same time. We do all our own builds, including servers. The equipment costs were roughly the same across the two types of suites, so you can guess where the savings were!
Rob Hudson
Network Manager
