St Dustan's Community School

Pioneering work is taking place in the USA and a few schools across Europe including the UK. My aim is to promote their work and success under the banner of "Open Source - save money - employ more teachers". Some schools will spend up to £25,000 on Microsoft & Windows based software when setting up a network. This is an unnecessary expenditure and those funds could be spent on putting more teachers INTO schools. For example Star Office 5.2 is a suite of applications that can produce and save documents in the Microsoft format. This again is free. RedHat Linux and SuSe Linux are 2 corporate distributions of Linux, which come in an easy to install package. These can be bought as boxed editions for between £45 and £57 or can be obtained "copied" for the cost of the CDs. Once the school has one copy of the discs no further expenditure is required for licenses. It can be placed on as many machines as the school can afford. Linux has been around for 10 years now and I am convinced that its use in education is about to flourish. All that is needed is for Senior Managers and LEAs to see working examples of it to break free of the Windows loop of purchase, licensing and upgrade. However many LEAs and ICT HODs are reluctant to try out something new because of the disruption it can cause to a school if it changes to another OS. Linux is ideal for these sorts of schools and departments if they are setting up a new network or adding a network to an intranet. For some starting FROM scratch is easier to stomach than giving up the "devil you know" syndrome. For others Linux can offer the breakthrough that the school is looking for and enable it to expand its Windows based network to classrooms more cheaply. The UK government are now considering the potential of using Open Source software as well. It is also the best software to use when teaching children ICT because it is "OPEN". "Students should, at least, be given the opportunity to see how their new tools work. They should be given the opportunity to examine the inner workings of software. They should be given the opportunity to extend the functions of their tools, where they see or imagine possibilities." (Terry Vessels) Linux provides these opportunities. My main thrust this year will be to campaign and lobby the Educationalists in Government to take this powerful educational tool on board. I am very keen to learn of any schools particularly in the United Kingdom that are already using Linux extensively on their network.

I want to set a small network of 10 machines as a case study to prove reliability,

I have started with 2 demonstration machines, one running RedHat 7.1 and one running mandrake 8.1. I will prove the power of Linux on older machines. There have been no problems with the 2 machines. They share a printer. Big

It is amazing how the student's curiosity to try and learn a new X- GUI are as well as realising the potential of free access to c++ development programming

The school may look at upgrading the current hardware. I will insist we use