...or: Fedora in Education - a true story
In the last weeks, I've been working on a software solution "based on Fedora" for my school. To give you a rough overview, I'll try to sum the most important facts up. Please note that this is just a report and not an announcement of a new product or so ;).
For now, I've been propagating a switch from proprietary software to open source solutions, but currently, there're several clients around, among with a windows terminal server. Since we wouldn't be able to accomplish larger changes (also due to political concerns), we decided to stick with the latter one, but try to give some linux-based clients a test run.
So I hurried up, created kickstarts, pondered about space management and stuff like an intelligent distribution strategy. Later, I also came across our school's webpage, which also seems to need more than a quick check-up - but later more on this.
Let me draw up, what I'm imagining for now: The clients would be based on Fedora (currently on F9, but I'm working on rebasing them for Rawhide / F10) and include a number of education and office applications. The connection to the terminal server would be established using tsclient (there is a new version in rawhide - looks good!) and will be followed by the usual suspects:
- an office suite (openoffice.org)
- a web browser (firefox)
- a flash implementation
- a bunch of education apps (kdeedu)
- a photo viewer (eog)
- a document viewer (evince)
- a media player (totem)
- a lockdown editor (pessulus)
- a graphics program (inkscape)
On the other hand, this image also needs to be deployed - therefore, we'll be using a CentOS server, which should then include applications like:
- spacewalk (for system management)
- cobbler (for deployment)
- func (for network controlling)
For the webpage, I still need to get an idea, of which CMS to use... so far, Drupal, Joomla and SilverStripe had appeared on my screen. But these are just the ones I came across recently.
Those were just some of my ideas, but this seems to be an example, how Fedora can be used for educational purposes: We're going to propagate the software - once we managed to install it completely - to the people in the school, so that e.g. more educational apps get used by the teachers.
If you've any ideas or maybe a suggestion concering a CMS, please come up with it! :)
