[K12OSN] K12LTSP demo - any suggestions?

[Chris Thomas]

Hi,

For doing maintenance on my school's server boxes, I
use to use webmin. Webmin was nice because you could
use the batch user add tool and it had a nice
interface. But now, I just use the redhat-config apps
and the console. 

In terms of your demo, here are a few things I would
do,IMHO (Warning: long post):

1. Make sure you run through your presentation at
least once. I mean, pick out and test the terminals
you are going to use. I know k12ltsp is a turnkey
solution and most terminals work with it out the box.
But, resist the urge to just walk in there the day of
the presentation and use any ole desktop as a
terminal. Sometimes stuff needs to be configured. It
would be a shame the day of the presentation to pick
some random computers to use and one or two of them
don't work as smoothly as you would like.

2. If you have k12ltsp on a decent laptop, use it as
your demo server. This is for a few reasons. One, If
your lazy like me, you don't want to be hauling around
a server box. Two, lots of people view laptops as a
lighter weight computing device compared to servers or
even desktops. If you do that, people will be blown
away that a laptop can support a few computers. Then
you can say "just think of the number of computers I
can support with a real server!"

3. Make sure the computers that will be the terminals
are clean and free of scratches, finger prints, etc.
as much as possible. This has a physiological effect
on your audience's sub conscious. For one, it makes
them focus their attention on the non-windows box
because they will stand out a little bit. Two, they
will say that these PCs are better than the others
because they are clean. Hopefully they will equate
better with k12ltsp being better than windows as well.
Here is an analogy; Lets say you have to buy a item
you know little about. When you go to the store and
there are two brands of the same item, you are going
to pick the one that has the box that looks more
appealing to the eye, because you equate the better
box with being a better product inside even though
there is no real correlation. Here is another example;
Many un knowledgeable people buy Macs because of their
innovative case designs and not on what their needs
are.

4. Some people don't get things until they see it. You
can demo k12ltsp but, your audience might not envision
the students using it. So, if during your
presentation, if you had a student or two, surfing the
web, typing up a report in OpenOffice, using the
graphing calculator program, using GIMP or Scribus,
etc., it would help. Then the audience could see that
the students could use Linux, that it is easy to use
even with complex apps, and that the kids don't have
to re learn a new computer system.

5. If you could find articles/ case studies about
Linux in education, that would be helpful too but I
know those are hard to find.

That's about it. I'm sorry that I was long winded.

Chris

--- Bill Bardon <bill at computassist.com> wrote:

> I support a small high school with a 30-computer
> student lab. They ran
> SuSE Linux on the individual machines up until last
> summer, when the
> powers on high declared it would be switched to
> Windows. We converted
> all the machines to W2K over the summer (still
> running Samba on the
> Linux server for personal folders and network
> shares.)
> 
> Today I had a conversation with the teacher
> responsible for the day-to-
> day lab operation, and she's had enough of Windows.
> After fighting
> with viruses, spyware, and crashing computers, she
> wants to go back to
> Linux!
> 
> I'll be demoing K12LTSP this Friday, using my LTSP
> server which I'll
> bring on site, and a few of her lab computers booted
> from floppies.  Do
> any of you have recommendations for how I should
> approach the demo? Any
> experiences or wisdom to share?  Once the comps are
> booted over the
> network (which still has a small WOW factor for me,
> and I know how it
> works ;-) what then?
> 
> Obviously I'll show her OpenOffice and Mozilla,
> maybe Scribus and some
> of the Kedu stuff. More than that, I want to
> emphasize how easy it will
> be to administer and maintain.  Since I do most
> things from a console,
> I'm wondering what GUI program folks use for user
> maintenance.
> 
> Lots of questions, feel free to take a crack at any
> of 'em.  I'd love to
> see Linux back in this lab.
> 
> 
> -- 
> Bill Bardon
> COMPUTASSIST
> Omaha, Nebraska
> http://www.computassist.com
> 
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