This article is not a suggested template for schools, or evangelism on how schools should be proprietary software free zones. After all, in the work places and further education establishments that our schools are supposed to prepare young people for, many will be expected to have a level of familiarity with popular proprietary operating systems and applications. What this article is intended to do is detail what I have done at Hagley Park Sports College in Rugeley, UK where I work in ICT support.
Briefly, most schools I know of have two distinct networks, curriculum and administrative. Mine follows this model. There is a great deal of freedom for schools in how they deliver educational ICT and MIS systems.
The initial driver for introduction of GNU/Linux was the way the school organised the reservation of facilities like ICT rooms for other faculties’ lessons. An Excel spreadsheet was used and shared on a MS file server for common access by teaching and support staff. This was inadequate for a number of reasons, not least because only one member of staff could edit the document at one time. No money was available; that and my predisposition to Open Source meant that it was always going to be a FOSS solution!
My familiarity with and the support for the Ubuntu distribution of GNU/Linux meant that the latest “long term support” version of the Ubuntu Server was the distro of choice. A little searching of the internet revealed MRBS (Meeting Room Booking System), a web application (to run in the school intranet) coded in PHP using a MySQL database and running on Apache web server. Crucially, it can “play nice” in a Microsoft network via open LDAP which meant users could log in to MRBS with their Windows domain login credentials. No need to maintain a separate database or file of user logins. The ability to install and configure LAMP software (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) as an option during the installation of Ubuntu Server, meant that the software environment MRBS needed was ready. There is great support for MRBS on the ‘net via an active mailing list which is archived and searchable. Pleasingly, the staff embraced the new system and it was extended for use in booking portable multimedia equipment and other resources.
Initially the system ran on a former curriculum system PIII desktop machine, beefed up with as much RAM as I could cram in and additional hard drives however a server became available after an upgrade and I migrated the services to that.
With that extra processing grunt came extra capacity for more services. There was no software help desk in the school; intranet delivery in mind I found a great deal of choice for help desk software. I decided to trial GLPI. Largely French developed, it is free IT and asset management software. Also well documented and supported via forums it provides for help desk and knowledge base and much more besides. Installed on the Ubuntu server, I trialed it within the support dept and ultimately opened it up to the staff. As with MRBS, GLPI has the facility to talk to the MS Active Directory via open LDAP.
So much for the administrative side. For the students, I installed Audacity, an audio editor and the GIMP for image editing, the former is now fully used in delivering one educational module. Both applications were rolled out via a popular proprietary package manager without any problem to Windows XP desktops.
As you might expect, within ICT support GNU/Linux helps out. Largely with tasks like data recovery from corrupt floppy disks, hard disks and USB pen drives thanks to dd, dd_rescue, mount, fuse and many more wonderful open source apps. Wireshark for network traffic monitoring too.
There is scope for expansion and thanks to the availability of another server and with the continuing support of the head of ICT I’m looking to introduce Asterisk / FreePBX for VoIP telephony and video conferencing. Would be nice to get Open Office in too!
A little further down the line, I’d like to have an Edubuntu server available either working with terminals (curriculum workstations network booted) or a NX session with the free Windows NX client.
