John Mark Bucciarelli wrote:
On Wednesday 26 May 2004 09:20 pm, Holmes Wilson wrote:Hi John, The ball is still just getting rolling, so we haven't put all the information up there yet about our experiences, and we didn't really have the people to put together learning materials. I got really busy with other projects, and a few other people left town. But, the lab has been a pretty successful after school drop-in program for local kids, many of whom don't have computers and most of whom don't have internet access. So that's pretty positive. The thing I've been most impressed with by LTSP/Debian has been the stability. We have a bunch of young kids in there 4 days a week for a few hours clicking on pop-up ads, messing around with the settings, and generally beating the crap out of the computers. But in almost a year we've done practically no maintenance, and everything still works fine. If we had Windows PCs we'd need to do a clean re-install every two weeks or the computers would be completely unusable. That's the one thing that makes me really confident in recommending linux for nonprofit labs: the reliability. I'd say the biggest downsides are: 1) really crummy cut and paste functionality between Mozilla and Openoffice. This is a killer, and it was really surprising how big a deal it was. First, you can't copy images from Mozilla into openoffice-- you have to save the files to disk and then "Insert an Image". All the little kids got a crash course in how directory trees worked each time they wanted to put a picture in their report. Second, when you copy a big section of text it tries to paste it into openoffice.org as html, which throws ooo into its completely-inscrutable html editing mode. It would be better if it just pasted plain text. And we'd do this all the time because in order to save paper we really wanted people to paste images and text into documents, so they'd print out more efficiently (no 20 page printouts with 30 pt text). But quite often it simply wouldn't work, or it would have to be fiddled with. I've even tried this with the latest versions in Fedora Core 2, and it still doesn't work. That made me want to switch to Konqueror and KWord, but the version of Konqueror for Debian stable really sucks.I'm running Debian testing with KDE 3.2.2 and was able to drag and drop an image from Konqueror into OpenOffice.2) no local CD/floppy support. I know they have this working, I just couldn't figure it out. Hopefully it will come out of the box in newer versions 3) Clicking on a program multiple times opens multiple instances of it. This is a terrible thing for beginners, especially on underpowered hardware. There should be some global switch that allows you to shut it off, or at least to make it impossible to launch the same application twice within 30 seconds. We have a hack that does this for Mozilla, but it should come out of the box. 4) no local sound support. We got it working on one computer, but it was really tricky and had to be manually configured each time. Also, lots of old computers have ISA soundcards that linux rarely autodetects. My general issue with Debian is that it's too slow to incorporate new stuff. This makes sense for people running servers where everything is already more or less good enough. But for Desktop users linux is *not good enough yet* and so it's really important to get the newest versions of everything onto peoples' computers quickly. It seems like Fedora Core is going to be pretty good at getting out the new stuff. I think we'll be switching to K12LTSP.org with FC 2 when it comes out.I think if you want desktop functionality, you probably will have to run Debian testing. I don't know about Gnome, but the time between a new KDE point release and the time it hits testing is very short.Don't let the "testing" label scare you: I've been running testing and KDE 3.2 every day all day for a couple weeks and have not had a single problem.Plus, I just checked out your organization's website. It looks awesome. Myself and some friends are really interested in putting together a compendium of tech tools and resources for nonprofits and activist groups. Holmes On May 26, 2004, at 8:46 AM, john stanton wrote:Hi Holmes, Your site and project looks great. For my part I would be interested in hearing about your sucesses and obstacles etc using LTSP/Debian in the lab. Are you planning on putting any info on the site about that? Also are you developing/using any curricullem for the labs that you can share? John npotechs.org Holmes Wilson wrote:Hi, I just joined the list. My name's Holmes Wilson and I'm involved with running a program that uses donated computers and linux to set up labs in my town of Worcester, Massachusetts: worcestercoop.org. It's similar to Freegeek, but a lot smaller, and still just getting going. A big part of my interest in the project has to do with turning nonprofits on to the benefits of free software, so I'm really into the idea of Debian NP, and I think making a live CD was a very good call. Anyway, I just tried out the Debian-NP live CD, and I have a couple small points that I think could make the next version better suited for its purpose: The first was that I really think the default background art should be replaced with something more conservative. Not because I don't like the graphic, or because I personally think people should have boring Desktop backgrounds--I hate Windows98 green just as much as the next guy. But speaking as someone who's really tried to pitch Linux to skeptical, non-tech-savvy people who run community groups, it's always seemed like the number one challenge is convincing them that linux is not some weird wacky thing that will make their computers even more inscrutable. To that end, I think Debian-NP would be a more effective demonstration if the computer looked a little less weird. A solid, darkish color or a nice gradient would be a lot better, I think. If it were subtly branded with something like "Debian-NP: Linux for nonprofits", then so much the better. But I think the beaker filled with magenta liquid is a bit too trippy for people who are already nervous about changing computers (and may already be leaning towards thinking I'm some hippy idealist :) The second issue was with the menu in the panel. Having a separate menu for Debian apps is confusing and strange. Things are set up that way too at an LTSP lab we run, and I've seen it confuse people. Most people aren't going to know what Debian is, and to beginners (nearly everyone, when it comes to Linux) it's bad to introduce unnecessary arbitrary terms for things, because it confuses people. Some of those programs shouldn't be in the panel menu at all, and other very useful ones are buried under several layers because they're in the "Debian menu". If we could put all the programs considered useful in a single panel menu that would be a lot less confusing for first-time users. Thanks everybody, for putting together such a nice tool, and I'm looking forward to being part of this discussion. Holmes