BETT 2009
Next week, we’ll be exhibiting at BETT, “the world’s largest educational technology event” in Olympia, London from the 14th to the 17th January.
On our stand (SW104) “The Open Source Precinct” with our friends at the OpenForum Europe we will be:
… promoting the benefits of Open Standards and the Free and Open Source Software Community. This global community creates high quality software that is Free for everyone, and best of all, the code is open so anyone can study how the software works and make improvements. Open Source and Open Standards create a lower cost, more open and competitive ICT market. Visit us to see (and play with) software for students and staff and learn where you can get local support from IT companies and user groups to get you started.
Please drop by if you are coming and say hello. Or if you know of any educators who are going, mention us to them. The educational world really needs FOSS right now more than ever before. But publicising it against the backdrop of vast marketing budgets and political influence is hard.
Think about it.
- Do you have kids who go to school?
- Do you still go to school?
- Do you teach?
- Do you pay tax?
- Do you care about the future?
If you can answer yes to one or more of these questions then FOSS in education really matters.
Do you want our Government and education system to waste your money on proprietary software like Windows, Anti Virus Software, Office 2000, 2003, 2007 etc and simply teach us how to use these products? “Just press CTL+ATL+DEL when it stops working Jonny”
Or would you prefer to spend the money on more teachers, buildings, hardware etc and teach us how to use any computer and how the software works and how to improve it and how to collaborate and how to communicate and and and?
We will have Edubuntu running on all our PCs, and lots of interesting applications to see and touch and play with.
Migrating from Windows
The last Windows computer in our house is very shortly going to be history 
I have been threatening my wife’s PC for quite some time now, but there has been no real motivation to move until today… Our bank called and told her a credit card has been fraudulently used in the last few days. Fortunately they appear to have correctly and swiftly identified the misuse and are dealing with the problem.
However, this experience has obviously caused my beloved (Helen) to start wondering how her details were captured in the first place. She is pretty scrupulous with the shredder, and this particular card is almost only ever used for on-line transactions; so her PC was a possible, if not likely, route for the thieves. The ClamWin AV scan threw up a few nasty sounding files, including some IE.IFrame trojan thing, although they had all been quarantined already. But the fact that Windows is so vulnerable to attack and subsequent compromise when compared to Linux, this saga has just tipped the scales. We now have a good reason to start the final migration of the Lord household.
This evening, I have installed Thunderbird on Helen’s Windows PC and imported everything from her Outlook email client. The import was basically flawless and after changing a few settings she’s now up and running with TB. (Interestingly, her first few comments were very positive: “This looks nice”, “It’s much faster”, “I like the address book layout” and so forth.) I added Lightning and connected her up to our caldav Calendar Server (Cosmo) which is an added bonus for Helen. We all use this for work, family and personal scheduling and Helen had been limited to using web access (simply because Outlook doesn’t support the Caldav standard) which is not the optimum interface to this calendar.
Helen was already using Firefox most of the time but now I’ve asked her to stop using IE altogether.
Helen also has OpenOfice.org (OOo) installed already but has not been using it much as the Windows defaults are [were] set for MSO 2003. This will probably be the area where there will be some new learning as she stops using MSO and starts using OOo but it isn’t that painful to be frank.
I think within a month, I will install Ubuntu 8.10 as a dual boot for a short period just in case she finds there are things that don’t work and then we’ll turn off the malware-that-pretends-to-be-an-OS Windows within a few weeks from then.
She does use iTunes for her work and pleasure so I am thinking we’ll need to have a VM (VirtualBox) running her copy of XP to support that, unless someone would like to offer advice on alternatives. She runs music therapy classes and her material is ripped onto her iPod using Apple’s lossless codec IIRC that iTunes seems to default to. Never having used it myself, nor do I own an iPod I am not the best source of advice on this one so if anyone can help here I’d be grateful.
I can’t think there is much else that will bite us though; she doesn’t have any other proprietary apps I can see that are going to prove troublesome to replace.
One thing that is really important in this story is this ability to run the main applications: Firefox, Thunderbird and OpenOffice.org, on both Windows and Linux platforms. It will make the transition, for a non-technical user, much less painful than having to switch wholesale over to new apps and a new OS all at the same time. Thanks Mozilla and OOo.
As we go through this migration I’ll write a little more (I might even ask Helen to document her experiences and thoughts). Hopefully it will help others doing, or wanting to do, the same thing.
