Orwell High School, in Felixstowe England has just completed a change over from a Windows based network to Linux and they are overjoyed at the cost savings and new features of their network. The only part of the system that still uses Windows is a Terminal server 2003 system which is used to provide access over the network to any Windows only legacy applications. That machine is slated for removal once all the software has been replaced with Open Source equivalents.

For graphics, they use “TheGimp”, for desktop publishing there is “Scribus”, for Office application tasks they have OpenOffice.org and for database duties, they have MySQL. As an added benefit, the students have access to Squirrelmail (webmail) and their own FTP share, both accessible from outside the school.

The workstations don’t boot from their own hard drives any more, they now boot over the network from a Linux application server. That step alone drastically reduces the workload of their previously overworked techie as instead of updating dozens of Windows desktops, he now has only to update the application server. Not only that, but the budget allowed them to achieve far more then they could have with a Microsoft network.

This is likely to be the forbearer of a new trend, and these guys are happy to help any other schools that wish to give it a try. The students of the school have apparently been delighted with the new set-up and have taken to it like ducks to water.

Read the full article at TheRegister.com.

regards

Franki

In what appears to be a first for Open Source Software, the Firefox web browser is about to be the focus of a full page ad in the New York Times, created, and funded by the Open Source community, and Firefox users that have donated. Firefox looks like becoming the most popular Open Source client side application ever at it’s current rate of adoption.

Get your copy of Firefox now. Firefox, the best browser on the Internet.

The full story can be read at spreadfirefox.com.

Regards

Franki

Sharp are about to release the first PDA with a hard drive in Japan. I believe that this unit is running Linux like several other Zaurus models, but don’t quote me on that.

This model really blurs the line between PDA and Micro Laptop. It has a clamshell design, a QWERTY keyboard, and even a rotating 640×480 screen just like some of the tablet laptops on the market today, and it’s powered by a 416MHz Intel XScale, which probably makes it more powerful then my last full sized laptop (Compaq M700 Armada). Most importantly, it has a 4 gig hard disk.

It’s unlikely we will see it over here, but if it takes off in Japan we might see one of it’s ancestors someday. All I know at this stage, is that if it’s anything like the Zaurus 6000, I want one.

TheRegister has the story along with a couple of nice pictures of the unit.

Regards

Franki

This lady has some nice image links in her blog.

Google has done it again, come up with something for free that will make your life easier, and finding what you lost possible. How often do you have to look all over your computer for something? Cannot remember where you left it etc. Google now offers a 400k download that will index your hard drive and allow you to search it. It includes indexing of email, im messages, and other things. In fact it may help parents keep track of im’ing and sites visited as it creates a cache. Check it out at: http://desktop.google.com/about.html.

The key I suppose is privacy Read the rest of this entry »

I recently updated to Thunderbird 0.8 from http://mozilla.org. One of the great new features they have added is RSS support. If you click on:
“tools” -> “account settings” -> “add” button and then select “RSS news and blogs”. From there is it pretty self explanatory. I set mine to check my favourite blogs regularly and essentially get email style notice of new blog postings. For some where I like to stay on top of comments I also added the comment RSS. Give it a whirl, you’ll be happy you did. If you would like to follow our articles via this method, our feed is here:
wp-rss2.php

Corel Software today (October 14th, 2004) announced the purchase of Jasc, the company that produces the popular Paint Shop Pro program. Hopefully it will lead to more widespread use of the program and will not lead to increased costs for this fine program.