[ale] Linux in SA
JD
jdp at algoloma.com
Tue Jul 2 16:46:23 EDT 2013
I wonder if any of the kids introduced to Linux went on to join Canonical?
The Cape Town LUG is very active and when I asked which distro they all used, it
was nearly 100% Ubuntu, though a few did run Debian on servers. I spoke there in
May about VirtualBox. Many thanks to Andy R. and the rest of the crew there.
On 07/02/2013 02:44 PM, Edward Holcroft wrote:
> Ah Jim, this discussion brings up so many bitter-sweet memories for me.
>
> I remember when you were running the K12LTSP list, and I was deploying K12LTSP
> in disadvantaged schools in deep rural South Africa. Your list was my core
> survival tool and Jim you personally solved many problems for me and the
> non-profit I was running at the time. The heady days of Etherboot and
> rom-o-matic (when Ken Yap himself would help me resolve boot issues), hand-built
> UV eprom erasers, reclaiming old BIOS chips from dead motherboards to create
> etherboot NICs. My EPROM programmer was the single most expensive piece of
> equipment that we owned. We made thin clients out of refurbed PC's that were
> donated to us by government departments and some companies. By tapping into the
> corporate social responsibility project of UniForum (the .za domain
> administrators) we were able to deploy several thousand seats into the most
> grueling of environments. I believe they are still running to this day (although
> with the demise of K12LTSP, the project switched to Ubuntu shortly after I left
> South Africa).
>
> Finding you on ALE when I moved to Atlanta really brought home to me what a
> small world it is. One day I plan to attend a monthly meeting so that I can
> thank you in person and tell you the story, or perhaps one chapter of the story,
> of thousands of Linux-using schoolkids in Africa that you had no idea you
> actually helped! And drink beer.
>
> Your stories of corruption are distressing to me because they sound so much like
> what I encountered in South Africa at one level or another. It bothers the heck
> out of me to see the same issues cropping up in an officially developed nation:
> we have no excuse for this kind of behavior in the US (not that anyone does of
> course, but here we're quick to use terms like Third World corruption, banana
> republic and so on, when we seem to be living in a glass house). When it came
> time for a government sponsored rollout into all 2000-odd schools in one South
> African province, Microsoft and their OEM partners came out hitting hard, and
> even though we deployed a fully functional demo site that "just worked" while
> the Windows teams were still booting, there was NO chance that Linux was going
> to happen ... too many palms greased and too much incompetence. In another South
> African province a DoE official actually threatened me with "consequences" if I
> dared to install non-Windows systems: I turned that province into my show-piece.
>
> One tale of woe, and there certainly were a few: the DoE sent a Doze technician
> to one of our sites who was so confuzzled by not being able to find hard drives
> in the refurbs, that he went and installed hard drives, and Windows, on each
> machine! After that little experience we started to glue-gun the IDE ports on
> the MB's before deploying. lol. You can't win 'em all.
>
> Anyway, just want to say is it's awesome that there are still believers out
> there. I would be willing to join with someone, or better yet a team of people,
> in taking a shot at rekindling the idea in Atlanta schools.
>
> The concept-plan I used in South Africa was very community oriented - we would
> have the school take responsibility for basic infrastructure and even have the
> kids help pulling Ethernet cables, with teachers and senior students trained in
> system administration. Regrettably, I had to leave SA before implementing the
> full self-sustaining concept that I had in mind (that's another story). I still
> believe though, that the basic concept is universal and regardless of the fact
> that Windows and corruption won one battle in Atlanta, the war is far from over
> as many fervently Microsoft shops are more susceptible than ever to the
> viability of FOSS.
>
> cheers
> ed
>
>
>
> On Mon, Jul 1, 2013 at 10:58 PM, Jim Kinney <jim.kinney at gmail.com
> <mailto:jim.kinney at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
> I had no more resources to throw at it. After it was all over, I ran the
> numbers and thanks to the ridiculous number of meetings I had to go to on
> the project I made just barely over $5 an hour. Can't feed a family on that
> even working 60+ hours a week.
>
> We looked at expanding that process and there was just not enough traction
> to justify staying in it. Marketing up against "everyone use Windows" was
> outside of our financial ability. When I spoke at NECC (National Educational
> Computing Conference) in San Antonio in 2008, the room was quite surprised
> to hear the greatest single challenge was "political engineering". My
> surprise was that the room was packed to overflowing.
>
> Don't get me wrong: the process WORKS. We came up with the first generation
> of LTSP that would scale to 10's of thousands of simultaneous clients. What
> we did has not be replicated at even half that scale anywhere in the western
> hemisphere to date. There are some projects in Europe and Scandavian
> countries in particular that are close to that scale.
>
> Technology changes as well. What worked then for thin client processes is
> not an ongoing solution now. Between 2006-2007 and now, KVM and SPICE have
> progressed to provide a far better user experience than what we could do
> then with LTSP. Server technology has vastly exceeded what we built with in
> 2006. A dual proc, dual core with a total of 8GB RAM was sizable then and
> laughable now. Schools we installed with 5 servers we could do now with 1
> and still have expansion room.
>
> There was a serious emotional toll on the project as well. Watching the
> leadership squander resources to pad their own pockets or just out of total
> ignorance was bad enough. But watching them do it at the expense of 140,000
> kids who already getting kicked in the social balls just by being there was
> too much.
>
> On the very first school we worked at, we met the librarian who was tickeled
> pink about the whole project. When I ran into her the following year at
> DragonCon, she was spitting bile over the project in general and us in
> particular. It seems the day after we were "officially done", some windows
> idiot from ITD went to her school and messed with the servers and they never
> worked again. Of course I was never informed of this or else I would have
> certainly RUN and fixed things. In fact, that school was the one where we
> verified the restore process that was fully documented (step-by-step
> cookbook) and provided to APS. They broke it and didn't care. And the people
> who were trying to make things work there had no power to get anything done.
> As far as the librarian was concerned, we built an unstable system that
> broke as soon as we left and no one could fix it so it was bad from the
> beginning.
>
> People expect Windows to crash and loose data. But a Linux system is touted
> as being so uch better and more stable so that when ANYTHING goes wrong,
> the PHBs and everyone want to throw it all out. APS really thought LTSP
> would work like a VCR. Set it up and walk away and it magically works with
> no intervention. Well, for the most part that was true for most of the rest
> of the year. The next school year, all the thin clients were in different
> rooms and didn't autoregister (by design - needed to KNOW which room they
> were in for many reasons) and manually registering was about 20 file edits
> per system.
>
> <sigh> good and bad memories from all of that.
>
>
> On Mon, Jul 1, 2013 at 10:09 PM, Dustin Strickland
> <dustin.h.strickland at gmail.com <mailto:dustin.h.strickland at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
> Well, why not try a different area? You might be surprised at the results.
>
>
> On Mon, Jul 1, 2013 at 10:02 PM, Jeff Hubbs <jhubbslist at att.net
> <mailto:jhubbslist at att.net>> wrote:
>
> Where to begin, indeed. The crying shame is that we (Aaron, Jim,
> and I) had done a lot of the scenario planning work to scale up what
> we had done to the entire district - tens of thousands of seats -
> and create the industrial processes we'd need to "go big" and still
> improve on what we'd done. We had even joined forces with an
> established and well-respected 8(a) local contracting firm to make
> it easier to do business with us. But because of the circumstances
> Jim described, we couldn't get a fair hearing even though we had
> demonstrated in no uncertain terms that our systems worked extremely
> well in that environment (even though we had almost no control over
> hardware selection). Yet the outfit selected to do the work
> couldn't come close to replicating what we had accomplished even
> though we mostly just made use of very common tools and capabilities
> present in most any Linux distribution.
>
> On 7/1/13 7:55 PM, Jim Kinney wrote:
>> where do I begin....
>>
>> As referenced in the ALE posting, two parents installed Linux in
>> the form of LTSP in their school. They fought the APS process and
>> managed to show that having working computers used more than 20
>> minutes a week made a significant educational improvement in the
>> school. Most importantly, they found a tipping point ration of 3
>> students per _classroom_ computer was was the minimum needed to
>> achieve this impact. The choice of Linux was for cost, security,
>> reliability. Using thin clients allowed a lot of students to use a
>> single "server" in the classroom and minimized maintenance of the
>> overall process.
>>
>> APS then was motivated by the performance statistics to do a
>> larger-scale pilot project. That's where I came in. Assisted by
>> Aaron Ruscetta and Jeff Hubbs, over the span of 6 months we
>> deployed 33 enterprise-scale server, 2200 thin clients in 7
>> elementary and middle schools for APS.
>>
>>
>> At the end of that school year, schools that had been performing
>> poorly and had solidly embraced the new classroom technology
>> showed significant improvements. Some of these improvements were
>> not manipulable by faculty as the tests were done on line by the
>> students.
>>
>> Once again, APS had to continue the process as there was
>> compelling reason to expand what had started as a parent project.
>>
>> What happened next was classic APS corruption. My team had already
>> been first-hand witness to blatant theft of servers, contractors
>> being arrested for attempting to pickup 12-year-old girls, and
>> what smelled suspiciously of refurbished servers provided as new
>> servers (of the 33 deployed, 12 failed out of the box and required
>> new motherboards). APS handed the next phase of the process to a
>> contractor with financial ties to a person (who was not an APS
>> employee but a contractor with no actual contract) with the
>> authority to decide who got the contract. The contractor then
>> managed to never get a single server running LTSP in any school
>> despite multiple millions spent in server purchases. They simply
>> didn't have the the Linux expertise to make it work.
>>
>> As I understand it now, the new head of ITD threw out the entire
>> pile and put in windows systems. The old head of ITD is under
>> indictment and many of the APS ITD staff should be joining him. I
>> would strongly recommend avoiding APS on this topic.
>>
>> I can't confirm the timeline of events, but my brief look when the
>> APS test cheating scandal hit the news loosely aligns with my
>> concerns: APS chose to not continue working with me and my team
>> likely because of the "trouble" we caused raising red flags on
>> ethics. The followup group didn't have the skills to maintain
>> Linux systems and certainly not LTSP systems so the existing
>> servers died of neglect. The performance gains promised in the
>> grant process that funded the initial and following installations
>> were not going to materialize so the need to keep the funding
>> going in the ITD group was a key factor in APS pushing test
>> cheating. The cheating took place in the schools that were touched
>> by the LTSP process that were not being maintained. In particular,
>> Parks Middle School was one of the schools that showed remarkable
>> improvements in 2 and 6 months and the teachers attributed it to
>> being able to split the classes in half (we installed at a 2:1
>> ratio instead of the minimum 3:1) and the time spent on test drill
>> in advance of the actual tests due to an abundance of working
>> systems. Once those systems failed and APS was unable to return
>> them to service, the performance improvements began to fade and
>> thus the push to regain them at any cost.
>>
>> All sour grapes aside, what we saw when those systems went live
>> was nothing short of total gratitude from the teachers and rampant
>> enthusiasm from the students. That was the highlight of my
>> professional career so far.
>>
>>
>> On Mon, Jul 1, 2013 at 7:07 PM, Dustin Strickland
>> <dustin.h.strickland at gmail.com
>> <mailto:dustin.h.strickland at gmail.com>> wrote:
>>
>> I have been thinking for the past few weeks about trying to
>> get my local schools to migrate to Linux. It seems like a
>> much-needed change. Technology is becoming more important with
>> each day that passes-- and the coverage of it in the
>> curriculum is disappointing, to say the least. I remember when
>> I was in Yeager middle school, not too long ago, the only
>> class I had pertaining to computers or technology was a class
>> on how to use Microsoft Word.
>>
>> Computers are far too important, and other subjects becoming
>> far too deprecated(in my opinion), for coverage of technology
>> in our schools to be limited to how to use MS Word. It's
>> almost insulting. Sure, there are programs that the majority
>> of people need to be familiar with, but kids need to at least
>> know about the basic components of a computer and the role of
>> the operating system. It seems to me a logical step - in order
>> for the children to gain an interest and actually learn, they
>> need to be introduced to Linux. Perhaps, then, we can see
>> about adding some more technology into the curriculum.
>>
>> As I was researching this topic to prepare a statement for the
>> Douglas County Board of Education, I stumbled upon <a
>> href="http://article.gmane.org/gmane.org.user-groups.ale/44438/">this</a>
>> posting. If anyone has any more information on this case,
>> please let me know. I haven't been able to contact the Board
>> of Education yet, but I will keep you all posted.
>>
>>
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