Exploring K12LTSP, Again

Since I'm going to be teaching at a new school this next year and switching from high school math and computers to grades 5-8 math, science & physical education. I thought I would invest a little time to see how the K12LTSP project is coming along. It would be great to have a small easily maintainable network in my classroom for students to be able to explore a new operating system and the tools that it provides.

For those of you not familiar with K12LTSP. K12LTSP is a distrobution of Linux that is packaged for teachers. It stands on the shoulders of a popular distrobution, in this case CentOS, and adds tools for teachers and LTSP functionality. LTSP stands for Linux Terminal Server Project. A terminal is a simple workstation that displays information to the user while the server does all the work of actually running the application, but that is a whole different tangent I'll let you explore an your own. Just note that a HP terminal right now runs for as little as $200-$400 and has now moving parts to go bad and feels the upgrade when the server get's an upgrade.

Now back to my exploration. I just recently rebuilt my computer this last fall and attempted to put Ubuntu 7.10 on it but wasn't very successful at getting the video card working correctly. Had I found that ATI driver then or ENVY which I used to get Ubuntu working on my wife's laptop I'm sure I would have been able to get it working but because of other reasons I decided to install M$. Now having ventured into Vista and VirtualBox I decided to give K12LTSP a try again and resovlve the M$ issue using it in VirtualBox. Besides my install has other issues. The initial K12LTSP installation went smoothly except for the network card a RealTek RTL8169, this is simply a driver issue which I'm sure a newer kernel will remedy. It was easily fixed by walking through a couple of steps in a tutorial and a download from the manufactures website. The next major issue was to get the correct video card drive working so that I don't have to kill my eyes on the 60hz refresh rate. ATI has kindly provided a driver which was easy to install. The printer/scanner an Epson CX6400 seems to be working correclty by simply plugging it in. WOW this was want of the easiest installations that I have ever done. I would say that the only difference between installing it and Vista was the activation of Vista with M$. When I installed Vista I had several driver issues which included loosing some features that I really like from my CX6400 such as double sided printing and the ability to scan multiple images at once.

Back to the evalutation of how K12LTSP is doing. It appears that there are several useful applications installed.

• Inkscape for vector drawings and illustrations
• Gimp for photo editing
• Open Office Suite word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation.
• Celestia space exploration
• Acrobat Reader (as an extra download)
• Scribus for desktop publishing
• QCad
• Firefox
  

The great thing about all of these pieces of software is that all of them work on both Windows and Linux platforms exept Scribus. What better way to give your students a choice of how they work. Asside from that many students can't afford some of the software such as Photoshop & Illustrator. I'll concede that Gimp & Inkscape may not be as powerful but for an elementary and high school setting they will offer most if not all of the solutions that you will need.

Other great programs that I will be installing and using in the classroom are:

• Stellarium planetarium
• GnuCash for balancing your budget

I hope to setup a server in the schools existing network, which is small and has now dedicated admin.

Checkout the aschool blog and worksheetshare this after the summer of 2008 to see any activities that I have created for these programs.