[sf-lug] SF out-reach for FOSS

[Christian Einfeldt]

2008/2/12 Charles N Wyble <charles at thewybles.com>:

>  Thank you very much for this update Christian!
>
> heh.  Thank you for reading it!

> learning new computer technology is not something that the principal has
> room in her life for.  Sad but true.
> * *
> *Wonderful news. Perhaps some of the other schools could also be switched
> over to FOSS *
>

That is our goal.  But it is a lot of work and requires a lot of time and
effort.  In fact, there are tasks that are going undone at the first KIPP
school, such as getting sound working across the network, installing a proxy
server in the lab, and trouble-shooting all of the boxes that are going from
the school to the March 1 St. Anthony's Foundation (SAF) event.

There is also just the raw fact of time, and getting to these other
schools.  To be effective, we really need to have one person "adopt" a
school close to their home, so that adminning that school is not a burden.
I stop by the first KIPP school every day on the way to work to make sure
our children sys admins have turned on the lab correctly, and every night to
make sure that they have shut the lab down.  They do a great job most of the
time, and I have event taught them a few CLI skills, such as sudo reboot and
how to reach a virtual shell, so they are good, but they *are* children,
after all (age 13).


> *and a tech support co op created? Is there any way that the teachers work
> load could be lessened with software? Ideally free software.***
>

Not at this school.  Not in this decade.  The principle is dead-set against
FOSS.  It will take a teacher to decide to get familiar with FOSS, and I
have offered boxes to the teachers, but they are not really gung-ho on
learning it.  There is only one teacher who has expressed an interest in
maybe sort of having Linux installed on one of his notebooks in dual boot
mode, but he keeps forgetting to bring in the notebook, and so I am not
pressing it.


> I have told her that our upstream supplier does not support religious
> organizations per se, and that he would need to approve any placements that
> sounded as if they were maybe religious.  (The upstream supplier to whom I
> am referring is James Burgett, of course).
>
> * *
>
> *[Charles N Wyble] *
>
> * *
>
> *This concerns me a bit. Any discrimination against a particular group
> could reflect very badly on SF LUG and the FOSS community in general. I
> don't know James, or his views. Certainly he is providing the boxes for free
> (I presume) and as such can choose where they go. However I would be very
> careful about restricting where the boxes go, and the reasons for denying
> access.*
>
Well, James is a busy guy, and don't usually get more than 5 mins of his
time at any given moment of time, and so I wouldn't even begin to discuss
broader topics like this, as I always have too many nitty gritty issues to
discuss with him at any moment.  So I just respect his wishes.  There are
lots of groups to help, and very few people who have James' vision,
commitment, and resources, and so my initial inclination is to just go with
the flow.


> * *
>
> Since we will have a lot of boxes coming down the pipe, I wanted to offer
> our upstream supplier (James) with several selections of placements for
> those computers in addition to the school.
>
> *I believe this is the install fest that Untangle is handling yes? I
> learned about it on Saturday at SCALE. I certainly plan on attending the
> event. *
>

Cool.  And yes, James Burgett of the ACCRC.org and Andrew Fife of Untangle
are spearheading that March 1 effort.

> **
>
> We will probably only need about 5 people to be at SAF on the day of the
> event, but we will need many more than that for the massive ACCRC.orginstallfest.  So please start planning now if you are interested in helping
> out on March 1.
>
> *
> *
>
> *[Charles N Wyble] *
>
> * *
>
> *Excellent idea. I plan on brining a couple machines with a full 32 and 64
> bit package mirror (well pretty much all the packages one would need anyway
> such as GNOME/KDE/Ubuntu Studio). *
>
Please watch for further announcements from Andrew Fife and / or James
Burgett about the choice of mirrors and distros and file servers.  I know
that James visited our first KIPP school last week, and he mentioned that he
was going to bring a file server.  So please don't get ahead of the game too
far, and please wait for that announcement.  In the past, James has been
warranting the boxes that come out of ACCRC.org (please check with his site
for the details of the warranty) and so he has usually told me that he would
like to stick with just one distro and just one set of configurations.  This
is going to be a really big effort, and will involve a lot of people, and so
we will probably have the best chance of succeeding if we standardize on
Andrew and James' choices.

With the SAF event, though, we have more latitude.  We only need about 5
people for that event, but if you would like to be one of the five, you will
get more flexibility on whatever distros you want to exhibit on whatever
boxes you would bring there.


> *They can also be used as boot/provisioning servers, which will vastly
> speed up installation. I can also bring a couple 24 port cisco switches
> which can be used for wired network access, as that will most likely be
> needed.*
>
We will need switches at both the SAF and the KIPP school installfest, and
I'm sure that Andrew and James will appreciate the offer of switches and
hardware.  So please wait for an announcement from Andrew / James about
equipment for the ACCRC.org installfest.  But I am sure that we will need
that equipment at SAF.

Thanks for your reply!
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