[sf-lug] Progress at the school with Linux

[Christian Einfeldt]

hi,

On Wed, Dec 3, 2008 at 5:45 AM, Daniel Gimpelevich <
daniel at gimpelevich.san-francisco.ca.us> wrote:

> On Tue, 2008-12-02 at 22:56 -0800, Christian Einfeldt wrote:
> > This is a rather important step for this school.  Until now, no
> > mission-critical functions were being carried out on Linux, just
> > student computer use, which is not considered mission-critical.  (Odd,
> > huh?).  This school considers only teacher computer work to be mission
> > critical: grades, lesson plans.  Student use of the Xubuntu lab and
> > the Linux computers in the classrooms is considered important, but
> > ultimately expendable if need be.  Only teacher work on computers is
> > considered non-expendable.
>
> What do you mean by the "until now" part? Your proposed dual-boot
> solution was for the express purpose of continuing to perform the
> mission-critical functions only under Windows, with the GNU/Linux
> intended only for what would not be considered mission-critical, and not
> required even for that.
>

Pretty much anything a teacher does at the school is considered
mission-critical.  In other words, the principal knows that the teachers at
this school put up with a lot, and so he (the principal) considers their
work important.  The teacher in question told me that he has been using
OpenOffice.org (OOo) to open and create word processing docs and
spreadsheets.

He has not yet installed the Power Grade app on Microsoft Windows, since the
vendor offering that program has been slow in getting back to him the data
that was somehow locked up in their proprietary cloud.  He just got the data
this afternoon, just 10 mins before I spoke to him.  That app is moving
entirely to the cloud, hopefully soon, so he will soon be able to browse to
it, and will be able to dump the proprietary client app used to access the
data.  Hopefully.  There might be a Microsoft Excel tie-in, and while OOo is
quite good at opening 955 of Excel spreadsheets, it does not work on the
massive behaviour-tracking spreadsheet that they use to keep the kids
behaving well.  We have repeated tried to open that spreadsheet, and even on
a fast dual core machine with 2 GB of RAM, it takes 9 mins to open that
spreadsheet, and whenever you want to add data, it also takes about 5 to 9
mins to process the changes.  So it is possible that Power Grade will be
tied to Excel, and thus another obstacle to a complete migration for this
teacher.
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