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The primary school in Saint Léger en Yvelines (France) has nearly completely switched to using free software reports the village's deputy mayor Olivier Guillard. "Do not underestimate the task", he advises others on the forum of Etalab, France's open government portal, "and, most of all, persist".
Saint Léger en Yvelines is a commune some 50 km west of Paris. The village has one school, with 6 classes, and includes pre-school. The Jean Moulin school is attended by all of the around 30 children in the commune up to the age of 11. On [April 15], deputy mayor Guillard published his recommendations for others that want to "free their schools from the commercial agenda of proprietary software vendors". Free software is unhindered by the constraint of financial profitability, he argues: there is no planned obsolescence and no lock-in to specific hardware.
Olivier Guillard urges rigorous testing of solutions before suggesting them to teachers. Just as important is to convince the teachers of the benefits of free software. He also recommends being proactive on maintenance and monitoring.
He cautions patience. The school's transition to free software took years, he writes. "Seven years of convincing. Seven years to find free software alternatives for each new commercial offering. Seven years of creating a dialogue and building communication channels with teachers dedicated to digitisation of education."
The school has not rid itself of proprietary software completely. Whiteboard solutions and office documents exchanged in France's education sector forces teachers to use proprietary software, for which the school keeps apart two PCs with proprietary office tools, the deputy mayor writes.
Blogger, Linux advocate, and retired 1-man school IT staff Robert Pogson has a short (two paragraph) post. [It offers several open-source software alternatives as well as hardware recommendations — fair use precludes including the whole post here. -Ed.]
(Score: 3, Informative) by hendrikboom on Monday April 25 2016, @11:31PM
I'm still running on decade-old hardware. Went through a few distros in the early days, then settled on debian, now in transition to devuan. My old code still runs.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 26 2016, @08:10AM
Just what I was going to post. Right down to the details!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 26 2016, @11:43AM
Yes, I have old hardware too.
486sx25 w/ 12MB of memory. Use to run NT3 and Slackware. Now only can get 8 to 10 year firewall software only.
K6-2 400 w/ 768MB of memory. Use to run Win98, ME, XP, Ubuntu 7 and 8. Now only can get 3 year firewall software. BUT If i install Ubuntu 7, I can update to Ubuntu 9, but have to go through all in-between versions. Can't load 8 or 9 directly.
C6 200 w/ 128MB of memory. I got Gentoo running on it, but cannot compile on the machine since the GCC compiler required 128MB of memory for itself.
PS: I came for the 8bit hybrid world and systems that ran in less than 1MB supporting 75 users with sub-second response time.