Guys:
Listen, I've been following what you are saying about engg. colleges, and the idea of getting engg students hooked onto Linux is great, but I am not sure sermonizing (you may call it evangelism if you like) is the best way.
Why not defeat the commercial software behemoths (Novel, MS, the list is endless) at their own game. Why not seed colleges? Once the software is on their desktop, the more technically adept ones will be exploring the innards in no time. They are the ones that you want to hook first anyways, they are the best evangelists that we can buy/steal/borrow, they'll in turn grow the Linux community at their colleges.
Lets make a distribution of Linux that does exactly what an engg college requires, and then give it to them free.
The way I see it there are 2 distro's needed. (Admin and Student are similar)
1. Server: mail, authenticated web access, proxy, directory service, etc...
2. Student Desktop: This is different for different engg streams, but I am guessing for an EE-Mech E student, some sort of Data Capture and Analysis software, some sort of Graphing Mathematical Package (like MAthcad/Mathematica?), A Word Processor (Open Office please)
3. Admin Desktop: Student Desktop minus EE/MechE packages, plus email clients, plus Line of Business apps (accounting, etc) And most important, Wine / DosEMU -- To be able to run existing Windows apps that they are used to.
(My perspective on this might be wrong, I did not attend nor have ever visited our target engineering colleges, but just writing about what I used at college)
The idea behind this is that:
1. Admins welcome it (no more paying for licenses, no more risk of pirated software, fewer viruses/worms)
2. Students see practical value of Linux as an OS. And it enables them to run the same apps that they use at college on their PC's at home (I for one could never afford to buy Mathematica, though we used it in classes)
3. Once I have Linux running on My desktop, I would really like to figure out how to run "My favorite IM" or some other tool. This will teach me how to deal with Linux.
4. This now gives us a fertile ground to start evangelizing further. And also hopefully we have 'ground troops' by then that can actually deliver on the promise of Linux, by actually following up with friends who show interest and installing Linux on their PC's, helping them with simple questions, etc...
What do you guys say? Makes sense?
Can some one also describe what is the available computing resources in a sample engineering college, also what the needs might be, (I'm pretty sure that my perception needs to be synchronized with reality)
Is your turn now...
Vaibhav.
PS: My company is working on a server distribution and will be glad to help.
-----Original Message----- From: linuxers-admin@mm.ilug-bom.org.in [mailto:linuxers-admin@mm.ilug-bom.org.in]On Behalf Of Ravindra Jaju Sent: Tuesday, November 06, 2001 4:29 PM To: linuxers@mm.ilug-bom.org.in Subject: Re: [ILUG-BOM] Wat abt our Linux in Schools/Colleges initiative
On Tue, Nov 06, 2001 at 10:11:36AM -0000, Nikhil Karkera wrote:
Hi,
I think in the new engineering syllabus (starting this academic
year), First
Year students have Unix in their portion (someone please
confirm this). In
that case they *have* to use Linux on their machines.
Well, *might* be true!
Actually, I gave a lecture on Linux at the MGM engineering college at Panvel on 19th October, where I was told that the first year students were being introduced to Linux as it was related the syllabus.
Didn't quite think too much about that! Duh!!
-- jaju _______________________________________________