Daily Cup of Tech

Being a Technology Director can sometimes be a tricky job. The budget is nonexistent and trying to keep a wasteland of old machines alive is sometimes impossible. Well, I turned to a few open source solutions to help.

One that most people have heard of is OpenOffice. We have three computer labs with 20 computers each, 25 teacher computers, five administrative staff computers, and three small mobile labs with 10 laptops each. Purchasing that many copies of Office 2007 doesn’t really fit into my budget. Starting with the 2006-2007 school year, we transitioned to OpenOffice in all but one computer lab. The benefits that we have received are numerous. The teachers were all given copies to give to their students. Some students may not be able to afford purchasing MS Office, so giving them a free alternative that they use at school and home is a great way for the students to use the same software in both places.

Another great open source tool is FreeNAS. FreeNAS is a free Network Attached Storage. I found out about it, on this very blog. After reading the multitude of articles featuring this great piece of software, I excitedly visited my computer graveyard. I had 10 to 15 old machines laying around and picked the best two. Then I purchased two 250 gig drives and installed one into each machine. I now use these NAS devices for storage of student profiles, documents, and backups. The software installed onto both systems is a snap to install and includes web-based administration. Both machines sit headless in different parts of the school.

The last open source program that I use is actually a bunch of open source programs combined into one package. K12TSP is the K12 Linux Terminal Server. Basically, install it one beefy server, and it will then serve several diskless thin clients. This project has been installed in many schools across the country. It includes programs such as OpenOffice, Gimp, K-Office, Abiword, Firefox, Acrobat Reader, Gnome, and KDE. My K12TSP lab include 15 laptops that were basically useless, but could boot from the NIC. I gave it a shot, and voila, I had 15 working computers complete with sound.

Overall, my exposure to Open Source software has been great. Above is just a few of the programs that I like. I am positive there are projects that I have not found that would benefit my network. There is a bunch of people out there that can do amazing things with programs. I am not a programmer, but I appreciate those that are.

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