I recently came across this post at DesktopLinux. The idea that the writer intended to breathe new life into a laptop previously headed for the dumpster intrigued me. My school is full of old computers that are being groomed for certain death and possible sale at our state’s surplus lot. I have taken a bit of an interest in these old machines since they are beign unused anyway. I have decided to take more than a passing interest in putting them to use. So began my search for a good Linux distro to use. My thoughts have worked like this…
1. I cannot connect any of these machines to the school network. If I do, I risk serious job trouble. Not worth the risk. So no chance for server-based thin client.
2. I need basic GUI since my 11 year-old sixth graders would flip over command line interfaces. Besides, I am competing with Windows in their minds, I need something that doesn’t look like old school DOS .
3. I need basic Office software and audio recording software that will reliably run.
The hardware I am working with is older, typically running a 550 Mhz Intel Celeron processor with 64mb Ram. I have a couple of machines that are 730Mhz Pentium III’s (or so sayeth DSL’s Grub) but that’s about the best of the bunch. I ended up robbing a couple of machines with dead ports or other fatal flaws of their memory, so I think each PC is at least 128 mb Ram.
I first tried Edubuntu. This is a nice distro with lots of preinstalled software. Once I got through the details of how to install and then how to update the core packages, I did ok. My trouble is that the distro is so heavily reliant upon apt-get which requires a network connection to function properly. I felt reticent for the lack of being able to update it. When I wanted to install Audacity, I ended up having to edit the sources.list and forcing it to see a CD-Rom drive which contained a disc with all of the package files for Audacity as well as its dependencies. Painstaking, but worth it. When Edubuntu works, it is great. What troubles me is that it would like much more memory so it doesn’t function terribly well. Audacity skips around and gets clearly overloaded when there are more than two or so tracks. Edubuntu uses the Gnome GUI and I have successfully installed the eye-candy XGL on my laptop which runs Edubuntu. Edubuntu is my favorite but it takes too many resources.
So since I like Edubuntu so much, I was heartened to find (via Jonathan Meyers) that there is a lighter, thinner version of Edubuntu called Xubuntu.
Xubuntu runs Xfce as its GUI as opposed to Gnome or KDE. It is thinner, but still more RAM heavy than I might like. I also had troubles with Audacity. Once all was said and done, Xubuntu works well on the older machines in my array.
I have also tried other distros trying to find a good one for general classroom use. I really really liked Novell SUSE 10.1 which proved to be the cleanest looking GUI of the bunch. I suppose by cleanest I am referring to it being the most Windows-like.
Now at this point I should mention that I am only mentioning Windows so much because my kids talk about it. They seem oblivious to the delicious tastiness of Mac OS X, which is based on FreeBSD and remarkably stable. But that note aside…
I also want it noted that I even looked for alternatives among the non-mac, non-linux world and I tested Solaris 10 on these machines. I figured I could work around the lack of available software if it ran well. No such luck. Even Solaris 10 (whose mission is far from desktop computing in a classroom) wanted more than I had to offer.
So I am sticking with a combination of Edubuntu and Xubuntu. I am avoiding Kbuntu, if you’re curious, because it is just Ubuntu Linux running KDE instead of Gnome, so not worth the effort. I am running XGL mostly anyway when not running Gnome. I do like Konquerer, though, but that’s a trade off.
I also have been playing with a Live CD of DSL, or Darn Small Linux (my paraphrasing). I will neglect to provide a link because I don’t like the name. It works nicely and can be booted from a USB Flash drive and likes to be booted via Live CD or Network booting.
I would be curious as to your thoughts on Linux distros for the classroom. What do you use?
pmouse says:
Hook all of these machines up in their private LAN and use distcc to compile gentoo.
Use xfce/fluxbox as desktops. These machines can still be very fast and responsive.
To compare, I have a laptop from the 98′s, Thinkpad with P-MMX 166 and 96M of ram. Most of the softwares run fine. But it requires a network of computers to help the setup process.
20th September 2006 at 9:44 am
beowulf says:
try freeduc; http://www.ofset.org/freeduc-cd; not the most modern of distros, but aims at primary schools
20th September 2006 at 10:07 am
crafty184 says:
So does this cause a setup similar to X Grid? Or the way the OLPC laptops are supposed to harness spare system resources? Thanks for the comment! I will look into this!!
20th September 2006 at 10:07 am
khorjak says:
Give Puppy Linux a try. It’s a small and fast distro like DSL but with a kid-friendly name.
20th September 2006 at 4:16 pm
edbloggernews says:
Linux distros useful in the classroom
The author explores different Linux distributions that are useful for classroom use, especially on older machines that can now be resurrected.
20th September 2006 at 3:46 pm
Doug Belshaw says:
Nice post. I used the K12LTSP features of Fedora Core last year running off 600mhz/128MB thin clients with an 800mhz/512MB server. There were only 5 machines in the network, but it ran well. Like you, I wasn’t allowed to connect it to the school’s network, but for word processing, keyboard skills, etc. it was great!
20th September 2006 at 7:51 am
JimMc says:
Thanks for sharing. I’m not a teacher or network admin, just a school parent who’s an avid Linux user, who also happens to like tinkering with old computers. I have an old laptop that I wanted to setup for my kids and toyed around with a bunch of so-called lightweight distros and ended up with exactly what you have: Edubuntu/Xubuntu. One of the main problems I discovered with old hardware is you’re also dealing with old BIOS, which in my case would not boot from an external CD-ROM. Not all of the distros for “old hardware” can actually deal with this issue. D*mn Small Linux handled it perfectly and Ubuntu – with some search help – did too.
Anyhow, thanks again.
20th September 2006 at 3:33 pm
Open Source Classroom » Blog Archive » On the verge of ditching Linux for Windows says:
[...] I have recently been given ten computers that range from 550 Mhz to 750 Mhz. They are all Dell and they were headed for the surplus heap to be sold for pennies on the dollar. I headed them off at the pass and directed them towards my classroom to be resurrected. I set about resurrecting them and was successful using a variety of Linux distros. I have posted on this before. I thought I had a great solution lined up in that Edubuntu works wonderfully on most of the machines, Xubuntu works on the ones that Edubuntu won’t load on, and I even have a few thinner client distros like Puppy Linux and Darn Small Linux for the oldest of machines. [...]
20th September 2006 at 7:46 pm