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Open source in education: Winning hearts and minds

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Linux

Ingrid Marson ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 07 Mar 2006 15:00 GMT

Case Study: Orwell High School — migration to Linux was a 'no-brainer'
Although many schools may be reluctant to try open source, one school that has taken the plunge is Orwell High School, a secondary school in Suffolk that has around 850 pupils aged between 11 and 18.

The School's deputy head John Osborne says that the decision to move to Linux was easy, once it analysed the potential cost-savings. "When we did the sums and looked at the [open source] software and its reliability, it was a no-brainer. Schools who have visited us have thought the same thing," he says.

Orwell High School started deploying thin-clients running SuSE Linux 9.1 in summer 2004 and is now running 350 thin clients. It replaced Microsoft Office with StarOffice, Microsoft Publisher with Scribus and is using the HTML editor Quanta and the image manipulation tool Gimp. The school is also running Windows Terminal Server so that the Linux-based clients can still run Windows-only educational software.

Deputy head Osborne says the school has saving a considerable amount of money by moving to open source, by cutting down on licence, support and hardware costs.

"We're saving huge amounts of money now. Our annual budget is around £30,000 per year. In the past, the entire budget was used just to keep things going, now we've been able to buy more laptops and more thin clients," he says.

The school was able to easily convert all the machines it already owned into thin clients by adding a network card to the computers that didn't have one, and also converted a batch of second-hand computers donated by Credit Suisse into thin clients. With the money it has saved on software licensing, it has bought Sun Ray thin clients, which have the additional advantage over converted fat clients that they are silent, produce no heat, and only use a fraction of the electricity. The school has also been able to provide every member of staff with an individual laptop running StarOffice.

Software licenses accounted for around half of Orwell School's budget in the past. As well as Windows and Office licences, which cost around £35 per desktop, it was also paying around £2000 per year for a Symantec antivirus product, and thousands of pounds a year for a RM Ranger product to lock-down workstations. Now, as it only needs to license one copy of each product to run on the Windows Terminal Server, its total software budget is only £400 per year. This amount will be cut back even further soon, as the school is planning to move to DansGuardian, an open source Web content filter.

The school is also saving a considerable amount through the reduced cost of supporting thin clients. Osborne claims that he would have needed a "team of technicians" to support 350 fat clients and the staff laptops, but only has one technician. The thin clients are easier to support as they run software from the central application server and students cannot change the local environment as there is no hard drive.

"The thin clients are proving to be staggeringly reliable — we are spending only three quarters of an hour every week maintaining 350 clients," says Osborne. "Before, the big problem was security — students downloaded software so we regularly had to wipe the hard drive and start from scratch. We were running 20 types of computers so ghosting an image was difficult, which meant that reinstalling the software took a couple of hours per machine."

The use of thin clients has also extended the life of the school's current hardware. "We used to get only three years out of each machine — the software gets bigger each time it comes out and the hard discs in the computers have a limited life," he says. "Some of our thin clients are now five or six years old."