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Westcliff High School for Girls Academy did something interesting last year: they switched to Linux. Their servers, their student workstations, their faculty/staff workstations. Everything went SuSe/Gnome. And a year later, it's still going strong.
England had a school curriculum that dictated that all students would Learn Microsoft Office and that would make them computer literate. Fortunately they ditched that standard and made it more open for the individual schools/districts to teach more useful things.
The best thing about this, aside from tremendous savings in software, was the tremendous savings in hardware. Microsoft is in this tight clench with hardware makers and you end up replacing all your computers every four or five years, they just can't handle the load. That's the sweet thing about Linux: runs fine on 5-10 year old hardware. They did have to replace eight network switches to bring the entire network up to gigabit speeds, that seems to have been their major surprise that they had not anticipated in their mini-trials.
This is an article with their IT administrator who did the switch after many hours of grilling by school administration.
http://opensource.com/education/13/7/linux-westcliff-high-school
http://linux.slashdot.org/story/13/07/31/1645240/a-year-of-linux-desktop-at-westcliff-high-school
England had a school curriculum that dictated that all students would Learn Microsoft Office and that would make them computer literate. Fortunately they ditched that standard and made it more open for the individual schools/districts to teach more useful things.
The best thing about this, aside from tremendous savings in software, was the tremendous savings in hardware. Microsoft is in this tight clench with hardware makers and you end up replacing all your computers every four or five years, they just can't handle the load. That's the sweet thing about Linux: runs fine on 5-10 year old hardware. They did have to replace eight network switches to bring the entire network up to gigabit speeds, that seems to have been their major surprise that they had not anticipated in their mini-trials.
This is an article with their IT administrator who did the switch after many hours of grilling by school administration.
http://opensource.com/education/13/7/linux-westcliff-high-school
http://linux.slashdot.org/story/13/07/31/1645240/a-year-of-linux-desktop-at-westcliff-high-school
