Large educational Linux deployment for Brazil [LWN.net]

By Jake Edge
April 30, 2008

Numbers like 52 million are attention grabbers, especially when they refer to students getting access to Linux. That's the number of Brazilian public school students who will have access to Linux-based educational computers in some 53,000 labs spread throughout the country. As reported on Mauricio Piacentini's weblog, the Brazilian government already has 17,000 of the labs up and running and plan to be fully rolled out by the end of 2009.

The project, called ProInfo, is run by the Ministry of Education (MEC) for Brazil. Piacentini heard about it at the recent Fórum Internacional Software Livre (FISL) conference, which is held annually in Porto Alegre, Brazil. He noted that the project is not only providing computers and infrastructure, but also a "Linux Educacional" distribution with free educational and entertainment software along with other "open content".

The distribution is Debian-based using KDE 3.5 as its desktop. Packages from the KDE Education Project (KDE-Edu) and KDE Games Center (KDEGames) were included. The project customized the interface, adding a quick navigation bar at the top (seen at left). This is the second version of the distribution incorporating feedback from installations of the previous version. The distribution ISOs, open content, and some documentation (all in Portuguese) can be found at the MEC ProInfo website.

There are various different lab configurations that ProInfo has devised that depend on the nature of the location of the school. Urban labs have equipment for up to fifteen students whereas rural installations have power-friendly hardware that can support up to five users. There is also a configuration targeted at schools for people with special needs that has a large display and accessibility tools added to the distribution. ProInfo also has a project that sounds much like OLPC, except in Portuguese: Um Computador por Aluno ("One computer per student") that plans to bring 150,000 laptops (possibly Intel Classmate PCs) to students over the next year or so.

Some have quibbled about the number of students estimated, but even if it is overestimated by a factor of two or three—which seems unlikely—it is still an enormous project that will impact a huge number of students. Free software is perfect for these kinds of projects, because it can reduce the hardware requirements significantly, eliminate licensing nightmares, and provide a look "under the hood" for students who are interested. Computer skills are largely portable if some of those students end up using other operating systems in the future, but because they are using free software now, any documents, pictures, music, and other data files will be able to move with them.

Folks from the KDE project are justifiably proud of this deployment. It uses KDE 3.5, but plans are afoot to work with MEC to explore using KDE4 down the road according to KDE hackers Piacentini and Aaron Seigo. Many have been concerned about the future of KDE 3.5, but the project has always maintained that it will be around for a long time. As Seigo says:

KDE 3.5 will be supported in the market for many years to come due to deployments such as this one. Looking towards the future, KDE4 will likely make some things even easier for them in the future, such as how to implement the navigation bar they added to the top of desktop as a result of usability research done involving this specific audience. With Plasma, a few lines of JavaScript is all that would be needed.

Proponents of the other desktops or distributions should be cheering this deployment as well. There will probably be lots of lessons learned that can apply to other projects in Brazil or elsewhere that standardize on a different set of software components. This is an exciting project for the free software community. But even more importantly, it is great to see so many of these tools become available to those who have not yet been exposed to them.

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Use of thin clients with Linux

Posted May 1, 2008 6:30 UTC (Thu) by Cato (subscriber, #7643) [Link]

It would be great if LWN could write an article about the technical and organisational issues
of setting up Linux for use with thin clients.  There are many projects world-wide doing this,
often for schools, and by all accounts there are big savings in both hardware and ease of
administration (admin time is a critical resource in schools and developing countries of
course).  Now that fast PCs and LANs are so cheap, it really makes a huge amount of sense and
Linux provides the flexibility to do this very easily.

I recently set up thin clients on Ubuntu using LTSP (Linux Terminal Server Project), and it
was far easier than I expected - a couple of apt-gets, some minor config file edits, and DHCP
setup.  In fact this works so well I'm going to turn a couple of old laptops into Linux thin
clients when they are at home, connected to a fast new Linux PC as the app server (and also my
main desktop PC).

Although this is of greatest relevance to schools, it's also very interesting for business and
home use, in fact anywhere that has some old PCs that are no longer enough to run the latest
Firefox etc.  Some projects I'm aware of are Ubuntu (has done a lot of work on LTSP 5,
includes thin-client server setup in the basic Hardy installer), Edubuntu, K12LTSP (CentOS
based), LTSP and DRBL.

Use of thin clients with Linux

Posted Sep 7, 2008 20:21 UTC (Sun) by Darlene (guest, #53781) [Link]

While you mention thin clients, I wanted to make you aware of our product 'Userful Multiplier' that enables you to turn one PC running a linux distribution such as Ubuntu into 10 stations. There are many large deployments utlizing this software, including a 18,000 seat project with Brasil's education ministry. We have also a large business deployment in Australia.

Instead of thin clients, you only require a monitor, usb keyboard and mouse at each station. by adding extra video cards to the orginal tower, you 'multiply' the linux solution.

For more information visit www.userful.com