Robert Pogson

When I was a child I was told “Every cloud has a silver lining”. It’s true. In the midst of the chaos in my life a cleaning lady approached me before I even reached the school and asked, “Do you fix computers?”. Debian GNU/Linux Squeeze is sliding onto her machine as I type. My web cache is still in storage so the packages are coming from York University at speeds over 300 KB/s up to 1000 KB/s. I cleaned her machine with some compressed gas and checked it out. Dual core with 1gB RAM. The only problem is a conexant modem for which we can get a free 1/4-speed driver. GNU/Linux is in demand here. It sure beats hundreds of dollars of freight and service charges.

We had a birthday anniversary party yesterday. It was nowhere near the actual date but it seemed a good excuse for a party as I was in the North on the actual date.

Besides the toil of preparation highlights of the day included watching a doe with three fawns leave an oak bluff and cross several yards to reach a ridge of willows along a drain, and a conversation with a bright young lady who is a teacher. I had never seen three fawns at once before. I had missed the fact that the young lady had graduated high school and become a teacher with five years experience in the blink of an eye. Time compresses somehow as we age…

The young lady told me of her latest teaching assignment. She is in a large school with many grade 2 and grade 3 students. The school has chosen to put these students into combined grade 2/3 classrooms for the social benefits that arise. Students can stay a while longer with their best buddies whether or not they are promoted and they get to spend two years with a favourite teacher. From experience, I can state that older students do help younger students and that a teacher can do a better job knowing the student for longer than a year.

I described the challenges of teaching where I teach and commented that even simple things like building vocabulary are crucial and how we had implemented KHangman and my cheat for it in the elementary classrooms using IT. I was shocked to learn that this bright young lady from a progressive school lacked IT in each classroom, something that I have had in every school in the bush in the North for a decade. She opined that teachers were not IT people and they did not have anyone to guide them.

Aye, there’s the rub. I do stuff routinely that is amazing to teachers with five years of university and much less experience of life with IT. This is true in my school. If it were not for me, an advocate of FLOSS, there would be a lot less innovation and good use of IT in my school. I am grateful my principal gives me my head. We plan to include a session on using the PCs, network and servers at the start of the next school year to make sure every teacher is up to speed on day one. Every school should have one or more computer geeks. FLOSS works in education.

FUD is often used to discourage people from using Free Software but Rex Djere turns it around. His thesis is that the purveyors of non-Free software are the ones in fear about how their control of people will slip their grasp with exposure to Free Software. Nice.

It explains why some people get so riled when I suggest FLOSS is the way to do anything. The idea of people sharing and not being enslaved by their software frightens many. It appears to threaten livelihoods in the monopoly but really only means they need to change. Change is sometimes necessary but people still resist change because it takes some effort.

It is illuminating that few end-users become riled when I suggest FLOSS. It is those in the food-chain of non-Free software who feel threatened, yet they attack me and others as though we are trying to deceive end-users. Cute. Carla Schroder got it right when she wrote, “The first step is figuring out who are your customers? When you’re Microsoft it’s not end-users, but everyone upstream: corporate buyers, resellers, and OEM shops. Actual users are little more than unavoidable nuisances. Microsoft salespeople and marketers cater strictly to the folks who sign the big checks.” Amen.

I had a little exercise in freeing end-users yesterday. We have just finished reports which have been done by editing spreadsheets in .xls format. It means opening and closing files one at a time, printing and proof-reading and printing again, wasting lots of end-users’ time. After finishing the reports, I gathered packages from the Debian repository and it looks like we will be able to generate reports next fall by merging XHTML with a database so the teachers will not have to worry at all about formatting and proof-reading. We will be able to run scripts on the database to check that entries are complete and run the lot assured of consistent formatting. There will also never be a collision because each teacher only makes entries for his/her courses. I put in a day’s work organizing a database and a couple of scripts and our teachers are freed forever from opening and closing files. Sweet. Priceless.

In addition to saving myself and all the teachers in our school from hours of useless labour four times a year forever I had the satisfaction of doing stuff I love with computers and data and I even found a bug in a package in Debian GNU/Linux and submitted a bug-report. With closed software, on the other hand, I would have put in the same effort trying to persuade bean-counters to issue a purchase-order for some grade-book software, waiting for things to arrive or not before the next school year, and being told the salaries of the teachers are paid so labour-saving is extra-cost… What would you do? I will pick FLOSS every time to solve such problems.

FLOSS works.

I found a neat article with a list of 50 applications available as FLOSS for educational purposes. I have used a bunch of these, but I am always willing to learn about others.

While FLOSS does save money in education, some of these apps are quite effective tools in education and may be superior in many ways. I tend to teach high school so I do not regularly use some that are intended for younger students. Many courses I teach rely heavily on OpenOffice.org which, while it may lack some features of commercial software is easier for students to use because of that. OpenOffice.org can be used successfully by students as youg as ten years. They learn a few operations and are instantly productive.

Moodle is great for teachers in computer labs or for distant education. When done well, a course is much easier to manage than with paper-shuffling. Marks are automatically tabulated, for instance. Students can also get fast turn-around on assignments.

Schools should review FLOSS projects for regular use because they can save a bunch. It should be reuired to give evidence why a FLOSS app cannot do the job when requisitioning non-FLOSS. It just does not make sense to spend more than you need to get the job done. Adding fluff to the task does not make it any more effective.

Today was supposed to be a good day. Classes are over and I just have to prepare reports and a few other things to be free for the summer.

The morning started with a lady who could not print pictures of the end-of-the-year sports day. The camera was not recognized at all by XP. GNU/Linux seemed to see it but there was no pop-up on the desktop, just some messages in the system log. USBview could not see it. We thought about taking out the memory card and using a reader but we tried one more XP machine. This time it seemed to work. We were half-way through the transfers when the connection was lost. Now, we were pretty well convinced that the connection or USB interface was faulty. We managed to find a way to hold things together long enough to complete the transfer. We zapped stuff to the server by FTP and then back to the lady’s XP machine. I asked her, “Have you dropped the camera?”. Yes, it turned out. If she had told me that right away, I could have used other choices. All the while I was fussing with PCs she was telling me how she never had any trouble with the camera working with any PC… On top of the connectivity, the camera had two modes, storage and PTP. It was set to PTP which made it doubtful for any PC without a driver installed.

That spoiled half my morning. In the afternoon another lady, who had been away on sabbatical, knocked on the door wanting her old PC back with data for her to do reports. I had it handy and set it up for her. Everything looked OK but she was back soon. It would not print. I checked things out: ping router, printer, etc. all work. We rebooted the printer server because it had been difficult but still she could not print. In the process, I had started some XP updates while I looked for what I thought was a network problem. I checked the log of the firewall. It was part of the anti-malware package, a filter on everything including the checksums of every application that wanted to do something on the network. The browser, the spooler, everything except ping, it seems, was blocked. Now I had to switch to admin to tweak the firewall. No good. XP would not let me log out while updates were going on. It didn’t say so, but I could not log out. I clicked “cancel” for the updates. No good. I still could not log out. I waited five minutes… Finally I started the updates again. Three were done, nine to go. OK, how long could that take??? It was way long but eventually the grind ended. Several updates had not taken for unknown reasons. I became admin and sorted out everything but the blocked spooler. Then it dawned on me. The sums were based on the file so this thing was working against the spooler as it was loaded. I reloaded and it was good to go. Admin could print. I removed the things that could not be updated. We did not need them, I hoped.

Back as a normal user things were better.

Now, M$ did not cause most of this grief. The camera deal was end-users being high-maintenance. That’s OK. The anti-malware package is really anal-retentive though and indirectly I blame M$ that stuff like that is needed to keep XP going.

So, nearly a whole day is taken up fighting the system. Fortunately I have a long weekend to get my work done.

I am the closest thing you will find to an IT professional in my school. Our ISP does have a help-desk far, far away, but most of the teachers here have to go to the office to make a call and the help-desk has office hours, so that is not much help. I did talk to them a few times about error messages saying to call this number… (I thought it was some kind of spam, at first…), and the ISP did provide us with a more or less effective anti-malware system (a great aggravation to all users). We also get a few visits per year by technical people who mainly service the satellite systems and stop at the router. There is a way to integrate the anti-malware with the help-desk but that is awkward.

So, we are alone in the bush. Many schools on a road can get technical help within a few hours or days but very few have a tech in-house. It is just too costly to pay the Maytag Repairman just to keep him around. I have been in schools where itinerant IT visited almost every week but they could never get to the bottom of their “todo” list. Rather than wait for a miracle or outside assistance I have to fix stuff here with no budget and few spare parts.

Fortunately the ISP and Computers for Schools sends us enough stuff we can keep things going. A few key power-supply failures whould finish us for a week or so. I try to put mission-critical stuff on things we have in abundance so I can cannibalize. Fortunately, besides a few power failures, we have had only a couple of systems die with power-supply or motherboard issues.

Almost everything that needed to be fixed was with software, systems running too slowly to be usable (one extremely patient lady was getting five minutes per click…). At first I tried cloning systems that worked reasonably well but it was a lot of work. Our network did not allow in-place cloning as we did not have a server. We now have two servers going but I have found switching to GNU/Linux practically eliminates the need to image over the network. I can use a USB thumb-drive with Clonezilla to convert an XP machine that is acting up to GNU/Linux in minutes. As a result there are very few XP machines left to give us trouble. There are only four still on teachers’ desks and two of those will be converted next week when the year-end paperwork is done or staff are leaving.

Teachers do a lot of volunteer work: extra-curricular stuff with students, activities on evenings and weekends in the gymn, field-trips, preparing snacks, and so on. I do IT. I enjoy it and it makes my job easier and helps others. It would be inefficient to have me hired as an IT person, because my salary is much higher than the typical in-school tech but my IT work is unpaid/not-an-item-on-the-budget so this works. One can argue whether the IT I do is best-practice, good enough or whatever, but I have unique insight into using IT in education so it helps me to speak the language of teachers and to help them use IT effectively in school. At the start of next year every returning teacher and every new-hire will have an IT package outlining the services available and how to access them. We even have installed BugZilla on the server to report problems asynchronously. It’s crude but it works. People can see instantly what problems others have encountered and what the solutions were. This saves a great deal of time and provides some history for my eventual replacement. The server also has a database with our complete inventory and I have scripted some automation of routine tasks. A manual of how the whole thing works and how to manage is also in the works.

We do not have a formal IT plan because so much of what we are able to do is controlled by others: the ISP, funding agencies and bean-counters but we have a general idea to expand IT to every classroom at first with seats at a PC/thin client and to increase access to peripherals like audio, video, still-cameras and scanners. By the end of next year we should have nearly enough PCs to properly implement the curriculum that calls for IT to be integrated into the curriculum and we will find ways to increase peripherals. Bingo is not out of the question. By using the old machines as thin clients of the new machines we should have more than adequate computing power. By using a local cache of the Debian GNU/Linux repository we have in-house backup and installation of software superior to anything we can do with that other OS.

Already we have several teachers who use IT well in class at all levels. The next major goal is to have teachers share their knowledge of how to use IT to permit every student in every classroom to properly use IT to aid learning. That should be achievable in the coming school year because we will organize get-acquainted sessions from the start and IT seminars evening and weekends.

I am a teacher. It is what I do. It is what I enjoy doing. I am like a performer who gets depressed between performances when students are not around. It makes my day when a lesson goes well, students ask questions, try things and learn by doing. Today was one of those days.

Yesterday’s lesson was “Commissioning a PC”. We showed them how to open the carton, remove a brand new PC set it up and locate it. We followed that exercise by installing and running GNU/Linux. That part of yesterday’s lesson took 20 minutes and the machine ran like a rocket.

Today’s lesson was “Commissioning a PC with That Other OS”. This time we did not install GNU/Linux but did the routine setup of that other OS new out of the box. The difference was amazing. This time, I made a brief introduction outlining what I expected they would learn: slow, EULA, no apps, crapware, needing to install anti-malware etc. At that point I handed the utility knife to a young lady. She declined and a young man went to work. All was as before until we pushed “power on”. This time it did not boot to a GNU/Linux system. Another young lady was appointed to sit in the captain’s chair and click through things while the class watched on a large screen. We got to the first banner with “please wait” and she blurted out “It’s so slow!”. Indeed. These students are used to logging in on a thin client in a few seconds. When she reached stuff where a response was needed I tried to guide her. Some parts had so many choices we had to try a few and go back to get it right. Power-on was at about 0930. By the end of class at 10:25 we were still removing crapware and installing needed applications. One of the crapwares was Office 2007 which greeted us with a request for our “product key”. Of course we did not have any but it gave the students a glimpse of the beast. I made them read a few choice parts of the EULA like not connecting more than ten devices…, requiring authentication, and agreeing to espionage. They were appalled. It was clear to them that this software was totally unsuitable for use in our school. It was configured to make money for Wintel and not to meet our needs as teachers and learners.

As the day wore on, I continued to work on the machine when I could, urging it to be useful. By noon I started installing the anti-malware. For some reason the necessary downloads were terribly slow so it took more than an hour. Even with wuauclt.exe /detectnow running the thing did not update. I finally browsed to windowsupdate and got 71 updates going. Somehow it fit installation of IE8 into that even though I scanned the list… At one point the machine stopped. There was no network activity at all. I rebooted in hope of waking it up. On the way down a window buried a few layers down was revealed, demanding a response. Too late, the reboot continued. Another crapware reared its ugly head when the machine came up. It was demanding my admin password! What’s with that? Some stuff Lenovo added to enhance security. I did some more crapware removal after that. Anyway, after six hours we seemed to be current, with anti-malware, a default printer, three new browsers and the blue “e” banished from the desktop. We still have none of the apps we need to run a school except OpenOffice.org. No KHangman, no KTouch, no Gimp, etc. It’s just a barely useful PC for teachers. The same machine with GNU/Linux installed can run all the students’ PCs as thin clients sharing apps and we don’t have to count licences or connections.

So, now, I will back up this as an image and wipe the hard drive to Debian GNU/Linux Squeeze to make it useful. Six hours of work were needed just to bring that other OS into a very basic form from which my successor may want to start. With no budget, I wish him well (it’s a long story…). For now, GNU/Linux is eating M$’s lunch in our school and students and staff have seen the light of free software shining from their monitors. I will be installing GNU/Linux PCs for the rest of this month and putting in a requisition for 20 more next school year. That will be close to a useful system. This is just the first step, providing infrastructure. We still have to pull staff and students together to make the best use of it. That requires inspiration and perspiration but there are a lot of clever people here so it will happen. I will write a memo suggesting how we can be sure the system is properly utilized next year by providing a bit of documentation and demonstrations to current and future staff. Some staff are taking courses now and there will be some turnover so it looks like a few hours of orientation at the beginning of the next school year should connect with everyone.

LSE claims it will save millions of dollars annually by using Millenium Exchange on GNU/Linux instead of TradeElect on that other OS. This is another case where buying a company producing a product was cheaper than paying the costs of licensing some non-free stuff. We don’t know the details of their cost structure but if they are saving money like that even while using the costly Oracle DB, the cost of TradElect must have been huge. LSE is writing off millions in depreciation on the money invested in TradeElect. Switchover is expected to come in September.

I think everyone should look at stories like this one and realize there are less costly ways of doing IT based on FLOSS on desktop or server. The same benefits of speed, low licensing costs, freedom to examine and modify the code, and fast development times apply to the desktop as well as the server.

Don’t let businesses have all the fun, run Debian GNU/Linux today. The staff here are in agreement to distribute a dozen new PCs to teachers. These are fairly hot machines with all the goodness needed to run that other OS (meaning they will fly with GNU/Linux). I will set mine up with VirtualBox to provide documentation/video of the installation process and operation and maintenance. Some of the result may be posted here and YouTube. The staff expressed a desire to have IT that works, works faster and is maintainable. They asked for some training which we will start this week. We can do that much more easily with GNU/Linux than with that other OS. We have in the building 80 PCs now with only part-time IT support. It was impossible to keep the other OS running. Teachers are having constant problems struggling with the slowing down of that other OS and dealing with malware. With GNU/Linux, most problems are fixable in seconds by remote administration.

Some tests on the new machines this weekend are very interesting. I was able to boot in 10s with a basic configuration. With a full XFCE4 desktop setup, it takes a bit longer, 15s. Folks were used to taking minutes to boot XP on the old machines. Is anyone going to object that it’s not running that other OS when it’s this fast? I haven’t even configured the RAID yet…

One of my students, who uses Debian GNU/Linux, Squeeze/testing, every day, brought in a year-old Toshiba netbook with Intel Atom processor. The thing was sick. It would not even show a bar, let alone a menu. It was not usable in the normal mode. I got it into “Safe Mode” and found 83 processes were competing for time. I knocked off a few of them and the thing became much more responsive. It was running XP Home. We discussed options including installing GNU/Linux but he was reluctant to do so because his father was not willing to change and his father used the machine sometimes.

We tried to run the Google-Chrome browser which was already installed and it would not load any page, even one from our local server. Norton AV had expired so we tried to install AVG Free. We deleted Norton. With a few seconds left in the download (about 1 hour) the battery died. Atom is not competing well with ARM in this example. The unit was uncomfortably hot on the bottom. We plugged it in to the mains and started the download anew. This time it finished the download and then informed us that it could not install in “Safe Mode”. AAAGGGHHHH!

We then started in normal mode and killed a few processes. Now we had a normal desktop which was usable. The third AVG download finally succeeded. After 3 hours we commenced scanning. Within seconds it found a trojan and a buddy. It was apparently memory resident for deleting the infected file was effective only for 30s or so. After 40 minutes, the scan found six infections of two malwares. This gave me hope that rebooting would kill the memory resident thing. It worked. A shutdown/start sequence and another scan showed clean results. We set a scheduled scan during school hours when the student would not be using the machine and re-installed Google-Chrome. It still would not work. We installed FireFox and Opera. Opera was a surprise. I have not used it for years. At 10PM we were too tired to figure out how to set its homepage…

Six hours of fiddling instead of a 20 minute installation of GNU/Linux… Was it worth it? I do not know. Certainly the student is very aware of the high cost of maintaining that other OS. At my usual rate of pay, six hours would be worth roughly the value/price of the netbook so it could have been scrapped and replaced for the cost of “fixing” it until next time. His family is also aware that that other OS cost the boy an evening at home with family. I will write up an advertisement to send home with students promoting our “InstallFest” to be held next week. Such costs will figure prominently.