Category — TWINCLING School

My first stop. Chirec seems to be one school that has taken open source software to its students. From my classmates at FIITJEE, I got to know that Chirec has RedHat running (I was left thinking if the institution was a bit too rooted in the past.). I called up Chirec this morning and I was told to send them an email detailing the organisation I was representing etc. I have sent them 5 already but I haven’t got any sort of response from them. Not even a “no”. This makes me feel stupid. I will keep calling them etc. but it doesn’t seem to really work out. A pretty depressing start to TWINCLING Schools.

So I am the ambassador of TWINCLING Society Schools Division(page: http://www.twincling.org/node/149 ). My job is to promote the use of open source software across Hyderabad and I am concentrating on promoting Edubuntu. By the way it might be worth mentioning that Edubuntu will be offered alongside Microsoft’s product on the Intel Classmate. This contract was signed on September the 18th. This was a great achievement for Open Source Software.

I will focus on the following points when I present Edubuntu:

1. Edubuntu is FREE. As in Free speech and Free beer. I will not focus on the philosophy but on the advantages. No admin I know gives a damn about philosophy. They want the work done cheap and fast.
2. Edubuntu  comes with a plethora of educational software. KDE-EDU is an excellent package that comes with software like KStars and Kalzium
3. The power of LTSP can be experienced with great ease. The Linux Terminal Server Project allows thin clients (a pentium 2 with a good 64 MB of RAM can act as one) to boot off a Linux installation on the LTSP server.
4. Edubuntu is open source. No, not every kid might end up to be a geek but those who want to be geeks will get their Linux dose on a regular basis.

I believe that this initiative of TWINCLING Society will go a long way in promoting the use of free and open source software in Hyderabad.