Revolution Linux's Blog

Webinar on" Open Source: A Guide for the School Districts Technology Leadership Team" Tuesday March 16th 2010

Benoit St-Andre — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 14:44:00 -0400

I will be giving this Webinar for NSBA TLN series on Tuesday March 16th, at 10am Pacific, 1pm Eastern, 5pm GMT. It will be held on Elluminate, and I am pretty sure that it will be recorded and accessible after that for open viewing.

Hope to "see" you in the crowd !

Open Source: A Guide for the School Districts Technology Leadership Team

Because of the low costs associated with Open Source software. people install it easily at home and in the classroom with few problems. Additionally, because Open Source software is promoted by many enthusiasts, who communicate their enthusiasm very well, generalizing Open Source at the organizational level seems a no-brainer. The problem is that installing software on a computer isn’t the same as making it work on dozens or thousands of computers. There are challenges that you must consider before taking on a transition to Open Source. This webinar presentation is about getting to know what you could avoid in implementing Open Source in your organization.

Reserve your space by sending an email to Crissy O'Donnell at codonnell@nsba.org. Please include your name, district and title.

Pictures from SCALE8x Try-It Lab

Benoit St-Andre — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 10:41:00 -0500

Thanks to folks from SCALE8x that did a tremendous job in making this conference possible. On our side, we tried to make the Try-It Lab as interesting as possible, showcasing LTSP-Cluster and its possibilities.

Here are a couple of pictures, taken by OSSIE Chairman Tim Fritchel, who was also responsible for the program in the lab (thanks Tim !). And as usual, thanks to our partner ASUS computers who makes this lab possible by providing the actual machines used as thin clients (as you can see in the pictures).

Try-It Lab, by Revolution Linux and ASUS !

Empty Try-It Lab

A packed room for my Open Source Social Networking Tools session

Even more people, for my Desktop in the Cloud with LTSP-Cluster session !

An EeeTop (all-in-one touchscreen) running as a Thin Client on LTSP-Cluster

An EeePC Netbook, running as a Thin Client on LTSP-Cluster.

Thanks everyone, we had a wonderful time there !

The Open Source Pavilion at CUE 2010 - March 4th to March 6th 2010

Benoit St-Andre — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 10:14:00 -0500

Once again , we will be at CUE Conference in Palm Springs this year. Last year was a success, I sure this year will be even better !

New things

Since CUE provides a handy schedule planner this year, I am going to do a couple of quick links here to this schedule. If you are attending CUE, you should at least take a look. Choosing sessions is quite easier with this tool.

A couple of new things this year

Like our other latest shows, we have the privilege to partner with ASUS computers. They provide us with all the EeeTop , EeeBox and EeePC that will be use as thin clients during CUE, for hands-on session and evaluations.
Opening hours of the Open Source Pavilion are extended.
The Pavilion will be in a room of its own, Oasis 4 - check the schedule of the Pavilion.; The evaluation survey will also be filled there in a space contiguous to the lab.

Our sessions

I will give three exciting sessions at CUE this year. You can see these sessions in the planner itself, but let me list them for you right here:

There is limited space in the lab, so be there early.

Come and meet us in Oasis 4 whenever you have a chance, and you will actually see physically what Open Source Thin Clients with LTSP and LTSP-Cluster look like.

See you there.

Meet us at South California Linux Expo 8x February 19-21

Benoit St-Andre — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 11:41:00 -0500

We will be at the next South California Linux Expo in the end of this week. Lots of things happening there for us:

The Try-It Lab , partnering with ASUS Computers

As you can read in this press release, we once again partner with ASUS computers to deliver a nice hands-on experience of Linux and LTSP-Cluster in the Try-It Lab. It will be possible to test drive Ubuntu in a thin client environment on all-in-one EeeTop, EeeBox mini desktops , and on EeePC netbooks.

OSSIE - Open Source In Education Day on Friday 19th

On Friday, there will be two tracks about Open Source in Education , one of them being held in the Try-It Lab. I will present there

1-to-1 : Scalable and Affordable Ubiquitous Computing using Open Source
Open Source Social Networking Tools in Education

This will be a great opportunity for educators to see and touch what Ubuntu Linux can look like in an educational environment, with most of Edubuntu applications installed on our lab setup.

And on Saturday and Sunday , meet us in the Try-It Lab or at our exhibitor booth #83

On Saturday and Sunday, we will be close to the Try-It Lab (I will give there a session on Desktop in the Cloud with LTSP-Cluster). You can also visit us in the exhibit hall, at booth #83.

This will be an exciting weekend !

Come and meet us at FETC 2010 in Orlando - January 13-15 2010

Benoit St-Andre — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 08:50:00 -0500

FETC is one of the largest educational technology conference in K-12 in the United States. We will be there next week for multiple sessions in the Open Source Center (room W313), where people will be able to experiment all sorts of Open Source applications running on LTSP-Cluster. This thin client environment will be using once again ASUS computers, that sponsors the Open Source Center together with us.

I will be presenting

Why Web 2.0, Open Source, and Open Content Matter so Much (with Randy Orwin, Steve Hargadon and Kevin McGuire)
10 Common Pitfalls on the Road to Using Open Source in Your Organization
The New 1 to 1: Scalable and Affordable Ubiquitous Computing
Panel Discussion: The State of Open Source in Education (with Steve Hargadon and Randy Orwin)
Everybody's Doing I: Open Source Social Networking Tools (with Randy Orwin).

I will certainly microblog about it during the event, using #fetc hashtag.

See you there !

Announcing K-12 Open Minds 2009 - Now Open and Free !

Benoit St-Andre — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 14:12:00 -0400

If you are in K-12 somewhere in the world and you are interested in Open Source in K-12 Education, you should come to K-12 Open Minds Conference that is going to be held in Michigan City on October 6th and 7th.

Big news is the conference is Open AND free, so there is no entry charge.

There is going to be a lot of various sessions regarding Leadership and Policy, Teaching and Learning, and on Technology and Infrastructure. There will also be some school visits where you will be able to see real classes using Open Source technologies in their daily lives.

We hope to see you there !

NECC 2009 - 10 common pitfalls on the road to Open Source in an organization

Benoit St-Andre — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 08:21:00 -0400

Even if it took a bit of time, here are the slides of my last week presentation on the 10 common pitfalls on the road to Open Source in an organization.

Enjoy !

Sneak peek at the Open Souce Lab in NECC

Benoit St-Andre — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 23:51:00 -0400

We just finished to setup the Open Source Thin Client Lab, and I can tell you it is beautiful, thanks to the wonderful machines of Asus, and the nice monitors that Michigan City Area Schools landed us.

We had many volunteers that helped us to put everything into place and have the perfect setup. Randy Orwin, Steve Hargadon and I would like to thank Kevin M, Mary, Paul, Kevin C, Mel, Mike L , Mike H, Lucie and her friend, Sugar Labs volunteers, and probably some other people that I don't remember theirs names.

So here is a sneak peek of what the lab looks like.

There is going to be a bunch of sessions going on there tomorrow. Come and meet us there if you are (well, sessions are full, but you could still enter if there is some space left 5 mins before the beginning of a session).

You also will want to see this if you still think that there is no multimedia and all this nice stuff on LTSP thin clients (there IS , even volunteers were surprised !).

You can also come and meet us at the Open Source Playground (and see the thin clients there too), just in front of room 152B (the Open Source Lab's room).

See you there tomorrow until Wednesday !

NECC 2009 in Washington, we'll be there !

Benoit St-Andre — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 10:32:00 -0400

Next week is the NECC 2009 annual conference, that will be held in Washington, DC from June 28th to July 1st.

I'll be there all week long, giving two sessions, which are

Great Open Source Programs You Can Start Using Right Away
10 Common Pitfalls on the Road to Open Source

Those sessions are going to be held in the Open Source Lab.

We are providing the infrastructure to run the lab, which will be an LTSP-Cluster installation (like the ones we do for school boards and school districts), with 60 Eee Box Mini Desktop, gladly provided by Asus, that will run as thin clients.

I'm looking forward to meet a lot of people there, and discuss with.

There will also be a lot of volunteers helping us in the lab and the Open Source Playground, that will be just in front of the lab itself. I know that folks from the Ubuntu DC Loco , OpenSuSE, Fedora are supposed to be there.

I think all this will be very fun.

I'll try to post here, and also on Laconica/Twitter.

UDS / Day 1 / EC2, next step for Karmic

Benoit des Ligneris — Mon, 25 May 2009 21:11:00 +0000

Intro / Disclaimer

First of all, long day : Ottawa Marathon sunday morning, then travel during the night then two hours delay in Frankfurt then ... Barcelona and UDS. Anyway, please forgive my poor grammar and style !

EC2 (Amazon), Eucalyptus (FLOSS) are part of the Karmic grand scheme of things. This session goals were to ease the integration of "The Cloud" into Ubuntu by fixing major issues and address ... futur ones.

The blueprint is here : https://blueprints.edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/server-karmic-ec2-next-steps

Things were already started and I was slow to catch so once again, those are my notes and reflexion, use at your own risk.

Image update

Images are not updated in the cloud and kernel change can only be done by Ubuntu (at least on EC2). (Later, some kexec possibility was invoked but ... it does not look very "clean" from an amazon viewpoint!). Thus, a mechanism has to be set up in order to have an inventory of the images used in the cloud. The usage of update-motd has been discussed as well as the eventual link with inventory systems and more advanced management systemes (Landscape).

Idea :

Notification of new kernel and new images for the user running
Exposing this information in landscape
Not just EC2 but more or less for every technology out there (landscape, etc.)

Faster Boot Time / Ubuntu-minimal-minimal

faster boot time and faster image initialization for ec2? (Removing non essential packages such as bluetooth and trimming the inits) -> Lots of useless packages where still deployed in the image (same need for any virtual machine : KVM, VZ, etc.) -> How do you plan to do it ? EC2 and UEC image should be _really_ minimal. -> Remove most of the "useless" packages

On a side note, this is true for every virtualization/container technology out there so I think that having a truly minimal (no sound, no USB, no udev, no kernel, etc.) will really help Ubuntu on the virtual side of server land !

AMI-tool and API-tool in sync

Keep in sync ami-tools and api-tools (Author: Neil XXX) (Amazon & Eucalyptus) when new released are published. -> Where should this stored : it has to be on "archive.ubuntu.com" so that it can be accessed/ installed from the EC2/Eucalyptus ?

Problem with amazon software/licence/break compatibility ?

Documentation

Amazon EC2 level of documentation ?

-> Very good -> Leverage this ?

Some differences :

-> root vs sudo -> take in charge of the differences

Idea :

-> One documentation with basic principles & co -> Then "EC2 and UEC" can be distinguished

Test & process :

-> Release the alpha & co ? Problem : noone is forced to update -> we can have to manage bug reports & support users that uses alpha releases in production.

Someone said this (sorry, missed the name) and it is an excellent and valid point : "We are certain to have _no_ testing if we don't release the images!"

As a consequence, we have to release the images ASAP and put a disclaimer "This is an alpha release, not intended for production use" This image will stop running the 20ab-cd-ef"

Some random ideas :

Have a special account on Amazon EC2 for alpha testing / alpha images : once the testing phase is over, let,s stop paying this account !

If "kexec/kboot" into the kernel available then it is possible to stop those AMI anytime. Lot's of people

mention that Amazon will certainly not be happy with this?

Desktop Image

We need a desktop image ?

Bigger / more expensive ?
The same kernel can be used
Someone mention that vnc is barely usable on EC2
NoX/Ulteo shoud be used as a way to remotely stream desktop (please see precedent post on Server Centric /Anywhere computing)
Testing can be much more better with desktop images :
- Testing testing testing, translation, bugfix, automatically generated images, etc.

LGM 2009 - Videos available

Benoit St-Andre — Mon, 11 May 2009 09:53:00 -0400

You can find the videos of our three presentations following those three links:

LTSP and graphics applications (Benoit St-André and Stéphane Graber)
Discussion about the Impacts of Design Decision on Software Usage and Adoption (Benoit St-André)
Keeping in touch with Ubuntu (Stéphane Graber)

Excellent work from River Valley TV for videos and slides integration by the way !

LGM 2009 - Discussion about the Impacts of Design Decision on Software Usage and Adoption

Benoit St-Andre — Thu, 07 May 2009 17:31:00 -0400

Here is the talk I just did at Libre Graphics Meeting 2009.

Of course, these are just the slides. I'll update the blog post when we are going to have the recordings available.

LGM 2009 - LTSP and graphics applications

Benoit St-Andre — Wed, 06 May 2009 15:40:00 -0400

Here is the presentation that Stéphane Graber and I did this morning in Libre Graphics Meeting 2009.

Good news is, just after the presentation, we had people coming up to us and see what we could to together to help graphics applications run better on thin clients.

More news to come up during the conference on this blog, if time permits to blog ! (we have to listen up too, you know ;-) )

UPDATE: You can see the video of the presentation here.

Server Centric Computing + Ubiquitous Network = Anywhere Computing

Benoit des Ligneris — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 02:28:00 +0000

The Web as a Model

The Web is a tremendous success. It has profoundly affected the human society since its inception several years ago. Not a single sector of our society has been spared by the Web. Some examples :

The largest encyclopedia that human have created is entirely Web based (wikipedia)
The biggest database publicly available (google search ?)
The largest network
The cheapest way to communicate all over the world
The largest social network (Web 2.0 & co)

For me this is a clear demonstration that the server centric computing architecture is the most successful one. In a few words, for non technical readers : all those services run on servers located in one or several data-centers located all over the planet. The intelligence has been moved away from the extremities of the network (lets say, the device used to access the Web : a PC, a phone, a game console, etc.) to the servers.

An equivalent explanation is that the device you are using to read this post is not very important. It can be a dual-head 29" PC, a Mac, a laptop, a netbook or even a phone, running Linux, Windows, MacOS or any other device connected to the Internet. What is important is the network you are using and, more precisely, its speed!

Desktop computing is a thing from the past. The idea that one can run complete applications on one single PC without network connectivity will appear to be very strange for our descendants !

What consequence for the enterprises and more generally for IT ?

One of the major IT cost is ... running PCs. PC stands for Personal Computer and the PC as we know it was never intended to be deployed and managed in any organization but reserved for personal use. Maintenance costs are huge for companies and they are hindering their ability to provide the same level of services, agility, change management as the Web based / Server Centric powerhouses.

However, given the fact that innovation is pushed from new market segments (search engines, social networking, etc.) into more "conventional" ones, I think that we are assisting to the paradigm shift from "all desktop" to Server Centric computing. It will happen for organization of any size and type in the years to come.

I was lucky to hear a conference from Brad Wheeler, the CTO of Indiana University, during OpenMinds 2008. He has a very nice catchphrase that can be applied in our context "From Edge to Leverage". By migrating intelligence from the edge of the network (the actual PC/fat clients, local applications deployed on those PCs, etc.) the agile organization that will achieve this will gain a tremendous leverage. This catch phrase can also be applied to the so called "Core Business" of any company or organization.

Some example of leverage that can be achieved by migrating from PC Computing to Server Centric Computing :

Lower cost of operation
Greener Computing : 17W for a thin client, 22W with the server + cooling system vs 80W-200W desktops
Sustainable computing : thin clients use a third of the hardware (??)
Remote access for employees : work from any computer in the world (one of our customers called it "Anywhere computing", I really like the term!)
Remote access for specific customers/members/suppliers/etc. to specific applications : now you can give access to any application to ... anybody
Etc.

Entreprise Computing (EC) vs Elastic Cloud (EC ?) or why The Cloud will fail

Well, I think that the Cloud Computing is an elaborate marketing word for what was called "Scavenging" a few years ago in the high performance computing field. Of course, the term "Cloud" is much more marketable and much more sexy. What's interesting with clouds is that different people looking at the same cloud see ... different things. This is a very romantic way that allow actual owners of very expensive datacenters, servers and network connexion to rent you a bit of their infrastructure in order for them to ... make more money or lower their costs.

Cloud Computing poses a number of challenges. Most of them, are not technical but ethical and related to confidentiality and international law. The principe behind cloud computing is that your server is "in the cloud". You don't have to know where, what's its physical characteristics, in what country it is located, who runs it, etc. Basically, this is the ultimate IT silver bullet for Server Centric computing : it allows you to solve all your management problems at once and you will become more agile and lower your costs. Let say that the promise of cloud computing, like most of the marketing messages anyway, is not necessarily ... true.

What are the drawbacks of cloud computing ? Well, every advantage can become liability. Service levels can/are very difficult to measure, what is the cost of a "cloud" failure and who will pay ? Where is the server located : in a foreign country, in some island, very friendly to hazard games, in a bunker, etc. For most organizations, this can cause a tremendous legal headache : who owns the server, the data, what laws are applicable, etc.

Price can be cheaper at this time to run some services on the cloud than to operate your own data-center (well, of course this is true only for small scale project). However, I think that Moore's law and high bandwidth availability (fiber to home) will cause cloud computing to ultimately fail on this level too in the future, even for small scale projects.

For large scale projects and organizations, I think that it's less risky to operate its own servers than to rely on the cloud : this is not a mature market and you can expect protocols, technology and ultimately suppliers to evolve/disappear quickly in the following years. Of course, the one that _need_ data-center excellence (let's say Google, Amazon, etc.) will still try to lower their costs and rent you some spare CPU cycle and TB but it will not be their main business line, only a side business.

Private clouds can be the solution for organization that want to control more closely their data (and who don't !). But what is a private cloud ? Mainly a data-center with virtualization technology.

What about Anywhere computing (once again, not my expression, one from our customer) ?

It has already started : all you need is a Wifi network access and a "device" that can connect to your servers. Then complete applications or even a complete desktop will be streamed to you so that you can interact with servers (the one of your organisation, the ones from the Internet) with a very high speed and it will be the less expensive way to give you access to any application anywhere and I would add anytime. (Trop long !!!!) Small organizations will use some form of Cloud Computing, larger organisation will use their own servers but the net results for you, the user are the same : you will have access to any application from any computer on the Internet anywhere at anytime.

As a company, Revolution Linux is focused on the "Anywhere computing" and this require a migration from PC based Computing to Server Centric Computing. On the way to salvation, we want to decrease CO2 emission and this is also a benefit of Server Centric Computing : the so-called "device" can be a thin client using less than 20W, less expensive and requiring less than a third of material to build (of course, average life of those devices are 10 years, compare to 3-5 years for a regular desktop).

I think that the Open Source approach will also be more or less mandatory for two reasons : when you want to leverage your infrastructure and give access to more people (employes, members, customers, tech support, suppliers, partners, alumni, interns, students, etc..) not having the control of your application and licensing costs can block those initiatives. Not having complete access to the source code can pause real technical challenge that block the scalability of your solution.

Conclusion

I really think that the cloud will soon be replaced by a clear and blue sky illuminated by the sun of the server centric computing approach. This is the most important lessons that we can learn from the tremendous success of the Web and of the applications that are nowadays developed on this incredibly rich platform. Anywhere and anytime computing will be achieved with Open Source software using green and sustainable technology and the desktop paradigm will remain dominant at least for a generation. After that, well, who knows ?

Revolution Linux to participate at Libre Graphics Meeting 2009

Benoit St-Andre — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 09:51:00 -0400

We are proud to announce that Revolution Linux will participate at Libre Graphics Meeting 2009.

LGM 2009 will be held in Montreal, Quebec, from May 6th to May 9th.

LGM 2009 is the fourth annual worldwide meeting of teams developing open source graphics applications. Designers, graphic artists and anyone involved in print production and/or web development are cordially invited to attend and meet the developers one to one.

One of the main aspects of our participation will be the presence of Stéphane Graber, Ubuntu liaison at Revolution Linux, who is Ubuntu developer, MOTU and also maintainer of LTSP and LTSP-Cluster. We sure think that his presence will bring more of the spirit of collaboration and sharing that LGM is all about.

I will also be there, bringing my two cents about graphics applications integration into education. I'll try to bring up the user point of view, and share experiences we had with graphics applications in our large scale deployments of thin clients.

We submitted those 3 talks, that we hope are in line with the spirit of LGM :

LTSP and graphics applications (Stéphane and Benoit)
Keeping in touch with Ubuntu (Stéphane)
Discussion about the Impacts of Design Decision on Software Usage and Adoption (Benoit)

See you in Montreal !

We are at CoSN 2009 - Austin, Texas

Benoit St-Andre — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 20:36:00 -0400

Busy time of the year !

Last week, I was at CUE 2009, a conference in California with mainly teachers focusing on technology integration into learning. This week, another part of our team (Benoît des Ligneris and Patrice Albaret) is at the Consortium for School Networking (CoSN) annual K12 conference, in Austin Texas, from March 10th to 12th.

We are repeating our setup with K12OpenSource.com (thanks to Steve Hargadon again !), as we are responsible for setting up email stations around the place with our LTSP-cluster setup. This time we are quite lucky to have on board with us the people of DisklessWorkstations, that provided us thin clients that you can see on their website. We are particularly excited by the possibilities that their brand new LTSP Term 1520, Intel Atom based thin client, enables for Linux thin client solution. Smooth video, 3D acceleration, running local software like Skype and Celestia, all sorts of things that everybody was telling that "was not working on thin clients". It's still pre-production, but results are encouraging !

We also thank a lot Michigan City Area Schools, that were able to provide monitors for the duration of the conference.

We also have a booth (#505 if you are passing by), where we are showing to school district people all the possibilities that Open Source has in their infrastructure and as a way to raise access to technology in the classroom, and enable real scalable 1-to-1 infrastructure for students.

Picture time ! Have a good show guys ! (thanks to Benoît des Ligneris for the picture).

CUE 2009: great experience !

Benoit St-Andre — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 16:19:00 -0400

Last week, I was at CUE 2009 conference in Palm Springs, California. That was a lot of fun !

Steve Hargadon and I, as part of K12OpenSource.com, did a great setup of thin clients that were used both for email stations, filling up the survey and also as a lab for presentations for the conference. All of this was called the "Open Source Pavilion". We also had the help of Judith Beaudoin as a volunteer to help us do the setup (and the much appreciated remote help from Stéphane Graber).

You can see on this picture people filling up the survey for the conference. CUE had this great idea of giving a t-shirt to people who fill up the survey, this is a great incentive to do so and a trick to keep for other conferences.

I also gave two talks in the Open Source Pavilion

10 Common pitfalls on the road to Open Source
Large scale Open Source infrastructure and thin clients.

Here is a picture of the pavilion, with people looking at Ubuntu and various applications available on our thin clients using LTSP-Cluster, between 2 presentations.

Following these talks time I spent at the Open Source, I had the chance to meet a lot of teachers and IT people from various areas of California and United States. A lot of people almost jumped on us to have our list of "Top 10 Open Source software in Education". By popular demand, you can download it right here. If I have had a thousand copies of it, I'm sure I would have gave them all !

I'm sure that this was just a first time and that we will be back at CUE next year.

T + L 2008 : Thin Client Lab Success

Benoit des Ligneris — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 22:59:00 +0000

First participation at T+L. Revolution Linux provided the application server for a thin-client lab which was used during the whole conference. This post describes how the lab was installed...

The setup was done in two steps : Stéphane Graber installed the latest not yet released version of Ubuntu (8.10, codename Intrepid) and the latest version of LTSP as well as LTSP-Cluster on the server.

The idea was to show the latest available open source softwares. One of the most important one was iTalc running on the thin clients, the first "large scale" iTalc deployment on thin client to the best of our knowledge ;-)

We then shipped the server to Steve Hargadon. We, Steve, Randy Orwin and myself, met in Seattle on Sunday evening in order to set up the lab. Stephane was also part of the team as he installed, configured and tested lots of stuff on the server ... remotely using NX.

Setting up the lab was done in 4 hours (three people) : we were using recycled laptops given by CRC. Those computers were PIII without hard-drives with 256 MB of RAM. The most challenging part was ... the network.

I'm not a networking guy but I'm sure that we broke most of the rules ;-) 10 tables, 10 level 1 4-5 port switched, network cable that looks like "spaghetti", etc. It was working but somehow "flacky". Anyway, next year, we will do Wireless thin clients : it will solve this problem very elegantly !

All in all, a very interesting experience :

42 thin clients running on one server (quad core entry level server with 4GB or RAM)
Local applications worked very well : firefox + flash + java. RAM was a problem on some thick clients ;-)
Sound worked fine
Skype working as it'd on a standard laptop
Extensive testing (with real users !) of Ubuntu Intrepid
Extensive testing of LTSP + Ubuntu Intrepid
Extensive testing of LTSP Cluster on Ubuntu Intrepid
iTalc worked very well on the thin clients : no scalability issues

We hope that every user of the room 607 lab enjoyed the experience during the show !

K12 : large scale deployement of Open Source

Benoit des Ligneris — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 18:01:00 +0000

I'm a happy participant of the large scale deployement session. This session is dedicated to create a "white book" to help organisation to deploy large scale projects.

First things first :

What is large scale deployement ?

Numbers are not enough : for small organization a 10 computer deployment can be large scale. So it really depends on where you start from ! However some very interesting ideas came out :

It has to have a strong impact on every user targeted by the new system or by the upgrade

Some characteristics now :

Need at least a pilot project
Take at least one year to completely deploy the project
Need specific change management in order to assist users

What is a successfull project :

100% of the users are using the system (it can takes some times)
The project empowers the users
The project is repeatable, scalable, affordable and sustainable
The project has a strong and positive impact on how things are done after the project has been rolled out

It has been a very interesting day and some very interesting discussions occurs.

More to come...

It's K12 OpenMinds week !

Benoit St-Andre — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 12:16:00 -0400

Benoit des Ligneris and I will be all week long in Indianapolis for K12 OpenMinds conference.

We are going to post here, but also on our French blog.

I am on the conference planning committee, and we are going to present or collaborate to those sessions:

Roadmap Session on Large Scale Open Source Deployments
10 Common Pitfalls on the Road to Open Source (with Michael Harding , Michigan City Area Schools (MCAS) superintendant)
Michigan City Area Schools Open Source Infrastructure Project (with Kevin McGuire, (MCAS) IT director)
Laval School Board Large Scale Implementation of Thin Clients (with René Marquis, IT director).
Zimbra: The 3.0 Groupware Collaboration Solution for Teachers, Students and Staff

Let's get started !