[svlug] Bagels and 'Buntu7.10 - Saturday installfest

[Dell Anderson]

Hi Christian,

I'm confused - are the good physical (shuttle?) boxes purchased by the
school or donated by FOSS supporters?

If they were donated by FOSS, then to preserve the purpose and intent of the
FOSS spirit in which they were donated, the school should use the $5000+
money to purchase appropriate Windows boxes and licenses.  Anything else (VM
or blowing away the FOSS OS entirely) is simply enabling the school's
addiction to proprietary software.

If the school owns the boxes outright, my impression is that the loss of
these boxes for use by FOSS is more than outweighed by the benefit of
avoiding the inevitable headaches and hassles which may result by installing
Windows on a VM and then having it blamed on FOSS - in other words, keeping
FOSS may be a tactical gain but a strategic loss in the long run.

Dual booting would be my only possible consideration if you insist on
keeping FOSS and Windows on the same machines, and I would put the OS's on
completely different hard drives (install Windows first, make that drive
seconard slave, then install FOSS on the new primary hard drive using GRUB
to select between them.

VM image creation is not free last I checked or is it (only VM player I
believe)?   Headache opportunities abound from that also.

You guys are much smarter about this than I, so I'll butt out now.... thanks
for listening to my $0.02.

best regards,

Dell

On 10/18/07, Christian Einfeldt <einfeldt at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> hi
>
> On 10/18/07, Paul Reiber <reiber at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > Gang -
> >
> > I'd love to see a few bootable CDs/DVDs of this latest release at this
> > weekend's installfest.
>
>
> I am going to need to be able to implement virtualization of Windows
> <choke> for the public middle school that our community is supporting with
> FOSS.  The school has received a grant of $5, 000.00 plus "$23,000.00worth" of Adobe Photoshop and video editing software <gag> that they need to
> use in order to qualify for the money again next year.  Our choice (as a
> FOSS community) is to let them just go ahead and install Windows natively
> and blow away the existing Linux partitions; or to virtualize Windows so
> that at least the teachers and students have the option of choosing and
> comparing Cinelerra and Open Media Editor and Kino and Blender and Jahshakah
> versus the prorprietary options.
>
> IMHO, it is preferable to give them the choice of FOSS.  I know at least
> one reasonable person who has said that we should just let them blow away
> Windows and allow them to experience all the failure of Windows; but my
> concern is that in so doing, we lose the actual physical boxes, which are
> the best, fastest, and most powerful boxes in the whole school.  We actually
> use those boxes for other things, such as teaching the children to compose
> music via GNU Denemo.  So IMHO, virtualizing Windows is our only option.
>
> At any rate, I would like to bring these two "shuttle" boxes down to the
> Google installfest this Saturday.  I am totally unaware if there will be any
> FOSS virtualization tools available for download this Saturday.  I am
> assuming that there are good FOSS tools for both openSUSE 10.3 and Gutsy,
> which are the two distros that we are using for these two boxes.  We must
> have Gutsy on one of these boxes because there is a student assigned to this
> box for music class; and we should probably have openSUSE on the other box,
> because occasionally we have experienced issues with Edubuntu that do not
> exist in openSUSE and vice versa.
>
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