| Linux displaces 2,460 Windows XP desktops in rural Italian schools |
Sep. 01, 2005
Some 16,000 students in the mountainous South Tyrol province of Bolzano in northern Italy will find 2,460 classroom computers upgraded from Windows XP to Linux when they return to school this month. New multi-language educational applications resulting from this project are to be released to the open source community, the project's co-director told DesktopLinux.com.
Project co-director Antonio Russo, speaking for the Italian Scholastic Intendancy of the Province of Bozen, says that during the summer his team of 40 workers upgraded the computer infrastructure of all 70 of the province's private and public schools to FUSS Soledad GNU/Linux, a customized, multi-language distribution developed by a team of experts specifically for the region's schools, Russo said. FUSS Soledad is based on Debian GNU/Linux, he added.
Because of its proximity to Austria, Switzerland, and Hungary, the Italian South Tyrol region is a major intersection for people speaking multiple languages. New ideas in educational software -- especially those without licensing costs -- were needed, the project said.
Free liveCDs to be distributed to home users
That's not all. More than 20,000 liveCDs will be burned "with the same (Linux) software they will find at school," Russo said. "These will be given for free to students and their families" for use at home, he said.
"With the participation of all the public and private schools, this will give to all the students, families, teachers, and operators from the educational world the opportunity to use a entirely free operating system, both at school and at home," Russo said.
The initiative is supported and funded by the Province of Bozen, the European Social Fund, and the Center for Professional Formation in Italian language, Russo said.
New educational software may result
The specialized multi-language software developed in the project eventually will be released to the open source community during the academic year 2005-2006, Russo said.
Russo, co-director Paolo Zilotti, and technical director Christopher Gabriel of Italy's Truelite Srl are continuing to direct the team, whose main duties are to offer support for systems administrators and individual teachers, and to develop research tasks on technical and educational topics for all the schools.
What sort of research tasks are being planned?
"On the technical aspect, our software team has analyzed and satisfied all the software requirements for all the schools, and many new research tasks will start soon," said Russo. "We're planning to develop more educational software with the collaboration of all the schools' teachers, technicians, and students."
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