Because... why not?

[Jayce]

I hereby present to you a lab in our one middle school:

Yesterday's systems residing on the counter of shame:

As of today, Ubuntu powered mini ITX boxes. To say these are a massive upgrade would be a severe understatement.

These systems are running Tuesday's daily build of Ubuntu 12.04.

Wait, what? 12.04? The LTS that's still in beta and set for final release next month? Oh yes, we did.

 

[patonb]

What model of imac are they?

 

[Jayce]

What model of imac are they?

They're older... I'm not positive exactly but they're PowerPC generation.

Since Apple has proven time and time again they don't care about education anymore, we're giving them a swift kick to the curb in our upgrade process. Who'd a thought we could get a better setup for our environment and spend exponentially less in the process?

 

[iFargle]

I wish my school would let me do this. Mine are all running a severely locked down Novell installations of Windows XP.

 

[Jayce]

I wish my school would let me do this. Mine are all running a severely locked down Novell installations of Windows XP.

Ouch. Yeah, that kind of hurts.

 

[MindoverMaster]

I wish they could do the same at my High School years ago. Dunno what they are up to now, but there's gotta be a better way to bump education rather than using this clinky crap.

Are those ITX boxes branded at all, or your own doing?

 

[Puddle Jumper]

Who'd a thought we could get a better setup for our environment and spend exponentially less in the process?

Not surprising when the current setup is from Apple

As far as business ITX systems go I'm a big fan of the new Dell Optiplex 790 SFF's. I had one come in the other day with a Core i5 2500 and crossfire Radeon HD 6350's. Pretty impressive amount of power for such a small and quiet prebuilt system.

 

[MyGodAL3X]

Yeah the High School that I attended was Windows locked down in Novell as well.
All Deep Freezed and with a small amount of personal network space attributed.

Still like that up to this day. Do I ever wish I had Linux back then.
I would never have wasted 2 years in science at university, would have been straight up CompSci. If only ... lol

Very cool setup, how did you setup where the students save their things?

 

[Jayce]

I wish they could do the same at my High School years ago. Dunno what they are up to now, but there's gotta be a better way to bump education rather than using this clinky crap.

Are those ITX boxes branded at all, or your own doing?

They were built in house. We spec'd out a few builds and made our decisions accordingly. The boxes are AMD E350 APU's with 64 GB Crucial SATA 3 SSD. It takes about 6 minutes to install Ubuntu from USB stick onto one of these SSDs. It's crazy stupid fast.

Not surprising when the current setup is from Apple

As far as business ITX systems go I'm a big fan of the new Dell Optiplex 790 SFF's. I had one come in the other day with a Core i5 2500 and crossfire Radeon HD 6350's. Pretty impressive amount of power for such a small and quiet prebuilt system.

My last job (also a school district) was heavily Windows/Dell entrenched (ironically they are slowly moving to Ubuntu as well). I always had great experiences with Dell. Don't get me wrong, I used to really dislike them, but they have proven to me time and time again with their prompt shipping and quick turn around on needed parts that they really are up to the task. I'd easily rate them among the top companies I've had to deal with customer support wise.

Yeah the High School that I attended was Windows locked down in Novell as well.
All Deep Freezed and with a small amount of personal network space attributed.

Still like that up to this day. Do I ever wish I had Linux back then.
I would never have wasted 2 years in science at university, would have been straight up CompSci. If only ... lol

Very cool setup, how did you setup where the students save their things?

Ouch… deep freeze? I always had headaches with that program… It used to be popular in schools but they've kind of fallen off the radar lately. I have quite a few colleagues working in IT/Education these days and they all moved away from deep freeze as well. Most people share the same opinion: It's just easier to FOG the machines automatically with FOG's awesome scheduler than it is to deal with deep freeze on a continual basis.

The desktops have links to samba shares. Students just click and away they go.

 

[MindoverMaster]

They were built in house. We spec'd out a few builds and made our decisions accordingly. The boxes are AMD E350 APU's with 64 GB Crucial SATA 3 SSD. It takes about 6 minutes to install Ubuntu from USB stick onto one of these SSDs. It's crazy stupid fast.

How much memory is in that baby?