Brief description of this project

Generic, wide area, and large scale introducing experiment

This experiment is conducted in order to illustrate the possibility of introducing the desktop Linux PC into the schools anywhere across the country, by large scale deployment of Linux PC to several schools. The result of this experiment would be a trigger for the widespread use of the desktop Linux PC. More than 1,000 students use 275 desktop Linux PC in their daily coursework, and the use of several contents provided by multiple education boards (Tsukuba City and Gifu Prefecture) with the OSS platform shows the validation that the OSS tools cover a lot of educational materials practically.

The project aims not only for the validation of the desktop Linux environment but solution of a technical issues

It is said that there are almost no problems concerning the lack of applications, which is one of factors obstructive to popularize the desktop use of OSS, in the educational situation, because only a particular bit of educational software, the web browser, and drawing software are officially used. At most, restrictive use of productivity application can be seen in the higher grade.

However some problems shown below are recognized and this project aims to solve such issues. In addition, the results of development are fed back to the OSS communities, and they are reflected into next versions of Linux OS distributions provided from members of this project consortium (Turbolinux and Sun Java Desktop System).

(a) There is a problem in viewing web pages in which multimedia contents, video and audio, are embedded

The educational board in each district provides web-based materials for education. Though some of the contents contain video and audio embedded in the pages, web browser running on Linux cannot handle them correctly. To solve this problems, we make an improvement of the OSS web browser.

(b) Many of educational software runs only on Windows

The project helps replacing the educational software to web-based systems which can be used from the desktop Linux. For example, we introduce the web versions of "Study Note" and it enables the migration from Windows to Linux.

(c) The desktop Linux is inferior to Windows in terms of user-friendliness

The desktop Linux environment should be tuned in to make the students use it easily, by eliminating the difficulties in dealing with print and peripherals.

Load reduction of the desktop Linux PC management

The difficulty of management by teachers is the one of the factors obstructive for spreading Linux as the desktop PC. To solve this problem, we develop "the classroom PC management system." This system keeps the PCs up-to-date by copying the disk image every night.

In these days, there is a lot of wasted time and effort for upgrading of the software, for updating anti-virus patterns, and for fixing troubles by user's misoperations. The classroom PC management system makes it sufficient to manage only one reference PC, so that the teacher's work load of management is drastically decreased.