The K-12 Open Source Classroom

Bringing Open Source (Free and Free) into the Classroom

Posts Tagged dell

Ubuntu 10.04–First Thoughts

May 9

Posted by admin in OSS Applications, hardware, open source | No Comments

My Desktop

My Ubuntu 10.04 Desktop, and Yes, I 'Switched' to the Purple Background...

After being at the marathon last weekend, I spent today upgrading the home computers to Ubuntu 10.04, Lucid Lynx.  The largest buzz from the upgrade came from the buttons (close, minimize, maximize) moving from the top, right of a window to the top, left of a window.  As you can see in my screenshot, I already used gconf-editor to move them on back to their right place.  I do like them rounded, except Google Chrome, which kept their default buttons.  I guess that’s a little sad, that a major upgrade (10.04 becomes the default Long Term Supported version) and all we can say is it looks like the Ubuntu team (or Mark Shuttleworth) wants to move Ubuntu more and more to Mac.

In years past, I dreaded ‘upgrade day’ for my Dell Inspiron E1705.  Every time, I would lose networking capabilities, at least at first.  That darn Broadcom card.  With some script magic, eventually I would get it, but I would usually spend at least a day working on it.  This time, I thought I would try it first, and low and behold–worked perfectly.  So I did not doubt my Dell XPS 400 desktop would go as smoothly.  NOT!  As it upgraded, I noticed some message about Grub, but I clicked through it without reading carefully.  It rebooted, and sure enough, it froze at boot with a Grub error.  Argh!  So, I grabbed a Live CD and eventually reinstalled Grub.  No problems.  Then on next boot, I made it through Grub, and it forced a disk check, which took FOUR HOURS.  Argh part deux.  Finally, I made it in, and now no networking.  At least wireless communication.  About a year ago I put a Linksys Wireless N card in this as we move this desktop around at times.  I can ‘see’ the wireless networks, but I just cannot connect to them.  So right now, I draped a nice, blue network cable across the floor.  Argh, the return!  Hopefully, that will be resolved soon.

Social Networks

Where My Social Networks (Facebook, Google Chat, AIM, etc) Would Be, If I Was Social...

So overall, Ubuntu 10.04, being a LTS, does not seem too different from Karmic.  Some icon changes, I like the blue and green icons for .docs and .xlss.  Ubuntu really seems to be forcing social networking on us, with the panel for social networking.  You can bring in all your Google Chat, Facebook, and others into this one panel.  I guess that’s ok, but I do not really use that much.  I do like what they want to do with their online storage, Ubuntu One.  Similar to Dropbox, but for Ubuntu.  Basic 2GB of storage free, but they continue to work on integrate Gnome features, such as Tomboy Notes, to the syncing.  Definitely does help when working across different computers.  Their Ubuntu One Store now sells music, with the premise of wanting to sync those tunes across machines as well.

Definitely some good features.  We never see anything earth shattering with an LTS release, so I think they probably will introduce some new things with 10.10.  Only a few months left…

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Dell Vostro 1320 Update

Apr 5

Posted by admin in OSS Applications, hardware, open source | No Comments

Ok, so I really do like this laptop.  You saw the outside in a recent blog post.  Nice, shiny red, which many commenters said would scratch.  Well, yes, it might, but so far so good.  I take care to put it back in its sleeve when not in use, and do not let it hang around.  The touchpad audio player work well.  You have play/pause, stop, previous and next track, low volume, high volume, and mute.  These are found up near the top of the keyboard, and yes, the WORK WITH UBUNTU!  So you tap one to increase the volume, and it lights up blue, and turns up the volume.  Pretty handy.

Ubuntu Desktop

My New Ubuntu on the Vostro 1320

So yes, I did partition the hard drive to allow for it to dual boot to Windows 7 and Ubuntu 9.10.  I began with a live cd to make sure it would boot and most functionality would work with the hardware in the Vostro 1320.  For those new to Linux, a Live CD will allow you to try Linux without making permanent changes to your harddrive.  In other words, you run the OS from the CD.  Pretty handy when looking at a distro (I have tried out many flavors of Linux: Fedora, Suse, Ubuntu, Mint, etc using this method) without making it permanent.  So I went ahead and installed Ubuntu.  No problems with the install.  Went pretty smoothly.  Upon completion, everything worked so far.  I have yet to try the webcam, and the fingerprint reader will probably not work yet, but that would be a cherry on top.  Wireless did not work without a proprietary driver being used, but once I activated that, no problem.

So now I continue to add the necessary functionality.  I added Google Chrome as my main browser, just like on all my Ubuntu and Windows machines.  You see I added Gimp and Gnome-Do as well.  Gnome-Do gives me the dock functionality.  Flash video works now with a little tweak.  I must point out at this time I configured this laptop to be a 64 bit OS with 8 GB of RAM.  Because of that, I lose some applications, but sure enough, I found a Flash plugin to work with 64 bit Linux.  W00t!

So now I will continue to personalize my Vostro.  Again, dualbooting now with Windows 7 and Ubuntu 9.10.  At this point, I am pretty happy with it.  I went through Dell and many other sites reading complaints about it, but I really, really like this laptop.  Not quite a netbook, but still with the high speed I needed, in a smaller size.

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Dell Vostro 1320

Mar 24

Posted by admin in hardware | No Comments

Dell Vostro 1320

My New Hurricane Colored Laptop...

My quest for the perfect work laptop finally came to a conclusion Friday with the delivery of my Dell Vostro 1320.  At home, we use a Dell 17″ Inspiron, so I wanted a smaller laptop, but one that I could move up to a 64bit OS.  After a pretty long search, even trying to get my hands on a System 76 (Ubuntu) machine, I finally speced out a Vostro 1320.  It has a 13″ screen, so not huge, but just the right size.  8 GB of RAM, that I throughly appreciate.  Dual Core processor.  Fingerprint reader that works with Windows 7, but not quite sure about Ubuntu yet.

I have yet to put on 9.10 Karmic Ubuntu onto it.  I play to dual boot into both and also use VirtualBox to virtualize Ubuntu.  I will continue utilizing the laptop, and share my experiences with it.  The Ubuntu part excites me, as I have yet to use a 64bit Linux distro.  More information to come…

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Library of Congress

Feb 25

Posted by admin in Professional Development, literature, open source | No Comments

One of the challenges in providing project based activities is finding safe content to use with the project.  For instance, if students study countries, they may want pictures of maps, cities, culture, and sports from that country.  Yes, you can do searches, check Wikipedia, or find a huge variety of resources online.  But that takes time, especially with younger students.  With all the online testing that books the labs, we need quick, reliable, usable content.  The Library of Congress (US) provides that.  At http://www.loc.gov you can find a huge plethora of content.

Japanese Internment

Ansel Adams Photo From Japanese-American Internment

On their American Memory site, a subdomain at http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/index.html, they share a huge amount of multimedia, from maps and pictures, to video and sound files, all from the history of our country.  Anywhere from sports, to culture and arts, to cities and geography, to war, all areas provide a huge amount of content to be used by teachers and students.  For instance, during World War II, many Japanese-Americans were interned at various camps across the US.  Ansel Adams, the famous landscape photographer, received permission to take photos, which are shared on the LOC website.  How would you use these?  I saw an awesome lesson once where the teacher gave each student a photo, they researched the basics of the topic, and then they wrote a diary entry as if they were that person.  They also made a photo podcast.  Awesome activity!  All this free content makes that happen!   On the site, they also provide various formats and sizes as well.  For the photo to the left, they provided seven different types/sizes.

In this section, they also provide a teacher area.  Here, they share lessons, resources, and even free professional development.  They keep an updated blog, podcast, and RSS feed as well.  And that really only scratches the surface of the teacher page.

While in this case, the Library of Congress does not own the content, most of it can be used under educational fair use, and much of it resides in the public domain.  For instance, in the case of the Ansel Adams collection, the following statement is shared:

Publication and other forms of distribution: No known restrictions. In giving this collection to the Library in the 1960s, Ansel Adams placed no restrictions on its use.

So it would appear, with citations, teachers can use this in any way they see fit.  Great to see!  Not quite Creative Commons, but we definitely also like Public Domain, clearing all permissions!  We hope to continue to see more collections added to this.  The LOC, by nature, definitely gets the need for content by schools!

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Dell 2100 Apps For Schools

Feb 5

Posted by admin in OSS Applications, hardware, open source | 2 Comments

Open Office Logo

Open Office Found a Place On Our Dell 2100s

With limited funds from our EETT/ARRA grant, we just barely scratched purchasing 60 Dell 2100s, 3 of the specially made carts ($3,500 each!), projectors, document cameras, and professional development.  After this, we will could not afford the extra $3,000 to purchase MS Office for all the netbooks.  And truthfully, I personally did not want to do that.  Yes, Open Office looks a little different, but in all reality, we made a great choice skipping this purchase.  It took my instructional folks a little bit of time until they were comfortable with it, but now they understand it and can use it confidently.  I anticipate some learning curves with the teachers when the carts are delivered as well.  Students?  Nah, they will pick it up with no problem and make the point moot.  I really hope this can lead us to some serious discussions in moving forward.  When we look at the 3,000+ computers in our district, the thought of paying $50.00 each for an Office upgrade, at a total of at least $150,000, does not appeal too much to me.  So let’s see, that is 150 desktops we could purchase.  150 SMART Boards.  20 SMART Tables.  100 sets of ‘clickers,’ the student response systems.  You get the point.  At this point, though, I am just happy to have the leg in the door to move the discussion forward.

What else did we put on the 2100s?  With the integrated webcam and microphone, Audacity was a no brainer.  We envision teachers and students creating animated movies, podcasts, and more with those.  Photostory went on them as well, and while not an open source product, it is a free app available for Windows.  And that’s pretty much the end of the apps installed.  I would like to look at Alice in the future.  Allowing students to create their own ‘games’ in place of a Powerpoint would be a great thing as well.  We also will rely heavily on many of the web apps out there.  We use Wordle in our district, as well as VoiceThread and Animoto.  They all provide great interaction for students.  So that pretty much sums up our 2100s.  Now we will put them out in the schools and see how the teachers use them.  Time will tell if we add any more applications, or how these ones work, but we will let you know!

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