Archive for the ‘Open Source Schools’ category

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Hell Freezes over – Is Steve Jobs right?

October 25th, 2010

It’s been widely reported that Steve Jobs thinks that 7″ tablets from RIM and Samsung are “dead on arrival”. The 7″ screen isn’t big enough for a pleasant touch screen experience and in any case they’re too expensive.

I seldom find myself agreeing with Steve Jobs, but I think he might just have a point here.

Today by “IT Buyers Guide” from BT Business Direct dropped in to my pigeon hole and their quoting £509.79 plus VAT for the Samsung Galaxy Tab – that’s a penny short of £600 for a tablet PC. I don’t see how that is a sensible price for a tablet in anyone’s book.

I’m toying with getting a couple of tablets for my staff to use when they’re out and about in classrooms to cut the amount of walking back to the office needed to pick up new jobs – but at £510 each there’s no way I’ll be buying Galaxy Tabs.

Equally I won’t be buying iPads, lovely as the hardware is, because of Apple’s attitude towards app developers and the devices’ junkie-like iTunes habit.

Is 7 inches enough?

Quite frankly I don’t think so – especially if the screen in question is a 16:9 or 16:10 aspect ratio. Tablets look like they should be used in the portrait orientation, as you would a clipboard, yet with a 7″ screen that forces web content to be relatively small. Those extra 3″ coupled with a 4:3 aspect ratio makes a huge difference.

I guess time will tell if Samsung has found a form factor that people like using. Having used a Dell Streak briefly it felt like a large phone (which it essentially is) and I see the Galaxy Tab as a slightly enlarged version of that – although at 7″ you’re going to look alot like Dom Joly using it!

Personally I want a 10″ device, powered by Android or maybe even ChromeOS and I’m hoping that the muted Google Tablet will be very much along those lines.

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Posted in Android, Computing, F1, Linux, Open Source Schools

Open Letter to Simon Kirby

May 12th, 2010

The upshot of the General Election for me was a change in Parliamentary representative in the form of the Conservative MP Simon Kirby.

There follows an open letter to Mr Kirby outlining my suggestions for cuts to the BSF program which would potentially save the country millions of pounds and safeguard jobs in to the bargain. I also mention the need to repeal or heavily rework the Digital Economy Act and to urgently look at Copyright reform.

I intend to publish here any response I might receive.

Dear Mr Kirby

Firstly my congratulations on your recent election success, and your parties subsequent proposed coalition Government with the Liberal Democrats.

As my elected representative, I’m taking a couple of minutes to put to you my point of view on a couple of important issues in the hope that you can take my views on board.

One of the stated aims of the Conservative Party is to begin cutting the budget deficit with immediate effect. May I suggest a thorough review of the Building Schools for the Future scheme and the quango appointed to run it (Partnerships for Schools) would be an excellent point to begin.

BSF in its conception was a revolutionary rework of state-funded secondary schools nationwide, however over time it has become clear that the needs of large businesses have been pushed to the fore and it is now the normal situation in a BSF scheme to spend millions of pounds unnecessarily on consultants, propitiatory software and replacing nearly new equipment like-for-like at each and every school it touches.

Education desperately needs its funding for ICT, but schools that have invested in their ICT services are being penalised by this levelling process that has been imposed by Partnerships for Schools.

Supporters of the BSF program would say that it’s possible for schools to opt out of the Managed ICT Service side of BSF – and it is, theoretically and on paper. In reality it’s a very long and difficult process to demonstrate that existing provision exceeds that offered by an MSP. It falls to the school – which is rightly working towards educating its students – to counter the claims made by dedicated teams from the MSPs. It’s not surprising that almost all schools that embark on that route fail to win their argument.

Please therefore consider cutting the monies spent on the BSF Managed ICT Service such that the remaining funds are spent directly where they are needed by frontline ICT staff, Headteachers and Governors in schools rather than wasted on consultants and replacing systems like-for-like.

The previous Parliament also presided over the farce that was the passing of the Digital Economy Act. The arguments surrounding that act are well publicised and I’m sure you’re aware of the pertainant points.

Nick Clegg made an election promise to repeal the Digital Economy Act if the Liberal Democrats were in power. I hope that the Con-Lib coalition will seriously consider repealing the act or at the very least undertake a major overhaul of the act to address the very serious shortcomings that it has.

And finally please use this period of Conservative-Liberal accord to tackle the issue of Copyright reform. The UK is still applying copyright laws passed decades ago to modern business practises and I’m afraid they just aren’t fit for purpose any longer. Indeed proper copyright reforms would largely address the contentious issues that the Digital Economy Act attempts to legislate around and would probably negate the need for its existence at all.

Yours sincerely

Alex Harrington

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Posted in BSF, Computing, Linux, Open Source Schools, Politics

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Xibo and MythTV

April 14th, 2010

W’e've got a new room at work for our older students which has a TV mounted on the wall for Digital Signage.

What we wanted to do was provide a live/recorded TV function for breaks and lunchtime and then an easy way to switch over to our Digital Signage solution (Xibo) at other times.

It turned out to be reasonably simple.

First we installed and configured a new MythBuntu frontend (we already had the myth backend server running from a different project). I then installed the Xibo Python client (1.1.0a21) and made a small modification to the code to allow it to exit by remote control button press (our Media Centre remote sends a backspace character when you press the back button):

if e.scancode == 22:
    log.flush()
    self.parent.downloader.running = False
    self.parent.downloader.collect()
    self.parent.scheduler.running = False
    self.parent.scheduler.collect()

    log.log(5,"info",_("Blocking waiting for Scheduler"))
    self.parent.scheduler.join()
    log.log(5,"info",_("Blocking waiting for DownloadManager"))
    self.parent.downloader.join()
    log.log(5,"info",_("Blocking waiting for Player"))
    self.player.stop()
    os._exit(0)

That block was added after line 2852 appropriately indented of course :D

It’s then a simple enough job to add a Xibo button to the MythTV menu.

As your mythfrontend user (ie the user that automatically logs in to Mythbuntu on boot), do the following:

mkdir ~/.mythtv
cp /usr/share/mythtv/themes/defaultmenu/mainmenu.xml ~/.mythtv

You then edit ~/.mythtv/mainmenu.xml and add in a block like this:

<button>
    <type>SETTINGS_VIDEO</type>
    <text>Xibo Digital Signage</text>
    <action>EXEC /opt/xibo/pyclient/client/python/run.sh</action>
</button>

Then restart mythfrontend. You should have a new icon on the menu system that launches Xibo. Once Xibo is running, the client should quit when you press the back button on your remote control and drop you back in to MythTV.

Here’s a short video to show the system in action!

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Posted in Computing, Linux, Open Source Schools, Xibo

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Converting Windows VMWare machines to KVM

February 24th, 2010

I had to do some work on a Windows 2003 virtual server running on VMWare this week which is running on our old playground VMWare install (Server 1.0.4!) and it was sooooo slow I decided enough was enough and it was time to move it on to a sensible platform.

It actually turned out to be quite easy to convert from one platform to the other, with a bit of help from my old boss James Lidderdale.

  1. Shutdown the VMWare server and take a full backup
  2. Boot the VMWare server and uninstall VMWare tools
  3. Apply mergeide.reg registry patch to enable windows to boot on KVM virtual hardware. I’ve no idea where this came from. James had it. I’d like to credit the original author though! Rename .txt to .reg and then merge in as normal.
  4. Shutdown the VMWare server
  5. Convert the vmdk disk image to a single pre-allocated monolithic image: 
    • vmware-vdiskmanager -r Server.vmdk -t 2 /some/other/folder/Server.vmdk
  6. Copy the resulting Server-flat.vmdk image over to your KVM server
  7. Now optionally convert the disk to a qcow2 file: 
    • qemu-img convert Server-flat.vmdk -O qcow2 Server.qcow2
  8. Finally create a suitable virtual machine definition using that file as the main hard drive. If all went well you should see your VMWare machine boot inside KVM.

The first time I tried this it failed miserably. Turned out that the VMWare machine I was working with had snapshots associated with it. In my case, the disk I needed to flatten with vmware-vdiskmanager was actually Server-000001.vmdk. Once I figured that out it worked first time.

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Posted in Computing, Linux, Open Source Schools

School Christmas Dinner Photo

December 18th, 2009

There’s been a literally a submission for the “best school Christmas dinner” crown:

My Christmas School Dinner, Longhill High School

My Christmas School Dinner, Longhill High School

So here’s the first, and to date only entry. From me! Longhill High School by Innovate Ltd. I can honestly say it’s the best school Christmas dinner I’ve had in recent times.

Turkey roll, stuffing ball,  roast and boiled potatoes, carrots, sprouts and parsnips with gravy. Pudding was Christmas pudding and custard.

Well worth a mention were the parsnips. They were so sweet – absolutely delcious. Apparently they’re cooked in oil and honey which explains it.

If you’ve taken a pic of your Christmas Dinner, send it over along with a short review if you like and I’ll add it on!

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Posted in General, Open Source Schools

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Best School Christmas Dinner

December 13th, 2009

At work our canteen is due to be enlarged next year as we can’t seat all the students during a lunchbreak.

So next week we’ve got a Christmas dinner marathon – with the festive meal three days on the trott – and I was wondering how these three dinners will stack up against the school dinners available nationwide.

I therefore call all school staff to forward me a photo of your school chrismas dinner. I’ll stick them up here and we can see who’s getting the best deal!

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Posted in General, Open Source Schools

Linux Teacher PC Update

December 11th, 2009

Well we’ve spent a little time on this. Seb’s been helping out and has done the majority of the work so far.

We’ve got the following working:

  • “Domain” logins (against the LDAP database)
  • CCTV Software (via Wine)
  • Themed to look like our standard XP workstations (but not to the extent that you can’t tell the difference. We’re still using the standard Gnome menus). This needs further work.
  • Promethean ActivInspire for Linux (full marks Promethean)

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Posted in Computing, Linux, Open Source Schools

Could 2010 be the year of the Linux Desktop?!

November 20th, 2009

With the release of Windows 7 and Windows XP some 8 years old now, it’s getting to the point where it’s time to make some changes on the desktop.

Without signing the school up to a Microsoft Schools Agreement, we’d be looking at approximately £45,000 to upgrade to Office 2007 and Windows 7. We’d also have to start looking at running Samba 4 at the network core to support Windows 7, or, move to Active Directory which would be an additional cost (server licensing + 2008 R2 CALs).

It seems then that this might be an opportune time to consider alternatives. The school has alot of Linux at the network core. File servers, domain controllers (LDAP + Samba + bind + dhcpd), Learning Platform, VoIP, SAN, Virtualisation Solution and more are all Linux-based and we have the expertise in the technical staff to support those systems.

From a BSF point of view I’m hoping this is a smart move too. It will significantly reduce ongoing licensing costs and is pretty hard to beat for long-term sustainability. It also makes the job of any potential managed service provider bidding on our site significantly harder since the expectation will be that the philosophy of the school should not be fundamentally changed by a switch in service provision.

My Christmas holiday project therefore will be to get an Ubuntu 9.10 box to mirror the functionality of a standard teaching workstation as far as possible. We’re pretty sure we know where the sticking points will be, but like most things, you won’t really know until you try.

Main points as I see them now:

  • Support from Leadership
  • Support from Governing Body
  • Training for Staff (and Students?)
  • Support for Windows-only software
  • Support for Legacy files (Microsoft Publisher being the worst offender)
  • MIS software officially requires Microsoft Office to run and runs on .net 2 and 3.5
  • Desktop Lockdown
  • Monitoring
  • Updating software (local apt repo?)

I’ll be posting here progress as I go along in the “Open Source Schools” category.

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Posted in BSF, Computing, Linux, Open Source Schools

Virtualisation Comparison

May 13th, 2008
Until now I’d assumed that we’d probably end up using VMWare Server 1.0 or 2.0 (if it’s out of beta in time) for the virtualisation project.
The paid-for versions of VMWare have lots of additional features over and above VMWare Server 1.0, some of which are highly desirable to me, and which are provided free-gratis in some of the GPL virtualisation technologies.
  • Multiple disk snapshots
  • VM State Migration (VMotion – moving a running VM between hosts with no downtime)
  • >4GB RAM allocation per host OS
  • iSCSI initiator support within the VM technology – such that a host OS can access an iSCSI target without a software iSCSI initiator.
I thought it therefore prudent to do a bit of investigation in to the options before making a final purchasing decision.
The four main candidates are:
  • VMWare
  • VirtualBox
  • KVM
  • Xen
VMWare
Most people have heard of VMWare – they are something of the industry standard.
VirtualBox
Produced by Sun Microsystems, VirtualBox is released under the GPL, however it has a few addon modules which are paid-for (such as USB and iSCSI initiator support). VirtualBox can leverage Intel VT technology but they think their software implementation is superior.
KVM
I hadn’t come across KVM before. Written around 2006, it was recenty adopted by Ubuntu and Canonical as the official Ubuntu virtualisation technology. It relies on Intel VT technology in the processor to provide much of the functionality, failing back to QEMU when the VT instruction set stops.
Xen
Xen is pretty well known for being fast and stable. It is very thin at only 50K lines of code, and runs as much of the guest OS on the bare-metal hardware as is possible. It is very much aimed at the datacentre market and has many advanced features that are addons to other systems.
Quick Reference

VMware Server

VirtualBox
KVM

Xen

Licence

Propriatory (free)

GPL (plus closed source modules)

GPL

GPL

Sponsor

-

Sun Microsystems

Kumranet / Canonical

Redhat, Oracle, Sun Microsystems

Architecture

Kernel Module

Hypervisor

V Requirements

None

None

VT / AMD-V

VT / AMD-V

Host OS Support

Linux / Windows
Linux / Windows
Linux / Windows
Linux / Windows

uest OS Support

DOS, OS/2, Windows All Versions, Linux, Solaris x86

DOS, OS/2*, Windows All Versions, Linux

DOS, OS/2, Windows All Versions, Linux, Solaris x86
DOS, OS/2, Windows All Versions, Linux, Solaris x86

Live VM Migration

Y+

Y+

Y

Y

iSCSI Initiator

Y+

Y+

N

N

Speed

Fast

Fast

Fast

Near Native

Configuration

GUI

GUI / File

GUI / File

GUI /XML
* Only with Intel VT or AMD-V enabled processor
+ Additional Cost

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Posted in Computing, Linux, Open Source Schools

So Much Choice!

May 9th, 2008

So after the testing it looks like iSCSI may well be the way to go. I spoke to Stuart at M-Tec about it and he didn’t seem to think that iSCSI was going to be a problem performance wise with VMWare. He’s sending over a quote for the basic paid for VMWare package with a list of the benefits over the free VMWare Server 2.0 which is in beta now – but should be in production by the time we go live with this.

Next problem is then to spec the hardware. In an ideal world I’d like to stay totally HP as their kit is reasonably priced and to date has been extreemely reliable – however they’ve discontinued the DL320s which I had thought would make an ideal iSCSI target with the addition of some RAM and either Ubuntu or OpenFiler. There is no direct replacement yet for the DL320 which means I’d have to go for a server using the 2.5 SFF drives – which are far more expensive, especially at larger capacities.

HP do a StorageWorks box that might fit the bill – the MSA2000i series enclosures. They’re the same size and density as the DL320 but work out more expensive. One would hope however that being purpose built for the job they would be faster than the DL320s.

Dell offer the AX150i which is a rebadged EMC enclosure. This is particularly tempting because EMC are a big name when it comes to SANs – and their kit ought to be up to par. I’ve not got a quote for one of these yet because the thought of Dell technical support based on past experience makes me shudder. There’s also the obsticle of actually buying one from Dell Education Sales which makes it an even more unlikely proposition!

Infortrend do an enclosure that would fit the bill nicely. I wasn’t that impressed with the build quality of the Infortrend fibre SAN I put in at BHCC though – and I understand Ian has been having hassle getting support on the unit when one of them failed recently. With that in mind I’ll only really consider Infortrend as a last resort.

The final option is to buy a server from another vendor – IBM or Dell – who do still support LFF drives in a rack configuration and proceed as planned, or source a NOS DL320s via eBay or the like.

And all that before we even consider what VM software to run. I’ve been assuming VMWare but there’s others to be considered…

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Posted in Computing, Linux, Open Source Schools