An Entire Californian School District Is Saying 'Good-Bye Windows, Hello Linux!'

The Windsor Unified School District in Northern California will switch their servers and desktops from Microsoft Windows to Novell SUSE Linux. By this summer, all 5,000 students and 250 teachers will be working off of a Linux-based thin client running OpenOffice.org, while the majority of the Californian district's servers will be running Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.

In August 2006, Heather Carver has been assigned as the director of technology and information service at Windsor. At the time of her arrival, Windsor had an aging Microsoft Windows environment running 70 HP and Dell servers. Upgrading to more powerful hardware and purchasing additional licensing would have cost the district around $100,000, which would have been far too expensive to their limited IT budget. Carver said the migration to Linux has cost the district about $2,500 per school, compared to the estimated amount required to upgrade the Windows infrastructure. In addition, every Microsoft Office license would have cost an additional $100, whereas OpenOffice is free.

The migration officially began in January at the Brooks school building, one of the seven schools in the Windsor district and has been reported as progressing quite smoothly. Moreover, Carver said that moving to Linux had enabled the school district to build out technology capabilities that wouldn't have been possible with Windows:

"[The students] are able to do more because Linux cost less," Carver said. "Our new computer lab [at Brooks] was set to cost $35,000 and ended up costing us $16,000 with Linux [on thin clients]."

The migration has also been appreciated by the students. Carver said: "The kids think Linux is cool because it's new, but what they're really doing is stepping into the 21st century,"