Linux and Star Office in Northern Territory Schools, Australia

The Northern Territory covers about one seventh of the Australian continent, yet has a population of under 200,000 people, many of whom live in remote desert or tropical areas. Throughout 2001, Red Hat Linux LAN servers have been installed on IBM hardware in over 180 schools throughout the Territory. The servers are connected to a state-wide network via a 400kbps satellite downlink running through a Linux-based router. The workstation clients supplied to schools as part of the LATIS package run Windows 98, but come with StarOffice 5.2 installed as the default office suite. Staff and student email is managed with Squirrel Mail, an opensource PHP-based web mail application.

I asked Andrew Hodges, Infrastructure Architect/Project Manager for the LATIS project, why the decision was made to go with Linux: "Basically the decision to use Linux was easy. We wanted a robust operating system to provide what are essentially internet services, the prime goal being to provide internet access to schools. Therefore, on a budget, we needed to provide a service that would be 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and which provided access from wherever you are to whatever you need. We wanted to provide every student with an account, and to provide teachers and potentially parents with accounts also. We wanted to provide web portal access to educational resources, but we only had a limited budget and needed to provide the best options for schools."

In addition to cost and reliability considerations, network manageability was also an important consideration: "We needed to be able to manage 185 servers remotely without costly management tools ... better to use scripting under Linux than proprietary GUI tools. We needed a consistent OS image, and needed to focus on opensource because we wanted to run a central directory service (aka LDAP). So what we ended up with was a server at each school running DNS, DHCP, Squid, Samba, OpenLDAP, OpenSSH, Majordomo, nntp, Apache + SSL, SMTP, IMAP, PostgresSQL etc. The servers also were not affected by Code Red or Nimda viruses."

The decision to use Linux and OSS saved the Northern Territory Department of Employment, Education and Training $1M in the first year, and allowed it to put 1000 more workstations into schools.

StarOffice has generally been well accepted by staff and students, who are making a transition to the open source office suite from a variety of proprietary products. I asked Andrew why StarOffice was chosen as the default LATIS office suite: "We recognised that some schools wanted to run MS Office, but many, particularly the Mac users, didn't really care. Therefore, since we felt we needed to roll the PCs out with some tools installed, we elected to put StarOffice on each PC. This was after sending sample copies of StarOffice to each school and getting broad endorsement of the strategy. Schools in many cases were positive. Those that didn't feel it was appropriate have purchased MS Office but they have not been many. Many schools feel that the features of StarOffice exceed the equivalent MS environment, particularly the graphic manipulation program. Additionally, the number of converters for StarOffice exceed those of MS. This means that those parents that bought their kids a PC with Lotus Smartsuite or MS Works have a better opportunity to import data."

Thanks to the LATIS project, Northern Territory schools now have a network that is end to end, and all schools are connected. The primary factors driving the decision to use Linux and OSS were cost, better internet functionality, better performance, and better manageability over a distributed network. Following on the success of the LATIS project in schools, there are now unconfirmed reports that the entire Northern Territory public service will be switching over to StarOffice 6.0 in the near future.