Barker Bites Back
A look at some newsy stuff and interesting bits as well as those hopefully amusing byways of technology.
Friday 20 February 2009, 3:49 PM
350,000 Linux deployment planned for Brazil
Two companies, Canada-based Useful and the Brazilian company, ThinNetworks announced on Wednesday that they planned to deploy the systems to Brazilian schoolchildren using shared hardware.
The two companies claim that the Userful Multiplier tool “is the simplest, and highest performance approach to desktop virtualisation on the market”. It is a combination of software from Useful and hardware from ThinNetworks who claim their to offer lowest-cost desktop virtualisation.
The software will be the Linux Educacional 2.0 Linux distribution that has been developed by the Brazilian Ministry of Education the companies said in their joint statement.
According to the company doing the deployment, Userful, the system offers the features of “a full PC including high performance video for less than $50 per additional seat in large deployments - not including monitors and keyboards” and uses standard PC hardware including additional video cards and USB/two-way-audio hubs from.
There were few details of the actual mechanics of when this project is rolling out and the companies could not be reached for comment.
However, ThinNetworks does claim to have installed 400,000 multi-terminal workstations around the world and said that with the Brazil rollout they expect to increase this to 800,000 by 2010.
We did want to ask them when they expected to have the project completed. It is not clear from their press release, but the system they intent to use for the project is based on the idea that two workstations can share the one screen.
The companies did not reveal the cost of the project. We asked the companies for comment but have not yet received a replay.
PreviousComments on this post
It would be great if BECTA (or a similar national education computing authority) could perform an analysis of the capability and cost differences with such a roll-out, compared to a 'mainstream' school desktop deployment.
Getting schools to make broader use of educational software, scientific, mathematical, multi-media creation, has always been an interest of mine. Having them save money on deploying 'the platform', ie, the hardware-OS-browser-stack, would mean more resources on offer for the enhancements such as specific vertical apps (astronomy, programming, video editing, music creation, algebra etc.)
It would be GREAT, but trying to break the stranglehold of MS is a monumental task.
