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Saturday, April 10, 2010

Netlive,a complete Free Software lab in the pockets of every teacher | Stop!

Netlive,a complete Free Software lab in the pockets of every teacher

Fri, 2010-04-09 06:51 — marco

Endless cuts to Public Education budgets are creating survival problems to many italian Public Schools, forcing them to ask more or less "voluntary" contributions to parents every year. How can you guarantee quality education in such conditions, especially when many teachers, either because they only get very short term assignments, every time in a different school, or because their school has more than one campus, work every day in a different neighborhood?

Some italian schools just started to write their own textbooks to save their students money. As far as ICT is concerned, instead, many schools in Italy and abroad, may also use the method developed and already successfully applied by Ezio Da Rin (the italian entrepreneur fighting for proprietary file formats in Public Administrations http://stop.zona-m.net/it/node/104] and Marco Clocchiatti, teacher in the Paschini Lyceum of Tolmezzo, in the Carnia mountain region of Northeastern Italy.

Netlive is a system to set up and use in just a few minutes a very flexible computer lab without spending anything in software licenses. I asked Ezio and Marco (E&M) to explain how much good Netlive and Free Software in general could do for italian schools (even if the Italian Government seems to prefer other solutions).

Stop: What are the problems that you want to solve with Netlive?

E&M: The first one is to help all the teachers that would want to set up a complete computer lab but have little or no budget for it. The other is the unease that teachers feel when, regardless of money, they would like to teach valid alternatives to the operating system (Windows) that too often is the only one made available by schools, but cannot do it, sometimes because the school itself doesn't let them install Free Software like Linux.

Stop: Wait a minute. Couldn't those teachers just run one of the live versions of Linux, that is one of those systems that boot and run entirely from a CD-ROM or USB key without installing anything on the computer?

E&M: Such systems are quite unpractical for short lessons in crowded classes, because plugging in and booting manually 20/25 CDs or keys would take a good part of the lesson. Besides, there may be boot problems that not always can be fixed quickly.

Stop: What does Netlive do instead?

Read more...
http://stop.zona-m.net/node/142

Netlive: an interesting alternative to the Linux Terminal Server Project

Netlive is a slightly unusual distribution developed in Italy: a live version of Linux that makes available on demand any other live version of Linux chosen by its administrators to all the computers of its local network. Its developers, Ezio Da Rin and Marco Clocchiatti, call Netlive "a very efficient way to build portable ICT labs for schools, alternative to the Linux Terminal Server Project (LTSP)".
The practical advantages of Netlive for end users, that is schools and students, have been already explained elsewhere. This page, instead, explains Netlive's internal architecture and what makes it different from LTSP.

What's inside Netlive?

Technically speaking, Netlive is a text-only Debian-Live distribution, modified in order to export via NFS a special folder. This folder contains a Squashfs file system, that each client mounts as aufs. That file system can be any Linux distribution you want. The Netlive website currently hosts the ISOs for serving ITIS Linux, SoDiLinux, or an italian version of Linux Mint. The basic method and the building scripts, however, can be easily modified to include any other version of Linux, in whatever language you prefer. You take the ISO image of whatever distro you want to serve via Netlive, mount it, chroot into it and modify the distro, using its native package manager or messing with the configuration files in /etc/, in whatever way you want.

The next step is to generate an initramfs to boot that system in the clients. Netlive applies a Gentoo technique to the Debian-Live tool live-initramfs, in the same way you'd work to customize Ubuntu from scratch (even if Ubuntu uses casper).