S2S2 Project

Government of Kerala had introduced information technology (IT) as a curricular subject in high school education and the project 'IT@SCHOOL' had been initiated in this regard. Though the information technology has been introduced in schools as tool for effective teaching and enhancing the quality of learning, many schools located in remote rural area still doesn't have the infrastructure to build and sustain a full fledged computer lab facility. Moreover children coming to these schools are from economically weaker section of the society who can not afford to pay additional special fees to learn computers and digital technology. For them access to computers remains a distant dream. Of lately things are now getting changed as organisations/individuals have taken initiative to address the needs of bridging the digital divide by providing innovative ideas and technologies. New IT educational projects have been started all over the world to make digital technology accessible to each and everyone. Deploying simple/low grade hardware infrastructure and free/open source software tools it has been demonstrated that a cost effective and economically sustainable technology model can make big impact on bridging the digital divide in a country like India.

Following the success of technology deployed in many schools abroad, a similar attempt has been tried in Kannur district of Kerala to implement socially responsible and cost effective solutions to make computer enabled education more feasible and practical. In this context Kannur in Kerala achieved a unique feat by implementing a very cost effective, economically sustainable and easy to maintain computer education model for school children. Children of 49 Government schools in Kannur parliamentary constituency now have access to their own computer facilities running GNU/Linux Operating System packed with the latest GNU free software.

The project was initiated and supported by the local Member of Parliament( MP) Shri A. P. Abdullakutty who represent Kannur constituency in Indian Parliament. As a development project of MPLAD(Member of Parliament Local Area Development) Shri Abdullakutty along with district administrators identified the introduction of computer education facilities in schools as one of the prime development program and initiated the project of setting up computer labs in schools located in the constituency. Once the project has been selected, the next step was to utilize the limited resource the most cost effective way so that maximum number schools could benefit from the scheme. National Informatics Center, Kannur, convinced of using disk-less workstations based on GNU/Linux operating system, decided to try the same technology for setting up the school labs. Using disk-less PCs to boot over a network server, the requirement of high end hardware could be minimized and the money thus saved could be used for setting up more number of facilities.

In the first phase of the project 49 schools have been identified. The state owned technology enterprise unit Keltron had all the infrastructure to provide the hardware facilities to schools and Keltron was chosen accordingly to implement the first phase of the project. In order to deploy the best suitable technology for disk-less workstations, an installation and feasibility test on LTSP server and etherboot was carried out by Mr.Sujeevan (Swathantra Software Solutions & Support, Kannur) at Keltron Control Center, Kochi. GNU/Linux operating system RedHat 8.0 distribution was used and configured for setting up an LTSP server (on Intel P4 machine) . After the successful feasibility test, it was decided to deploy LTSP as the solution for setting up disk-less workstations in schools. The LTSP server is a Pentium IV machine with CD-ROM drive and hard disk. The disk-less workstations are of Intel celeron machine without any hard drive and cdrom drive. Since project involved setting up installation on new hardware starting from scratch, the procedure was a bit simpler. All the machines, video cards, network cards, hubs, and other accessories were of identical type. This reduced the complexity of the setup to a minimum. Making the setup working on one server was good enough and this configuration could be copied to other machines. To boot diskless workstations from remote server, etherboot (www.etherboot.org) was deployed. Boot image downloaded from the site rom-o-matic.net was burnt into the ROM chip of each and every Network Interface Card (NIC). For example, all machine are equipped with Realtek 8139 NIC and the etherboot image corresponding to this card burnt into its EPROM chip.

After the successful testing of the machines, they were sent to the schools. To begin with, each school have one server and 3-5 diskless workstations. Local network was setup using standard hub and cables. A custom made RedHat 8.0 installation is done inside the server and LTSP & DHCPD configured to use dynamic IP for the network. In order to make X- window load much faster than the default GNOME or KDE , the thin window -manger "icewm" is installed on all the server. Icewm is configured with custom menu and selected applications. The other installed GNU software package include, Openoffice, multimedia, Internet applications , programming tools and many applets for educational use( physics, chemistry,maths etc.). A custom made single CD (GNU Utilities for Education) is used for setting up the installation fast and simpler.

The new system has been well accepted by teachers and students. After providing basic training on how to use GNU/Linux based system, the response of the teaching community is very much encouraging to accept GNU/Linux in education. S2S2 is providing technical support and training to the school community.