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Couros linked to this eSchool News article on the 1600 new desktop Linux computers in Indiana. There was an earlier piece about this as well.

This quote is consistent with my "no training" idea.
Taylor said the state's open-source alternatives have become so similar to the proprietary models on which they are based--and with which teachers and students have become so comfortable--that teachers and students pick them up intuitively.

Couros notes that Opera, a pretty cool web browser is having a 10th anniversary party. One cool thing is that they're giving away registrations for free. This is Free as in Beer, not free as in speech, but if you're going to have to compare web browsers sometime soon, this could be a good thing to know about.

Five reasons NOT to use Linux is a silly one-sided piece about how great Linux is. I think that the framing of the piece is interesting, but it's so clearly one-sided that it's easy to dismiss.

There are a couple interesting threads on EDUCAUSE's CIO Listserv that talk about using and Moving to Moodle. This one talks about the decision to choose a Learning Management System (LMS) and asks about Blackboard, Jenzabar and WebCT. Many of the responses talk about choosing Moodle. This one talks about the pains of switching from one LMS to another.

Changing from one system to another is a very expensive proposition, not because of the costs of licensing the software and its care and feeding, but in the re-training of thousands of users. In one post, someone says that if Blackboard doubled the $75K/year that it's costing this school now, he'd probably keep paying it, as the current price is half what he's currentlly paying Microsoft and provides similar fractions for lots of other very expensive stuff. That's all true, but the fact that once you've gone with a proprietary system you're forever beholden to their whims is what I get from this line of reasoning.

Couros has a link about Puppy Linux. It looks like with a few minutes one can download a CD, boot it, and then install this mini-distribution on a USB drive. It runs most everything from RAM disk, so it's pretty fast. This looks like a potentially useful way to have a computer on a USB drive so that wherever you go you have all of your files and settings with you.

A cool project would be to do something like outfit a classroom of students with these to see how their use of computers changed and whether they do stuff like, you know, actually edit and revise work that they create.

It's really small, so there's no OpenOffice, but it has Abiword, mozilla, and gnumeric. It looks pretty cool. One downside is that it wants to wipe away all the files on your USB drive to do the USB install (not necessary if you're willing to boot off a CD).