Look more closely though and you’ll see the Firefox bar along the top. What you are seeing is EyeOS – an operating system that runs inside your browser.

It isn’t perfect yet, and someone is going to have to figure out a way to make money out of such services if they are going to be sustainable, but it’s interesting nonetheless.

Surely the time is coming when all the “computer” most users will need is a browser.

The Gnu Public License

Linux, and most of the software running on Linux are distributed under the GPL. This license guarantees:

• the freedom to use the software for any purpose,
• the freedom to share the software with your friends and neighbors,
• the freedom to change the software to suit your needs, and
• the freedom to share the changes you make.

In effect this means that Linux is free as in “free beer”, and free as in “free speech” (the French would say it is  “gratuit” and “libre”).

Anatomy of a Linux Distribution

Linux (or GNU/Linux as the hardcore free software crew call it) really refers to the kernel, the foundation of the operating system upon which the rest of the system is built. A full operating system based on the Linux kernel is called a Linux distribution, and includes the kernel, a desktop environment (the software that deals with windows, menus, login screens etc) and thousands of open source programs (called packages) to run on top (18733 packages in the case of Debian). These packages are stored online in repositories.

There are hundreds of different distributions. Popular ones include Debian, Ubuntu, OpenSuse, and Fedora.

One of the great delights of a Linux distribution is the ease which you can install new software and keep your system up to date. It all happens over the Internet in the simplest way imaginable. You open up a wee application and (once you have given a password to show that you have admin rights) you are presented with a searchable list of all the available packages. If you see one you like, click on install and you’ve got it! It downloads from the repository and installs on your machine. Since all the packages in the repository are open source, they are all free and there are no licensing issues.

Your local Linux system keeps track of what versions you have of packages, and as soon as any updates becomes available, it alerts you and allows you to update your system with a single click. Absolute simplicity.

Linux Security

Linux has always been very secure operating system, unlike Windows which began as a security nightmare and has gradually improved! The design of Linux assumes multiple users, with a “root” user that has admin rights. By default, all other users are prevented from performing any action that would affect the system, or the files of other users. For this reason, Linux viruses are simply not a problem. The first time I ever saw anti-virus software for Linux was on the eee pc!

I installed the excellent open source xournal and plugged in the tablet. The Eee recognised the tablet immediately, and I rattled off a quick quadratic equation. Xournal can export to pdf, so you can see that here or just look at the screenshot (click on the screenshot for full size image):

I’ve been adding some useful maths programs to the Eee PC, and adding icons for them to the Maths/ Learn tab.

The scientific calculator is jscicalc, which works exactly like the calculators that pupils use. Maxima and Geogebra should be familiar to you from previous posts of mine.

Playing with the Eee pc has brought home to me the fact that 1-1 (one device per pupil) is coming soon. I don’t have to do anything to make it happen. It is inevitable.

I have therefore decided to focus my energies on preparing for 1-1. In other words, I am going to be working on lesson plans that assume 1-1 in my classroom, starting with the topics that I’ll be teaching on Monday (iterative schemes for Advanced Higher, surds for credit etc).

Some time soon, someone is going to ask “where should we start the roll-out of 1-1?” and I want to be so ready that they couldn’t possibly choose anywhere else

I’ll put my work online, cc wiki, but I’ll hold off publishing the url until I’ve got at least a couple of ideas written down.

image by venkylinux

These people have given of their own time without any financial reward simply because they wanted to help to make something useful to humanity, or maybe because it was just an interesting problem to solve. Whatever their motivation, I am immensely grateful to them. Without them we would still be stuck with the duopoly of MS and Mac, and the Eee pc would not exist.

Linux has benefited from considerable investment by IBM and other companies over the years, but it is the vast army of unpaid volunteers that created Linux and continue to drive its growth.

My first impressions are very positive. As an experienced Linux user, I found the interface a bit annoying, but a quick google brought me to this howto which explains how to switch out of the easy mode and back to a more regular Linux desktop. Before the switch, it looks like this:

and now it looks like this:

I can see the appeal of the easy mode for younger pupils.

So anyway, I’ve just about finished rewriting it, but I decided to save and take a break before sending it. I checked my gmail and got a link to this:

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/advisory/929433.mspx

I love this bit:

As a best practice, users should always exercise extreme caution when opening unsolicited attachments from both known and unknown sources.

In other words, opening any Word document that you didn’t create yourself is a very risky business. Wow! I think I’ll be sending back any Word attachments with a link to this announcement until a patch is issued and school applies the patch to the machines I use. At home I’m mostly on Linux and OpenOffice. I sleep soundly at night