Olivier Berger wrote:
This solves the problem of system adminsitration, but not of the educational applications, that teachers and students really need.
Well, at my sister's school they currently have a WinNT server with Win98 on all the boxes. They use MS Office for most things, and Visual BASIC for teaching programming. I believe the art and music departments have specialist programs too.
Now, getting GNU/Linux on to the servers shouldn't be hard. The engineers who were setting them up wanted to use GNU/Linux, but the council told them to use WinNT instead (this is hearsay, but I believe it to be true).
The trouble after that is the desktop. There is a very powerful argument that says that the students should be learning to use Windows, because that's waht most of them will use at work.
However, if we can overcome that then it's easy-ish. IIRC Star Office is libre, so that can easily replace MS Office. The Gimp is as good as any other art software out there. I don't know what GNU/Linux has in the way of music software, though. There's a number of options for programming. There's a project right now to make a VB-alike called K-BASIC. There's the GCC of course, but it doesn't have pretty pictures like VB. Borland are porting (have ported?) Delphi, but that's not Free itself AFAIK.
A GNU/Linux + Star Office + the Gimp + [programming language] + [some Free music program] would be a lot cheaper than a comparable windows-based system. Considering how cash-strapped schools are in many places, selling that to them shouldn't be hard.