User:Jasujt

From openSUSE

I am James Tremblay, District Technology Coordinator for the Newmarket School District. I am a 15 year veteran of Novell networking technology, I have been employed by schools systems since My last commercial installation of "IBM School Vista" (a product that replaced the Windows 95 shell with a classroom landscape were every item in the room launched a computer function. A great idea but to hard to manage and expensive.)for a subsidiary of IBM's education division. I have always preferred Novell solutions due to their lower cost and higher reliability.

I was educated in NH at the NHCTC where I hold an Associates Degree in Automotive Technology and a Certificate in Computer Networking, long story short, cars are way to dirty and I was trained in electronic diagnosis in the Army and at NHCTC, so why not computers. My hands thank me profusely :) I jumped from cars to networked copiers, printers, faxes as well as shared scanners. A local IBM subsidiary needed a CNE to send to IBM's "School Vista" training. A few years later, my last School Vista customer hired me on full time. After 5 years of trying manage the 8 elementary schools, 1 middle and 1 high school(totaling 950 PC's and 30+ servers) alone, I found Newmarket schools. I've been here 7 years.

A few years ago I attended a symposium hosted by David Trask. There I got my first taste of LTSP. I knew I could use this to bring life back to my aging computers as well as save money on future purchases by using thin client hardware. Since I already had been learning NLD9 and was testing for the developers of the IPW2200 driver for Intel's wireless card, I decided to look up the dev team for k12ltsp and get involved. After a few weeks of studying that project I tackled the integration of LTSP 4.2 with NLD 9, I then wrote what has become the official installation instructions for LTSP on SLED 10 (http://en.opensuse.org/Ltsp#LTSP_4.2_on_openSUSE_and_SLED). I now run, one 60 seat network of LTSP for production and a 2 seat non-production environment for testing and learning the LTSP5 software being developed at openSUSE.

Now that my hardware needs were met, I needed to find software I could use to replace our aging and expensive W32 based titles. I started looking at all the offerings and noticed no one was bundling them, so I started asking different people at Novell\openSUSE to help me start a project to bundle open source educational software for use with openSUSE and SLED, known now as the openSUSE EDU-CD.

I am currently working with several developers in an effort to use open source titles for school administration as a basis for an ERP for Education.