Homeschool Computing: Introduction

Click here to go to the chapmankids.net Technology and Homeschool Linux home page.

The Goal: The goal of this little project is to write step-by-step procedures about how to set up and use an inexpensive, but great homeschool computer using Linux and other open source software. This includes specific recommendations on computer hardware, software, internet communication, PDA’s, etc., etc. Explanations will be targeted at computer illiterate and technophobic homeschool parents.

The bias will be toward specific, generally available solutions that anyone can install and use. To that end, will will buy a new low-end computer from a major computer vendor. We will install, from scratch, the latest and greatest version of the Linux distribution that best meets our needs. We will connect to the internet, hook up the peripherals, network the computer to our Windows computer, install additional software packages, and do whatever else is required to turn our system into a primo homeschool administration, education, and communication workstation. Most importantly, we will attempt to describe it all right here in great detail.

The purpose of this first post is to provide a little context for what we are trying to do. Our family is on the verge of finishing our second (non-consecutive) year of homeschooling. Over the past school year, our use of the computer evolved to the point where we now have some opinions about what works for us. It will not work for everyone, but it will probably help some. We have a broad set of criteria for selecting technology. Questions we ask when selecting technology include:

Is it cheap? Lots of homeschoolers live in single income households. Resources are finite. Cheap is good.

Is it interesting in a way that will help our homeschool? The point of homeschool is to teach stuff. Stuff is a lot easier to teach if it is interesting.

Does it do something we need to have done? There are lots of cool things out there. Coolness by itself is not enough when resources are finite.

Does its administration require more effort than the benefit derived from its use? Time with the wife and kids is more important than time with technology.

What qualifies me to do this?

I am a fairly savvy computer user. I have a Masters degree in an engineering discipline and I write C and C++ code as part of my daily work. Sadly, those qualifications could well be more of a hinderance than a help in meeting my goals for this project (see above). I will count on the help of a few computer illiterate and technophobic friends to help me keep the prose clear and devoid of overly technical descriptions.

My most important qualification is my status as a homeschool father. Like many homeschool parents, most of my time outside of work is spent correcting and planning school work, performing science experiments and other homescool projects, attending recitals, reading aloud, meeting with homeschool groups, and doing all those other normal homeschool activities. There is also church, housekeeping, yard and house maintenance, bill paying, shopping, and a million other such things. There is not much time left for anything else. Our research and effort to minimize the constraints on our time provided us with a wealth of opinions on what is important in a homeschool computer system and knowledge about how to make it happen for not too much money.

What did you do last year and why don’t you just stick with that?

We started the year with a Dell 3100 computer running Windows XP Home Edtiion with an attached HP Photosmart 7760 printer. That computer did most of the things we needed to do, but the viruses from the internet were killing us. I am sure that we could have found a solution to our virus problem on the Windows computer, but I had been playing with Linux and thought it might be kind of fun to give it a try. We were already using a program called OpenOffice.org which performs equivalent tasks to those of Microsoft Office, but runs on both Linux and Windows. Unlike Microsoft Office, OpenOffice.org is free.

I am going to degrade into a little technical talk right here that is not that important for anything other than a historical perspective, so if anyone feels a little bit lost with the computerese they can skip to the next section without missing anything really important.

The IT guys at work had a bunch of old computers that were not even good enough to donate to any of the local schools, so they gave it to me. It it consisted of an 800 MHz Pentium III computer, with a 20 Meg hard drive, 128 Meg of memory, a 17″ CRT, a keyboard, and a mouse. I added a little memory (up to 256 Meg) and a DVD player. I had played with both Mandrake (now Mandriva) and Redhat Linux, but I liked Redhat better. Redhat’s free, community supported Linux distribution is called Fedora.

I downloaded and installed Fedora Core 2. It worked great for most things, but was a major hassle for a few important ones. I never was able to get my USB memory stick to work right, I spent about a week and a half getting Samba set up right to network with the Windows computer for printer and file sharing. I set up the computer to work with the Gnome desktop, but the only way I could get the external modem to work was with KPPP, a KDE program. After a lot of downloading and configuring of multimedia software and codecs, I was able to play about half a DVD before the system locked up. There were a plethora of other less troubling, but irritating issues.

A lot of the trouble might have been due to our really old hardware. I am sure operator error caused a lot of problems, too, but the newbie audience for which these posts are targeted would have been completely lost after the first twenty minutes. When Fedora Core 3 came out, I was much happier. I solved some of our issues, but several remained. The intial setup was still way too unwieldy for anyone who wanted a box for use and not as a hobby project. Fedora Core 4 is due to come out in June of 2005. I am very confident that it will solve even more of problems. If I were using the computer for development or work, I would probably stick with Fedora, but for a non-savvy user, I do not feel Fedora is the answer.

Ubuntu Linux

When I downloaded and installed Ubuntu Linux, version 5.04 (called Hoary Hedgehog) in April of 2005, I felt a lot better about using Linux in a homeschool context. Ubuntu aims to be an operating system for the masses. It is the first version of Linux I would be willing to install for my 75 year old mother. She is an avid internet user, but the prototype technophobe. The story of Ubuntu, like many Linux distributions, is interesting and revolves around both an interesting personality and a unique community that it targets.

There is a guy named Mark Shuttleworth from South Africa that started a company called Thwate that did some internet commerce kinds of things. He sold his company, bought a ride on a Russian space shuttle with some of the proceeds, but still had plenty left. He wanted to contribute something back to the community, so, among other things, he started an organization to develop a version of Linux for the masses. That version of Linux is how Ubuntu got started. Its ease of use and its price (free) make it my distribution of choice for this project. You can read about the intersting life of Mark Shuttleworth and his latest adventureshere.

I installed Ubuntu on our old computer in April 2005. Itjust worked. The networking was automatic and flawless. Hardware was recognized. Additional packages were easy to install. There were two negatives. The first was that I hate their colors, but that was very easy to fix. The second was probably not Ubuntu’s fault. I could still not watch a whole DVD without locking the system up. I think it is probably a hardware problem that will go away when we get less ancient hardware, so I will give them the benefit of a doubt on that one. Maybe in another context, I will explain why it would not be my first choice for a work or development computer, but I am ecstatic with Ubuntu for use on our homeschool computer.

We will stick with the latest version of Ubuntu throughout the 2005-2006 school year. The next release of Ubuntu named Breezy Badger will come out in October 2005. We will probably describe how to do that upgrade as well as the one after that which comes during the 2005-2006 school year in April of 2006. Ubuntu releases new versions every six months, then supports those releases for two years when they are designated as obsolete. That all being said, I am going to try Fedora Core 4 when it comes out in June 2005. I will continue to look at Gentoo, Debian, and others, too, to assure we are using the best distribution possible for our needs.

Where to, from here?

I need to write three posts to explain what we consider to be important in a homeschool computer. That is fortunate because we will not have the resources together to buy our homeschool computer until a little later in the summer. The first of the posts will describe the homeschool curricula we use and how we go about performing homeschool on a day-to-day basis. We use several of the most popular homeschool curricula, but believe the workstation we put together can be useful to the bulk of homeschoolers irrespective of curricula. The second post will describe the software packages and accompanying hardware required to make that job easier. The third post will be a roadmap to the subjects we hope to cover in describing how to put it all together.