Libre Software at the Reach of the Right Click: the Experience of Implementing Linux in Zacatecas

Who we are

Dear friends:

We came to Libre Software Meeting on behalf of a pioneer institution in the use and promotion of the Linux solution in Mexico, the Escuela Normal Manuel Ávila Camacho of Zacatecas. We would like to share with all of you the process of how we became a local Linux powerhouse and the way we are currently promoting its use in public schools. We believe that our experiences could be useful in our common effort to help schools leave the commercial software paradigm, and enter a new option that is much better adapted to the conditions that prevail on most public schools.

Every start is a difficult one. We did not get to where we are now just overnight. It was a long and sometimes painful journey. Today, I would like to share part of this journey with you. First, I will talk to you about our experience of becoming part of the Linux community. Second, I will tell you about the steps we are taking to promote the use and development of Linux applications in our region and last, I will share briefly the conclusions we have reached after being users of Linux for almost four years now.

The main objective of our institution is to prepare teachers for pre- elementary, elementary and secondary schools. Our school is the oldest one with this function in America. It has been opened for 175 years and offered uninterrupted services. During this long period, the school has been able to satisfy the social demand of teachers that are dedicated to educate many generations.

With the advent of the information and telecommunications era, the school faced an amazing challenge: How could the oldest institution of the American continent be able to incorporate the new paradigms of technology into the culture that prevailed during almost two centuries? At first, it seemed impossible.

In 1990, we received 10 computers with 286 processors, no hard disks, TTL display, and 1 MB RAM. As you could guess, this equipment was already outdated. Nevertheless, the school administration of those years did not think of the computer area as something useful in education. Thus, we had to cope with using this equipment for almost seven years. Unfortunately, we were the most outdated computer center in the region of Zacatecas. Our own students voluntarily helped us during those times, donating some money to purchase motherboards to replace 286 to Pentium. We did not get financial aid from the school. It was an odd situation for an institution at a University level.

Ironically, the closed frame of mind of our authorities had a positive consequence: our school was the only one that did not jump into the Windows craze. We simply did not have equipment powerful enough to use the office suite in vogue or the latest commercial operating system. In turn, that had a positive lesson. We saw how all the others wasted their limited resources buying mere fashion and sacrificing features. They entered a vicious circle: in order to run its newer software, they had to upgrade or replace their computers, then they had to buy the new version of the software. Later, they found that their computers were obsolete to run the newer version, so they had to upgrade or replace their computers, and so... you can imagine what came next.

When our school was finally benefited from a federal equipment program in 1997, our concern was that the new computer center could generate many expenses that would be exceed our budget. Due to the fact that our computer center is part of a public school, the majority of our students have low-income. We do not receive high payments. The courses are given for free. In side the school we charge symbolically for printing services. We cannot offer too many services to external users, because the computer center was donated by the State for the destined mainly to our own students. 20 computers to serve 1100 students was not sufficient. We also calculated that the acquisition of commercial software would cost us more than we could afford. That is, it would cost us approximately $13,000 dollars, which represents eleven times more than the regular budget generated by our internal activities. Thus, the commercial software paradigm has proved to be unsustainable under those conditions.

We learned about Linux for the first time when Corel announced that WordPerfect would be freely available in this platform. We had been using WP 5.1 on our old equipment, so we thought that would be great to have a free and modern version of our favorite word processor.

We began to study Linux, and we were happily surprised that we could use not only WordPerfect, but many great quality apps. In fact, with the tools available, we came to realized that by taking advantage of the Linux software, we did not need anything else from our former commercial companies. What we needed was available for free, or at a truly fair price in Linux. We then decided to accept the challenge and become the first computer center in Mexico using this platform. The new administration of the school supported this risky step from square one despite of the fact that the results were, until that moment, unpredictable. Nobody else in our region was using Linux. None of us, in the computer center knew how to work neither in Linux nor in UNIX. There were no books available about this subject on the local libraries. Our computer knowledge was relatively superficial, because our main concern has been education.

Four years have passed since we took this step towards our revolution, and we have not had any regrets. We found a powerful, stable server and desktop operating system. Linux has served daily to almost 1100 students and it has became extremely popular in our school community. Windows and some of its applications are still installed in all of our computers. However, these applications have become very unpopular and practically nobody wants to work on them. If you arrive to our computer center, you will see all computers running in Linux. We have been able to grow thanks to the free software.

We are very grateful to Linux and its developers, not only for providing us with a wonderful operating system, but also for the growth of our services, too. With the money we have saved by not having to buy commercial software, we have been able to buy another 15 computers in the beginning of this year. We plan to buy other 15 by October. The government has also become interested in our growth, and is going to grant the funds to buy another 50 computers in the near future. We have come a long way. We have moved from being considered the most underdeveloped computer center in the region to the one with the greatest growth expectations in the near future. It is really a great accomplishment.

After recognizing our success using Linux, we have decided that the next step would be to share our experience with other public schools in our region, by letting them know that they do not need to be  stranded in the commercial software paradigm. We have been doing so since August 1999.

As you may know, in 1998 the National Public Education of Mexico announced its most ambitious project, named ScholarNet. Under this project, the State will provide to public elementary and secondary schools with 140,000 computer centers. Each of which will have from 8 to 12 computers and Internet access. All of them could be running on Linux. Of course, we applauded and supported that decision. Nevertheless, we were worried about a fact: the lack of multimedia educative titles on Linux. We realized that this could hinder the possibilities opened by Linux in education. Considering this possible constrain we decided to put together our efforts and handle this lack of multimedia software by creating our own, which would promote Linux in the schools of our region. In order to do so we decided to follow four steps: