The Open Source Teacher

Over the past year I have been less than fully employed, which has been great in some ways, for example spending more time with the children and being able to undertake meaningful professional development along the way. Unfortunately, unless you are very fortunate, most people need to work pretty much full-time to make ends even remotely meet. I am one of those people, so eventually the fun must stop. Whilst job hunting I faced an old foe, the application forms and their lack of standards. Surely, in 2021 it is time to part ways with the massive range of forms we encounter and find a much more efficient and effective manner of selection? I get that applying for a job should be challenging, but when it comes to the employment and education history, please for the love of whichever deity you believe in, let’s standardise this part so that we don’t spend endless hours copying and pasting information into new and wonderful formats for absolutely no reason! So how does FOSS fit into this...

This is the first time I have actually attempted to fault find myself, albeit guided by the Lubuntu community who are great, so responsive and knowledgeable, I guess that’s because there’s not going to be as many users as with other distros. The Lubuntu Discourse platform is very welcoming, supportive and straight forwards. Ask a question, get responses and you get to contribute to the discussion the whole way through, irrespective of your experience level. So I had some problems with Lubuntu after it updated to 20.04.2. Testing on Kubuntu 20.10 as well there were more pronounced issues. Combined they pointed to hardware issues and that’s likely given the age of the laptop I was using (my sons). The symptoms weren’t to bad, virtually everything still worked and it still seemed to be going well. With the exception of the software centre Discover. I think this is part of something called Plasma or KDE, desktops that can be bundled with the Linux kernel. So my knowledge is improving, but...

Today I was given the chance to play with a pretty old laptop, 256mb RAM Centrino 1.4ghz, so really a test for any operating system to get it running. The owner was hoping to be able to donate it to a local primary school if it could be any use to them, the biggest concern for me was really whether it could even be connected to the internet. The laptop was a Packard Bell Easy Note E2, there was virtually no trace of this model on the web to be found, so not much in the way of starting points. I loved the design though, because it was older it had servicing more in mind than obsolescence. The CPU had its own hatch, so cleaning the fan or removing it would be an easy job; similarly there were hatches for the wireless card (didn’t have one though), the HDD and the RAM. It seemed to be limited to only 256mb of RAM despite having two slots, only one of which was occupied; so I initially got excited that it might be expanded to 512mb or perhaps even 1gb. Unfortunately running a check using ...

I started my eldest off with Ubuntu last year, as I revived my old laptop with it. She got to grips with it quickly, but to be honest it was still pretty demanding of resources and also buggy at 18.04 for us. Thankfully, 20.04 was so much better on that device and now that she has a pretty robust desktop, Ubuntu is playing really nicely for her. Unfortunately, she is a big Roblox player at the moment, so she still needs Windows 10 to play this, it doesn’t run in Wine and the developers aren’t keen on porting. It’s a shame in this day and age that they couldn’t just push their player code out to the community as open source, it’s promising that Steam have some level of support for Linux at least. Testing Origins with Wine has been pretty problematic, I have one device that can run everything and even then it was a nightmare to get any of my games downloaded to test. I did manage to get Fi running briefly, but can’t recreate the settings to get it going again. It was buggy but there se...