When 3Ghz dual core computers running 2GB of RAM weren't being used for many heavily CPU-intensive applications in a Victorian secondary school library, the school's IT department initially joked about replacing them with older and previously abandoned hardware. Then it saw the serious side.

Working with school systems one thing you will notice in almost every case is a pathetic library…there is just not enough money for books. Each district has a budget for books which is often augmented by a Library Fair or some type of way of selling stuff to get money for the Library. But still there just is not enough money for kids to have books.

Remember a time when doing research required us to have to go to the library? Your school had one, and that's probably where you spent most of your library time at. If it wasn't your school, then it was probably your local town or city library.

Alexander Ponosov, director of the school in the village of Sepych, Perm Territory, who has found guilty of installing pirated Windows software in 12 school computers, has changed jobs. He is now engaged in popularizing the free Linux operating system, Window's biggest competitor, after winning a competition held by the Russian Federal Education Agency (Rosobrazovanie) to test Linux in school computers in three regions of the country. Ponosov received wide attention after the local prosecutor charged him with installing pirated software in school computers.

Lake City, Florida USA is the home of a rather unconventional school, New Generation. It is a non-profit, private school for students grade 6th through 12th that are at risk of dropping out of school due to educational difficulties. With a maximum population of 60 students, New Generation has an astounding success rate amongst a category of students that most of society has given up on.

The city will be deploying 15,000 OLPCs to its school system. The OLPCs will be given to all first- through eighth-graders in the city's school system. Some of the computers are expected to be deployed as early as March, with the rest to follow by the beginning of the 2008-9 school year. The first of these small Linux laptops will be used in pilot programs as teachers get up to speed on these computers.

I seriously don’t understand why schools don’t do this. If your school needs a PC lab, buy a whole bunch of Pentium 3 computers (or even Pentium 2) and run Ubuntu. It comes with almost everything a school computer needs. Kids in public school won’t know how to modify the system in any way and its completely safe to use.

The administration of the Danish municipality of Lyngby-Taarbæk is installing OpenOffice on some 1700 school desktop PCs, the administration announced yesterday. The first school where OpenOffice will be installed is the Lindegård school. At the school earlier today mayor Rolf Aagaard-Svendsen showed the first desktop running the open source suite of productivity tools.

At Phoronix we have tested out Ubuntu 9.04 quite extensively with a variety of different hardware and have delivered numerous benchmarks, but we had not looked closely at running the Jaunty Jackalope with older hardware. In this article though we have done just that and carried out a number of Ubuntu 9.04 tests using an older VIA-based PC.