KDE in nearly all public schools in brazil.

Today I was in a public school near where I live for a interview with Nazareth, the coordinator of a social-inclusion project for the less afortunate kids in brazil, that live in 2 poor-communities: Alto do Coqueirinho and Bairro da paz.

What do you plan to accomplish with your project?

The students here have many needs that their family cannot provide, there’s a lack of love, lack of knowledge and everything that is happening to them is weird, they don’t talk about it at home, and the school should provide some shelter.

But what has linux to do with this kind of thing?

I Feel in love with linux the first time I heard about it. all kids that live near hear doesn’t have the money to buy computers, and nowdays it’s really important to be part of the digital-inclusion for jobs and such. they usually uses the computer for playing, but some are already trying to make their homework using it. The government send us those machines, they had linux pre-installed, we have 20 machines here. it’s a small lab, but each windows copy is almost half of what a teaher gets per month, so it’s a lot for us. with linux, we are free to install and teach.

What about the Teachers, how is getting used to linux fells to them?

They hated at first. they are teachers that doesn’t like to learn new things, they don’t take advantage of the teaching tools ( and, to be fair, they don’t take advantage of the natural curiosity of the kids neither ). so it’s being rougth, we have asked some people from the government to came here and give a crash course for the teachers, but that wasn’t enougth. dealing with teachers that don’t wanna learn is hard.

How many students are going to use those desktops?

about a hundred.

And are all other public schools using desktops with linux?

Yes. it’s a big program. nearly all public schools got a lab with 20 computers and this linux preinstalled.

Can I take a look at the machines?

sure.

about the machines: to be fair, this was not so nice… the machines are a modification of Debian linux, named Educacional Linux ( linux for education), running 2.6.18 kernel and KDE 3.5.5, the /etc/apt/sources.lst was empty, and the aptitude and apt commands removed. I don’t know why the government did that, since the hability to upgarde is good in any system. But it’s really great to see that the government is doing what they promissed: digital inclusion in every school.