Press Releases

Thin client solution for third world education recognised in Project Excellence Awards

LinuxIT are finalists in the BCS Project Excellence Awards 2010 – Community Project of the Year category - for their innovative, rapid and reliable solution for NoPC, a charitable organisation dedicated to improving the access and quality of education available to Third World countries.
NoPC believes that digital inclusion through ICT has a critical role to play in making this happen. One of its educational projects in Tanzania had become unviable and LinuxIT was tasked with coming up with a solution that would meet all the challenges, and provided a scalable model for NoPC.
In 2002 NoPC delivered schoolroom PC's connected to the internet in Tanzania. Five schools took part. The result was enormously beneficial and led to school attendance rising from 60% in 2005 to 97% in 2007, and pupil attainment. However, the maintenance and support of PC's in remote locations proved to be a huge challenge and the decision was taken that the project, in its current form, was not viable.
For this reason in 2009 the NoPC approached LinuxIT with a brief to devise and implement a rapid and reliable internet and desktop computing solution to serve digitally under-privileged areas. Central to the brief was a solution to incur minimum support costs and use hardware that could be maintained locally, by non IT staff.
Peter Dawes-Huish, LinuxIT CEO, commenting on the project said ‘’ We approached the project scoping, design and build in the same way as we would when implementing and supporting mission critical systems for customers in the private and public sectors. A scope of works was agreed, followed by a design and implementation process before a final acceptance test by NoPC. At each stage prototypes were delivered for testing and comments for the design and build team. The build was assigned a duration of 4 weeks and was delivered on time.’’
The challenge was to provide a desktop internet and computing facility to serve remote communities and hostile environments. The solution needed to be robust and survive the theft or destruction of any of the system at the remote location.
The solution developed by LinuxIT was to use leading edge technologies namely the thinnest of thin client technology, and a form of dumb terminal that runs a remote session on a server based in a secure data centre, which can be located anywhere in the world. Each school had a number of thin clients with keyboards, mice and monitors. This pioneering and original approach using thin clients that have no computing power meant that they were useless to anyone outside of this environment, therefore making their theft value zero.
In practice each school has a setup of five thin clients with no memory or even processor to speak of. They are basically a hardware implementation of VNC. These talk to a concentrator, which is a solid state PC/server hybrid, configured with local logon profiles which also runs a customised VNC server for the thin clients. Applications include a web browser, Wikipedia for Schools, Edubuntu and Gcompris. Each student account is set up with a server session, giving them remote desktop access to a server hosted in a data centre in the UK.
This elegant solution means that each school has a monitor, keyboard and mouse all connected to a thin client which is displaying a desktop running on a server based in a UK data centre. In the event of failure, or theft, of any of the components at the school they can be readily replaced by spares which are then just plugged in and work.
The model has the potential to be replicated across the developing world. Indeed the NoPC intend to roll this out in areas with similar educational challenges and needs.
The project lead to increased student enrolment with the percentage of children in school has increased from 60% in 2000 to 97% in 2005. Encouraged by the outcome of the project the number of secondary schools in Tanzania has grown from 1,202 in 2005 to 3,185 in 2009. The project also required teachers ICT skills to be developed and this led to more teachers being trained in ICT. Both those in schools and those in the country’s 32 teacher education colleges where 16,700 student teachers now have enhanced ICT skills.
The model is being implemented by NoPC In Grenada this year.
For more information please contact the LinuxIT press office on 01454 333 004
9 September 2010
Editors note:
About LinuxIT
Headquartered on the M4/M5 intersection and operating from a network of national offices, LinuxIT is the UK’s leading authority and specialist on the application of Linux based systems. On the path to becoming a Red Hat Premier Partner we use our specialist skills and experience to assist organisations in the commercial, public and voluntary sectors to harness the benefits of Open Source and Linux. We do this by expanding their IT capabilities, reducing their IT Infrastructure costs and increasing their competitive advantage through the innovative use of technology. Our clients span many sectors including financial services, retail, industrials, central/ local Government, technology, education and charities. LinuxIT contributes by providing world class consulting, technology and support services through the application and integration of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Open Source Solutions, alongside other complementary skills including Microsoft and Unix to assist customers in their migration, or integration, of Linux in mixed IT environments. More at http://www.linuxit.com