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It is hard to believe that my 10th and 11th Grade Vietnamese and foreign students at the American International School in Saigon have been using Linux for about one month now. I am very impressed at how fast they were able to use Linux in a short period of time.

Choosing a Linux distribution for the course was not easy. Last quarter, my students tried the LiveCD versions of openSUSE, Fedora Core and Sabayon Linux. openSUSE and Sabayon both were running too slow in the Acer laptops my students were using. Fedora Core, quite frankly, was just too boring for them. Several students installed Ubuntu Linux at home but ended up removing Ubuntu from their laptops later. I never even considered Ubuntu an option for my class. My favorite, Zenwalk Linux, did not make the cut either.

Finally, I decided to test PCLinuxOS with my students. Wow, amazing. Finally a Linux distro that the majority of my students actually liked using. It ran faster than any of the other Linux distros they tried and easily connected to the internet from inside the school (they like to read Yahoo 360 blogs in class). They figured out how to use Konquerer to browse around the different directories in their laptops without me even telling them. As with Macbooks, the Desktop GUI was easy to learn. Thus, I decided to use PCLinuxOS.

Since all of the laptops in the computer lab only used Window’s XP, the IT Staff and I decided to install PCLinuxOS inside of the VMWare Player. The first day PCLinuxOS was installed was a big nightmare but the IT staff smoothed things out this week. Students can now log into their own individual VMWare Player accounts now. My students are learning fast. I keep them all inside terminal window with Konsole. Yes, they all know how to use the command line now. Today, they all SSH to the Teacher’s Desktop and created two web pages. Several of my IT geeks also learned how to move people’s files around as well which was very amusing.

There are now 48 new Linux users in Vietnam!

(My Vietnamese student logging into PCLinuxOS with VMWare Player)

(Reading up on the latest Linux Tutorial with Mozilla Firefox)

(My student uses the command line in konsole to SSH to my computer)

(Ken uses nano to create a webpage entirely in XHTML)

(Another student using konsole and nano)

(More of my Vietnamese students using PCLinuxOS)

AIS Computer Science Course Website: http://ais.saigonnezumi.com/
American International School in Saigon: http://www.ais.edu.vn
Saigon Linux Group: http://www.saigonlinux.com

Big thanks to Tony from GHP Far East Company, Ltd., on showing me how to use VMWare.

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