Life Gate Academy

As an individual, I cannot say I have NEVER pirated a piece of software. But as a principal and someone who has to constantly monitor my school network for licensing violations and downloaded [bleep], I hate it. I spend an inordinate amount of time worrying about such things, which is why I fully support the free and open source communities. Sharing really is a better concept. But as long as we live in a capitalistic world, this will just be something we have to deal with- like it or not. Money is what runs the world.

I think this is great. We resent the licensing costs from Microsoft and it will be nice to see an affordable, viable alternative. We had considered buying one of these Dell's or converting one of our older Dell workstations to use as a web fileserver. Ubuntu offers a version called "Edubuntu" which is designed just for schools. We are watching this particular distro with great interest because as it matures, it may offer us some needed extra options instead of constantly throwing away and upgrading our older Windows desktops. We really like the KDE desktop, however, and that is not an option right now in Edubuntu. Ubuntu does have a KDE variant, however. What we are REALLY looking for. though, is a Linux distro that incorporates Moodle and Focus /SIS together preinstalled or a distro with a friendlier installer feature in its GUI similar to Windows. I think some distros are working on this, but I am waiting for all of the above to combined into one distro. When that happens, it will be a blow for poor Bill Gates. This is the main reason the education market does not move away from Windows. We also need a solution similar to WINE to run our legacy software that is reliable. This is when Linux will gain market share. Greg Stroud Headmaster Life Gate Academy stroudg@lga.heliohost.org

My site is up and running and I could not be happier. From the control panel, we found Moodle and may end up using most of our space for that instead. So far we have not had much luck installing the software we wanted on this server. I think the problem is coming from configuration file setup problems. Once we figure out the "lay of the land," we should be able to resolve our difficulties. Thanks for your reply. Greg Everything seems to be working and in order. I hope we end up with enough space. Is there a way to earn or buy more? Also, we did not find HTMLdoc installed on the server in the control panel. Is this package available? We need either this or LaTEX to do PDF files for our school admin software project. We prefer HTMLdoc because the package that is associated with it is much better developed. Thanks, Greg

Hi! Has anyone had any experience with Focus /SIS software? We have never used any non-commercial school administration software packages, but really want to give it a try. From what we have researched, it seems that Focus has the most features and is the most developed. If someone has other recommendations or reviews, we would appreciate your input. We are new to heliohost.org. We chose it because it is free (big pull) and supports PostGREsql. Thanks Greg Stroud Headmaster

Hi! We are new to heliohost.org and wanted to know how long to expect before account activation. We are anxious to get started. We chose ad-based hosting to begin with, but may be willing to switch to a paid plan or other arrangement later. We were attracted to your service because of the generous bandwidth/space allotments and the fact you support both MySQL and PostgreSQL. We want to run FOCUS/SIS, which requires Postgre, PHP and HTMLdoc. Your site was the only free host that seemed to offer at least the first two. We also want to run OpenBiblio for our library. This one only requires PHP and MySQL. Our actual webpages are all written in simple HTML. At present, we are running Windows based school administration software, but want to try the open source world before making an investment in our own webserver or finding a paid host. Any help you could give us in our quest is most appreciated. Greg Stroud Headmaster/Principal lga.heliohost.org