 Okay. Good morning all. It seems we've got a smaller group than, well, actually probably about the size I was expecting, but here we go. My name is Jonathan Dieter. I'm the System Administrator for the Lebanon Medical School. We're located on the outskirts of Beirut. Our school has about 1,600 students from the age of about 3 to 18, and yeah. We have been, we, I started working at the school in 1999 and in about 2000 we started investigating possibly using Linux in the school. And I, over the next year or two I started using Linux on my personal workstations, but it wasn't until 2005 that we put Fedora on some of our servers. And it wasn't until 2008, I don't know how many of you guys remember this, but Fedora 8 that we started using Fedora on our workstations in the school. We've kept on moving along up until nowadays where we're running Fedora 23. Hopefully at some point this summer we'll get to do an upgrade to Fedora 24. If not, it will happen sometime at about the time Fedora 25 comes out. Yeah. What I want to look at today is I want to look at the three things. First off, why use Fedora in the classroom? And honestly, most of you guys would already have your own reasons for that, so I'm gonna, I'm gonna give an answer. I'm gonna talk a little bit about why we're doing it, but do feel free to, to contribute extra ideas, extra reasoning that one might use. We're gonna also look at some of the tools we use as we teach Fedora in the classrooms, and then we're gonna look at the curriculum, the things that we actually teach our students. So first off, why do it? Well, the first question I always get, the first thing I always get is why not do it? Whenever I'm talking about the fact that our school is using Fedora, I have people saying, well, isn't this a problem? Isn't that a problem? The first problem we have, I don't know, I think this is more of a problem in Lebanon and in other parts of the Middle East, is that local expertise in Linux in general is actually quite hard to find. Finding somebody who can install Windows on a computer, set up Active Directory, make everything work is a piece of cake. Finding people who are comfortable even going through the install process, and it's not like it's all that difficult, but they just look at it and they're like, it's different. It's hard. I don't get it. So this is probably the biggest problem we have. For our school, it's not a problem because I'm the system administrator and I do get it, but for other people, I know this has been a reason that they have not wanted to switch to Fedora. The second reason I often hear people saying, why do we use Fedora? And this is very specifically Fedora. It's the update treadmill, the fact that you've got a release cycle that's good for a year. You've got new releases every six months. Isn't it a lot of work to do the changes? Isn't it a lot of work to keep everything up to date? And one of the things I've found is that it's actually not all that hard. It's gotten easier as the years have gone on. We skipped Fedora 22. We went straight from Fedora 21 to 23. And using Ansible, I was able to do the upgrade in a few hours, maybe about a day's worth of work. So the update treadmill all of a sudden becomes a whole lot easier if the updates, if doing a whole system upgrade is not all that big of a deal. The final complaint that I get is it's different. Why on earth are you teaching using Fedora? It is different. It's different. It's not what we're used to. LibreOffice, what the heck is that? We use Microsoft Office. Isn't that the be-all and end-all? Isn't that the most important thing in the world? It's what everybody's using. Why would you use something different? And so it's a complaint. I don't think it's a very valid complaint, personally. But it is a complaint that you hear. It is something that people say, and we're going to look at some of the reasons why I don't think it's actually all that valid. So why do it? First, most obvious reason that we switched to Fedora is viruses. Now granted, we made the switch back in 2008 when we were still running the brand new operating system called Windows 2000. It was time to make a change. We needed to change somehow. And again, we were getting so many viruses, even with antivirus software installed. It just wasn't worth it. It wasn't worth trying to keep it in. Crashes, we got tired of them. Now, being honest, when we switched to Fedora back in the day, the crashes were not all that cured. Maybe individual crashes were, but we would get updates that about once a release, we'd give an update that would bring our entire system to grinding halt. However, in the last probably three or four years, we have not had a single update do that. And I honestly have to give credit to the QA team in Fedora. And obviously he's not here, but Adam Williamson, I think was when we started pushing that stuff. And they have done an amazing job. Again, Fedora has been rock solid for us over about the last three or four years because of the work that they've done. And I really appreciate that. I know a lot of people don't like the whole voting and the feedback on Fedora, but I think it is actually hugely, hugely beneficial. Licensing fees. Lebanon is not well known as a place where money is flowing. At least not when it comes to things like spending money on licenses. So one of the things we found is that we can either steal the software, in which case what the heck are we doing teaching our students how to do what's right if we're not doing the right thing, or we can spend a ridiculous amount of money. And at that point, yeah, we could be spending it on better things. So what we found is obviously using Fedora, we get to bypass both of those aspects. We are teaching our students to do the right thing, and we're not spending a ridiculous lot of cash on something that isn't worth it. And finally, there's the control. With Fedora, I am able to specify what my students are allowed to do on the school systems. I'm allowed to decide what applications are available. I am able to control what the systems are like. But with that, that gives me the freedom to actually open up our computer system. Our students are each issue the username. Every student from about the age of eight on up is issued a username. And from about 11 or 12 on up, they are allowed to come into school before school, after school, during the breaks, they're allowed to come into the computer room and use the computers. I may not be there. The computer room is open, and they are allowed to use them. The computer system is we have an open system because we are there, we're keeping an eye on what's going on through logs and again, through the accountability we get with them logging in with a username that we can then track. And so that that level of control allows us to give our students an extra level of freedom. So what are some of the tools we use? There are there are actually more than these. But I want to look at the forming tools here three of you will have heard of when you want to that's fine. The first tool we use is free IPA. And it has been a major blessing for us. By the way, these are not real user names and not real names. So it's all been properly sanitized. But this is it's a beautiful way of being able to take care of my son like Donald Trump. It's beautiful. Okay. Sorry, guys. It is a really lovely way of of being able to sort your sort your users organize your users and just keep track of what put users you have that we've actually got some plugins that even allow us to tie individual computers into the system via DHCP using IPA. I love it. It means I can have my assistance reset a password without having to go to the command line. But IPA also has a great command line interface. And that's what we use for all of our scripting. The next tool we have is IPXE. I'm sure any of you guys who've ever been installing operating systems on more than one computer at a time, you will remember the joys of going from computer to computer with a CD or a DVD or God forbid if it's that old floppy disks and having to install software one computer at a time. Okay. The beautiful thing about PXC most pretty much every modern computer allows you to boot off the network. With PXC with IPXC we are able to boot off the network to a pretty menu that then allows you to either boot from the hard drive or start doing some admin stuff like installing Fedora and what have you IPXE has a built in HG. Well, you have to compile it in but they've got a HTTPS module that you can use which then allows you to make certain disk images only accessible by certain user names and passwords. So just because the system is booting off of the network does not mean that every person who is able to reboot your computer has full access to a system with passwords and stuff like that. The third tool we use is something called lesson. Now lesson is a system that I started designing about 10 years ago. I would be the first to say it works really well but please I beg you do not look at the code. The code is on GitHub it's under the GPL you're welcome to look at it if you really really want to mock my coding. The only excuse I have is this was not originally intended to be the massive project it has turned into. It started out as a way for me to be able to keep track of the marks of my students and has turned into over the last 10 years has turned into something that actually runs the marking, the grading, the reports, attendance, discipline of our school. Think of it as it would kind of fit in with Moodle but where Moodle is geared towards lesson like a lesson plans and stuff like that this is geared towards actually running an entire school. And the final tool we use is Ansible. What can I say about Ansible? It rocks. Okay. Back in the old days before I knew about Ansible, I set up a Koji instance. Okay. And I stored configuration for our workstations in Koji well in RPMs that I would then build in Koji which meant that if I was going to make a change if I wanted to do a small upgrade or small fix, I would have to go fix it in the spec file, build the source RPM submit the source RPM to Koji which would then go and build the full RPM and then I would have to wait for it to go and regenerate the repo. We were looking at about a 10 step process that would take about 15 or 20 minutes because of the underpowered hardware we had at that point, it would take about 15 or 20 minutes for me to make a small configuration change. And that was just to be quite honest, that was just really, really annoying. So when I found Ansible, it's beautiful. I make a change in one small, one small configuration file, and I'm able to push it out to all of our workstations. Every new workstation that we that we set up runs the same Ansible playbooks to, to make it run like every other workstation we have. And the beauty of this is it gives us automation. We I am not sitting here having to configure each system separately. I have one configuration for most of my systems. And if there have to be exceptions for one or two systems, I can rig that up and Ansible quite easily. So the teaching tools, those were the admin tools. Let's look at the teaching tools pretty quickly. I'm not going to spend a huge amount of time here because most of you guys are well aware of these, but if there are some that you guys have some questions about, I would be quite happy to answer them. First one is LibreOffice. I'm assuming all of you guys have used it at some point or another. It's what this, what this presentation is on. You've got your documents, your documents, your spreadsheets, and your presentations there. The GIMP for photo editing, it's, it's actually quite useful when we're wanting to teach the students how to work with pictures. I have not used Photoshop in probably about 15 years. This is what I used and it does everything I need. Yeah, for simple text editing, when I'm teaching programming, when I'm teaching HTML, this is the most common tool that I use for those things. It's simple. It's easy. It works. Blender. This is one of my favorite tools to use to teach. We have one, one section, what we call grade nine, we what about 15 years old, where they spend about half the year doing 3D modeling. And it is, again, one of my favorite things to teach. Scratch. Was it Radislov? Is that his name? The previous speaker? Yeah, he talked about this briefly. I've, you've got Scratch and then you have Scratch too. He kind of mentioned this. Scratch one is what we have in Fedora right now. It's actually Scratch 1.4. It's a nice bit of software. We ran into a problem though, where some of our students were creating things using Scratch 2 at home, and then unable to use them in the school. And so, despite the fact that Adobe Air is not supported on Linux and hasn't been supported on Linux, I somehow managed to, and I'm not even sure how I did it. It was long enough to go. I somehow managed to put together an RPM that includes, and it's not redistributable, but I would be happy to share the spec file I've got. But it basically uses, combines the air runtime and the Scratch air project to create a system that actually works. So we have Scratch 2 set up on our school computers, and the students actually really enjoy it. Python is the final tool that we use when we're designing, and sorry, that we use for teaching. Very useful. It's a great programming language. Most of you guys, again, I'm sure are already using it. So with all of that out of the way, this is what I consider the meat of what I want to talk about today, the curriculum. How do you actually go about teaching using Fedora? Now, as we heard in the previous presentation, there's a lot to be said for we are not wanting to sit here and make our students memorize. There's this whole concept of memorization versus true comprehension. Memorization is an easy way to teach. If I'm a teacher and I want people to understand something that I don't really understand myself, memorization is easy. All I have to do is get out of the book, read the words on the book, you guys get to memorize it. And wow, we're all bored, but hey, we all know the same thing, right? Comprehension is different, though. Comprehension takes work. Let me let me give you guys a quick example here. Okay, how many of you guys remember this? This is word 90. I think this is 97, though, it might actually be 95. This is Microsoft Word 95. When I was in school, when I was in high school, this is what we were learning to work processing on. Now, I want you to picture a second that you're in a class where they're teaching using memorization. So they go through, you've got a book and it has all of the menus and all the items and you are taught. This is how you are going to learn Microsoft Word. Okay, to do columns, you do insert up here. This is actually a screenshot, so I'm not going to actually be able to click on it, but you go to insert columns and you choose the number of columns. Okay, and that is how you memorize it. And you've learned all the other subjects like that. You've learned all the other things you're meant to do. Insert columns, for a file, page setup, all these different menu items to do the things you want. And your class gets through quite a bit because, hey, you've memorized these things, right? You've gotten down. On the on the quiz, there's a question. How do you change the number of columns? Go to insert columns, okay? On the final exam, the exact same thing. So you've passed the class, got a wonderful score because you got it all down pat. You come into the office on your first day of work. It's a few years later, I don't know, maybe you had a time machine or something. And this is what you come into. This is Microsoft Word 2016. You've been told you need to do a prepare a leaflet. You need two columns. You're like, I've got this. I've got this. I studied this. I know how to go to calls. Insert it. There is there's insert. But when you go to insert, you find that the columns is not there. Okay. That's not so great. It turns out that in Word 2016, the columns thing is under the layout line. They've changed it. What does that mean? That means that all of the things that I have memorized are completely and absolutely useless. So teaching using memorization, it may be an easy way to teach, but it is a crap way to make sure your students are actually learning something. And so this brings us back to comprehension. Comprehension is different. Comprehension means you're not just looking at memorizing the steps to do something, but you're understanding how to do something, why you do something. It's going beyond just a let's do this, this and this, but you're actually learning the steps that it takes. Sorry, you're learning the concepts behind why you're doing something. It's harder. You have to know where you've been. You have to know where you're going. Okay. But it is far, far, far more effective. And once I have students who have learned using comprehension rather than memorization, they can use Word 95, Word 2016, Google Docs or Libre Office. And you know what? They'll work out how to do the columns. Okay. They'll work out how to do what they want to do. The exact software doesn't matter. So with that said, sorry, moving on, I want to look at what they what we look at from our teachers. We look at a passion for teaching. We want our students, we want our students not to be bored out of their schools. We want them to know the teachers love what they're teaching and thoroughly enjoy it. When I was in university, I studied, I wanted the sciences I studied was geology. I don't care a thing about rocks. But my geology professor loved teaching geology. And so I took a class with him because I had to. And then when I needed another science class, I'm like, I'm going to do another geology class because this guy loves teaching geology. He loves rocks. And you know what? It was really, really interesting. We look for knowledge. We want teachers who actually know what they're talking about. Okay. It's great to have a passionate teacher. And I would say passion is probably more important than knowledge. But knowledge is important. I've had computer teachers who are passionate. They love what they're doing. And they don't have a single clue how to do it. So we need teachers with knowledge. And the final thing, and I would say this may even be the most important thing is compassion. If you're wanting to teach at all, you need to care about your students. We have had teachers who are great communicators. They have the knowledge they need and the students hate them because they know that the teacher does not give a toss about the students at all. And so we try and make sure that our teachers are going to have that level of compassion, that level of care, that they will actually care about their students. So what do we actually teach at our school? We teach touch typing. That is one example of where I think memorization is important, except it's not even memorization. It's actually more of a habit. And I believe that is one of the few places it is. We teach databases. We teach hardware. One of the things I love is when we're teaching the students how computer hardware works, we're not, we don't have any books. In our computer department, we do not have a single book. So when we teach hardware, we actually get a computer out, get a screwdriver, take the thing apart and start passing the pieces around while telling them what the pieces do. And so they learn what a hard drive is by actually holding the hard drive. And yes, we're telling them what it does, but they're holding the hard drive in their hand. And they're saying, okay, what is this? Okay, it's the long term memories. What keeps the information even when the computer is turned off? And then you pass around a stick of RAM. See this? This is fast memory. It's a whole lot faster than the hard drive, but you know what? When you turn the computer off, the information goes and you go through all the different things. I normally use an older computer because as they're sitting there touching the CPU pins, sometimes accidents happen. But the beauty is they're actually getting to do it. We teach word processing. By the way, everything you're going to see from this point on out is actual student work. None of this is mine. I have sanitized it to make sure that there's no personal information going out. But this is all student work. So we teach word processing. We teach, we actually have two different sections on that. One for younger students and then one for older students, where we do advanced stuff like working with styles, working with tables, working with columns and working with drawing objects. We do image editing, where we teach the students, excuse me, how to go and change a picture. We don't just show them how to change a picture. We talk about the ethics of changing a picture. What is considered an ethical change? Like for example, if I'm changing the contrast of a photo, am I changing the truth of the photo? No, not really. But if I go and put Batman on the top of this airplane, I'm now changing the truth of the photo. So we talk about the ethics. When is that okay? When is that not okay? What is acceptable? We talk about, with some of this, we also talk about licensees. When are you allowed to use a photo that somebody else has created? When can you not use their photo? What are the steps you have to go through? And at this point, we then talk about creative comments licenses and the requirements that you have to follow there. So we're not just talking about the go-to-the-gamp open, you know, use this tool to do this. We're talking about, we're going beyond just the how, we're also talking about the why's. We do spreadsheets where students are learning to put together whether it's a simple, man, I've forgotten the word now, invoice. That's the word I'm looking for, a simple invoice. We teach the students how to put together a simple grade book as well. How to work with formulas, how to work with absolute relative values. Just the stuff that is universal to every spreadsheet everywhere. We do, we do HTML. We teach the students how to work with web pages and we're doing it down at the HTML level and then we teach them how to work with CSS, how to work with styles so that they can create a website that is universal. The last thing they do in HTML is they get in a group and with their group they are creating a website on a subject that they care about. This group did a website on video games and so they came up with, yeah, they came up with a number of pages. This is just one of the pages but they came up with a number of pages all tied together. You use CSS to give it a consistent look and came up with something that actually looks really nice. Blender, like I said, this is my favorite thing to teach. With this, what I love about Blender is you're getting students who may struggle with some of the things that we teach. They may struggle with spreadsheets, they may struggle with HTML, but they really, really like drawing and they get on Blender and they're like, wow, this is really, really cool. Now, I'll be honest, of all the things that I teach, I love teaching this, but this is probably the one I'm least knowledgeable about. My background is in programming, my background is in, yeah, my background is more programming. The first time I taught Blender, I was literally two weeks ahead of my students. I was sitting there studying the stuff and I had students who were pulling ahead of me and you know what, that's fine. As a teacher, I don't have to know more than my students. I do need to know what I'm talking about, but I don't have to know more than my students. One of the things I've tried to make sure I do is that if students are way ahead of me, this year I had a student who's been working on Blender since he was in grade six. He's been on that about three or four years, working on it, doing pretty seriously amazing stuff. And I told him, we're going to do Blender, I want you to do stuff, but you don't have to pay attention to a single word that I say in class because you already know more than I do. What's the point in having you sitting there watching me getting bored out of your soul? I want you to give me stuff that's way better than what the others are doing and you're free to go sit in that corner, sit wherever you want, and get the work to do whatever you want to do with Blender. And so then you end up with stuff like this. This is if you were actually to visit our school in Lebanon, this is what a classroom would actually look like. This student took the trouble of actually setting it up complete with the whiteboards, the speaker on the wall, the desk that looked like our desk, the teacher's desk there in the front. The detail that they learn when they're working with Blender is actually seriously amazing and I look at it and I'm just blown away. They learn to do animations and apologies for the jerky video, but here you have a student and what I love about this one, this student who created this, yeah this is the Titanic, the student who created this is actually one who I don't think has really enjoyed computers up until this year. Like she's been, when we did spreadsheet, she wasn't really into it. When we were doing presentations, they weren't really into that, but when it came to this, she's like wow, that is cool and this is what she came up with. We do programming and Scratch. We have the, in the end we have, so they learn to put together program Scratch is a graphical based programming language where you're basically taking, you're putting together the program using graphical blocks. It's easy to use, it's, I believe it's totally complete, but it is not what I consider a very powerful language, but it is seriously cool in that you can put something together very quickly. And then what we do is at the end of the year, they, sorry, at the end of the Scratch section, they, again, getting groups and they put together games that they've designed and then we go and break them and vote on that. And part of their group's grade depends on how well their classmates liked their game. It's one of these things where you're trying to get them to work together as a group, we're trying to get them to, yeah, to just be learning how to work together and, again, how to understand what it is they're doing. And when they know that their work is going to be made public, that where anybody can see it, notice this is an external website, you guys can check it out, I'll have links at the end, you can see the last three years of Scratch programming that the students have done, and they know it's public, they know that anybody can see it. Finally, we end, we end one of the years with Python programming. And this is, it's after they've already done some work in Scratch and they're getting to go a step further, they're getting to learn about how to use functions, how to make sure you're not writing the same code over and over again, that's where Scratch can get really frustrating. But with Python, they're able to go and learn how to do functions. We unfortunately don't have enough time to get to classes, I'm hoping to revamp our Python curriculum a little bit so that we're able to start teaching them about classes a little bit sooner. But the end of that Python section is them learning how to design a very simple AI. I've created a game framework here and what you have here are two bots that are trying to shoot each other and they're scanning each other, the yellow is where they can see each other and there you have one bot actually winning. The idea here is that they're taught the rules, they have to write a function that tells the bot what to do for each turn and then it's up to them to go and pit their bot against other bots and see how well their bot actually works. It's fun, it's a game and it's something that some of the, again, some of them aren't going to enjoy, computers is a mandatory subject which means you always have students who are looking at you like why are you teaching me this, I'd rather be playing football or whatever else, but it is something that most of the students actually quite enjoy. So, what's our goal? When we're teaching computers at our school and when we're teaching using Fedora, what our goal is, is we want our students to understand the theory of how computers work, but we also want them to understand the, to truly understand what the applications are doing that they're using. We want them to truly understand how to work with an application, not how to work with Word or Ryder or Google DOS, but we want them to truly understand how to work with word processing, how to work with spreadsheets, how to create a web page, how to work with pictures, and we want them to be able to use whatever tools they find most comfortable and be able to do that. One of the things I'm very careful of is when I'm taking assignments in, for example word processing assignments, I do not expect them to give me an ODT file. I tell them I'm going to mark your homework in LibreOffice Ryder, but you can give me a .doc, you can give me .x, you can give me whatever Google Docs gives you, whatever you want to give me, you can give me, I'm going to mark it in LibreOffice Ryder, but I do not care what tool you use, because my job is it to teach them to use specific tools. My job is to teach them to understand the importance of what it is they're actually doing. The tool isn't nearly as important as the concepts behind it. And why do I use Fedora? Going back to why I'm using Fedora in the classroom, why am I using that? Because for me, Fedora is the best tool, not just in how it works. It is the best tool in how it works, I think, but it is also the best tool in teaching the students about ethics, teaching the students about freedom. And that is what Fedora is about. The final thing we do care about and tying into that is the ethics. We want our students to understand not just what they can do with computers, but what they should be doing and what they shouldn't be doing. We want them to understand the importance of making right choices, whether it's having to do with pirating software, whether it has to do with hacking, the number of questions I get about can you hack into this or can you hack into that? It's like you're totally missing the point. It's not whether you can, it's whether you should. And so, yeah, we want to make sure our students leave the school with a firm understanding of computer ethics as well as everything else. These are the links to the to the different things. If you want to take a shot of that, I will be posting the slides. They haven't been posted yet, but I will be posting the slides with all that information. And I will take any questions you guys might have. Why Fedora? Why Fedora? You want the honest answer? The question, sorry, for the recording, the question is why Fedora? Did we try another distribution? The answer is this. I was using Fedora when we first started looking at this. We did, when we, at the very beginning, we did briefly look at Ubuntu, and I just looked at it and I said, you know what? Because I'm more comfortable with Fedora, and because I'm the one who's going to have to maintain this, I'm going to stick with Fedora. I stand by that. I think that Fedora, with Fedora, we have managed to be on the cutting edge where we're always running the newest software, but without being bleeding. Again, especially in the last three or four years, we've not had a single major failure. And actually, I can't even think of any minor failures in those last few years. So, Fedora was what I was comfortable with, but again, the ethos, the mindset behind Fedora is one that I really stand behind. And so it allows me, as we talk about it with the students, especially when we start talking about open-source software versus proprietary software, we can really get into the whole freedom thing, if that makes sense. Okay, that is a really good question. We, the technical answer, hold on a second, the technical answer is probably about between 30 and 50, but no, probably about, probably closer to 60, but about 35 to 40 of those are multi-seat systems that have four seats on each system. So you're, we actually, this is something I mentioned briefly a couple years back, which probably isn't very useful here, but we've used SystemD's ability to do multi-seat systems and to sign devices and the ability to plug multiple GPUs into a computer. We basically, about two years ago, we started buying more expensive motherboards, slotting three dedicated GPUs into them, and then with those three dedicated GPUs and the integrated one, we now have four seats on each system. So we're in, if you're talking about seats, we probably have about a hundred, I would say, I would say about 100 to 120 Fedora seats available. Any laptops that we provide, most of our teachers bring their own laptops to the school and use them, but any laptops that we provide are also running Fedora. Yes? The ages of the students, they were in Asia, they were in China. Okay, for the, that's actually a great question. In the school, we start at three years old and we go to 18. The, I want to say they start having computer lessons in labs using Fedora at about four, but they're not actively in the, up until about nine or ten, they're not actively learning about computers, they're using the computers to learn other subjects. Okay. At about nine, yeah, but we call on Fedora, it's all on Fedora. At about nine or ten, we actually start teaching computers, and of course that's also all done on Fedora. Do you see any students like, it's like putting out an O or? Well, normally they come to me and ask me to put it on their computer, and it's not a lot, but yes, I have students, maybe a few each year that come to me and ask me to put it on their, on their systems. I, one of the things I'd like to do, but I never seem to find the time to do, and I really should be doing, is actually I, I am very careful not to put pressure on anybody to do it, but like, I don't want to be, you need to do this, you need to do this, but I do need to be giving them opportunities in a way that I've probably not been real good at up to now, of saying, if you, because I tell them, if you want Fedora, bring your laptop to me, and I'll install Fedora on it, no problems, but I probably need to actually set up some install days, you know, once or twice a year, bring it to me on this day, and we will install Fedora, but with just the bring me Fedora, and sorry, bring me your laptop and I'll install Fedora, we do maybe about two or three students a year, who actually follow through on that and bring me their laptops. I'm described that if you install Fedora, you will have to work as a thing or support for that for the rest of your life. You know what? Here's, here's the deal, I'm, I'm a, I'm already, our computer department is small enough that I'm already at risk of being technical support, okay? So the question is, what would I rather support? A system that I know works, and I know is reliable, or a system that comes down with viruses, and the thing to understand in Lebanon, pirated software is so prevalent that viruses are everywhere on, on Windows systems, so I have to make a choice, and I figure I'd rather be, I'm willing to support Fedora. The support, honestly the support is not all that difficult. Supporting something else is a whole lot more difficult, so yeah, I'm quite happy to do that. Okay, so how, how easily directed about do you think is what you're doing? I mean, I absolutely love it, but first question, like do you think that you could like spread the word and motivate other people to do the same? Or if you left the school, do you think they'd carry on with what you've been right now? Do you think it established process, or do you think it would crumble? That is an excellent question. Honestly, I would say it really depends on the people. Let me, let me, let me first answer your first question, how replicable it is for others, and then I'll answer kind of the related one about if I left the school. For, for other schools, if I think it takes somebody who actually has the passion to get it done, okay, if you can find somebody who has some knowledge of Fedora, who's willing to put in the time and effort to do this, it's definitely replicable. We have released every bit of software we have that I've written, every bit of, the configure, heck our Ansible scripts are sitting, all of it's in a GitHub repository for the school, publicly available, okay, obviously passwords and stuff are not, but the configuration scripts and everything are publicly available, and anybody who wants to go and create a workstation that is identical to the workstations we use is free to do so. Going to the question of if I left the school, that would depend on who is there. Right now the, the IT department is myself, my assistant, someone who works with the, there, our school is actually two separate buildings, and there's a guy who works with the younger students in the other building, and then our principal who was the head of IT before he became principal, which believed me, makes my life so much easier. Working with leadership who actually understands where things are at is, is great. The, my assistant is the one who would be most experienced with what it is that we're doing, and I think she would, I, I'm, but I don't know whether she would feel she has enough experience to keep fedora, she'd probably keep going for a while, but I don't know if she would feel like she's at the point yet where she could keep it going indefinitely, going through the upgrade cycles. I, I think she could do it, but I don't know if she would feel she could do it. My goal would be that if and when there comes a time when I, well obviously at something I'll retire, but by that point I would hope that whoever is coming after me will be trained up enough that they can do that. Yes. Okay, I've got, I've got the, for like the installation stuff, we have Ansible Scripts. So in that sense, that's documented in that it's, it's written down how we do it. I do not have, and this is where I'm a bit ashamed, no I'm quite ashamed to say this, I do not have proper documentation. My assistant has the, the curriculum that we use, like she wrote it down when she was observing me teaching the classes. Like I said, we don't use books and so most of what I teach is actually just straight out of here. You know what I mean? She's written it down. We need to get it properly documented. What I would like to do is properly documented and either put it on GitHub or put it on the school website. We've talked about releasing some of our curriculum and a number of other things as well. That is one of my goals. Because in my country, there are laptops for students and for students. I don't know if they need them, but usually they give the laptop with a room and so on that the students usually go back to, to Windows when they go, when they come and start something, they say, no, Windows, look at this is too old. Right, right. So it's a bit, when they're younger, it doesn't matter, but when they grow up, when they're teenagers, they start compiling and, and it's really old and they give you the system. It's not so you can't, you cannot update it. Update it, right. It's always like, it doesn't do what they are or system do. Right, well one of the things to, when I originally made the change, now remember we're not actually giving laptops out to the students. We do have laptops out to the teachers. We don't give them out to the students. They are coming into a lab and I'm making sure that that lab is at most one release behind current Fedora. Like right now it's 23 when we have 24 out. That's the most I will let it get behind and even Fedora 23 is still, whether it's Blender, LibreOffice, what have you, it is still relatively up to date. I'm totally with you. My goal has been to make sure that our systems are fast enough and have the newest enough software that I do not get complaints about the software's crap. I want the students to appreciate what it is that they have available and you know what they do. They do appreciate it. We've got time for maybe one more question, yeah. Other any events locally in Lebanon that are more current for educators or even able to share this kind of thing or? No, at least not that I have, not that I've had an opportunity yet. The open source community in Lebanon is relatively small. It's, there are a number of people there who are very passionate about it but even, I mean even the Fedora community pretty much insists of me and a couple other guys. So it's, it's tended to be pretty small. What about maybe like a non-open source specifically? Just an educational thing? There probably would be stuff like that. I would need to look into it and see because you know what that would actually be a good thing to to share with. Okay, if that's it, thank you guys very much. Enjoy.