A recent official report on FOSS in Italy says, among other things, "[the standard usage] of Free Software can be reproduced in elementary schools only with difficulty". Luckily, says Italian Linux activist Antonio Bernardi, "Nobody in Costabissara had read that report, and we hope they never do."

Costabissara is a small city in the province of Vicenza, which is in the northeast corner of Italy. The first signs of human activity in the area date back as far as 900 BC. Work on the city castle began in the early 7th century AC. Today, in Motta di Costabissara, the city hosts one of the few Italian elementary schools in which free software regularly is used.

The program, known as Progetto (Project) Mottabit, is spearheaded by Anna Galtineri (leonetta@freemail.it), a teacher at the school, and Giuseppe Barichello (beppuz@freemail.it), the school's system administrator. The project started three years ago, when the school decided to solve for good a serious problem it faced. The single, four-year-old multimedia personal computer available in the school did not allow teachers to work with a whole class--it didn't even have an Internet connection. The teachers used the machine to illustrate basic IT concepts in their respective classes, carting it around from room to room. All of the teachers also used it, taking turns, to write reports, home project texts and other didactic materials.

When the school decided to improve its IT equipment, it had two possible choices. One would have been to purchase at least three new computers, plus licenses for all of the necessary software and didactic materials, such as interactive encyclopedias on CD-ROM. As many fellow teachers worldwide probably can imagine, that solution had to be discarded quickly. The school did not have enough money for these purchases, and most of the current students would have graduated before the money came from the Italian public schools administrations. The second option, as you may have guessed, was free software.

As soon as they realized that money was a key factor in making their decision, the teachers started to look for ways to cut down IT costs by centralizing both hardware and software administration. In this phase, another main advantage seen in the free software solution was the possibility to have the same desktop environment always available to all students. Regardless of the software and hardware platforms being used, shared Internet access had to be granted. And it had to be granted in a controlled way, considering the young age of their students.

Once the school discarded the "all new HW, all new proprietary SW" route, the school staff began looking for ways to achieve acceptable performance and functionality rates with older, possibly donated computers. In this way and not out of any ideological need or desire to become programmers, the staff discovered the school section of the Italian Linux portal. Once they read about other institutes that had succeeded in achieving these same goals with free software, the teachers knew they had found their new platform.

A notable difference between Costabissara and the other schools discussed in this series--Chieti, Ragusa and Pescara--is the city administration was involved and contributed financially to Progetto Mottabit. If the school provided the computers, the administration said, Costabissara would chip in about 1,500Euros to cover the costs of networking equipment. Labor costs were not an issue, as a technician was willing to install and configure the computers for free. As for software license fees, well, the lack of them was part of the decision to go with free software in the first place.

Once Progetto Motti decided to go with GNU/Linux software on recycled hardware, things went even better than expected. The initial hope was to have three PC clients, but in the first six months, 11 computers were donated to the school. The resulting network contains one firewall/gateway machine and one application server. All the other machines are configured as X11 graphical thin clients.

The server in the new network was the school's old computer. The original AMD K6-2 350MHz CPU was upgraded with as much RAM as could be placed on the motherboard--768MB--and a new Maxtor 40GB, 7200RPM hard disk. Once up and running, this computer has proven itself able to run applications such as Mozilla and AbiWord for 5-7 clients simultaneously. Nothing more to report here, except the initial comment of the technician who actually put all of the pieces together: "Debian really is one nice distribution!!" Besides Mozilla and AbiWord, the server offers TuxPaint and several didactic packages written by another Italian teacher devoted to free software, Ivana Sacchi.

The firewall/gateway machine is a Cyrix 166+ CPU with 24MB of RAM and a gargantuan 2.4GB hard disk. This box also functions as a proxy server with its own cache. Initially, because no ADSL was available in the area, connectivity was ensured through an external analog modem connected to an internal ISDN card. This computer runs the custom distribution IpCop and is administered remotely over SSH.

Ten of the 11 computers arrived in the first batch of donations and were installed in two adjacent classrooms, hosting the second and third grades. The final client was put on a trolley, allowing teachers to continue to work even when moving from classroom to classroom. Talk about mobile computing!

The clients mostly are Pentium I, 133MHz computers with 16 or 32MB of RAM, a 3.5" floppy disk drive and SVGA video cards with 2 or 4MB of RAM.

The software chosen to turn the Pentiums into X11 clients was, not surprisingly, the package from the Linux Terminal Server Project. Because all of the PCs had a local hard drive, a partition was created to enable the installation of another (local) operating system. The Linux partitions contain only binaries and the LILO configuration files. All of the clients boot from the network. LILO has been configured to use the Etherboot images for the Ethernet cards present in each box.

Barichello notes that he initially chose GRUB as the bootloader, because he had read that this utility supports booting from the network. In the end, he didn't succeed in configuring it properly and instead followed the LILO configuration procedure provided here. This LILO procedure is not simpler to follow, says Barichello, but once you understand it, it works like a charm.

Apart from booting, the only real difficulty in setting up the LTSP clients was the video card and monitor configuration, which was different for each machine. The solution Barichello recommends for this problem is, he says, "empirical, but really effective". He simply booted Knoppix on each computer and copied the configuration file created by the excellent HW auto-detection utilities Knoppix provides.

Has all of this new hardware and free software managed to convert anybody in Costabissara to the cause of free software? In short, yes--but with the same difficulties found in other schools.

Since the beginning of the project, all of the teachers have been asked to contribute and express their opinions on everything from logistic details to the software choices. Predictably, advocating free software was not the easiest part of this project. Hesitation and resistance were more the norm than the exception. The two most common questions were "Why should I struggle to learn a new way to do what I already can do with Word?" and "What sense does it make to expose the children to an environment different from the one they will find everywhere else, from family and friends' homes to high school?"

Galtineri and Barichello also noted, however, that in some cases the diffidence was not towards a new, different operating system. In other words, the perceived problem was not the use of GNU/Linux, but the use of computers at school in the first place, because this guideline was imposed from the outside. There is a diffused feeling that teachers already are alone in the trenches, with many responsibilities imposed by and little support from the government. They don't need other tasks imposed from above. I suspect this may be another point that is familiar to teachers from other nations.

On a less gloomy note, the students' reaction quickly displaced any real or invented doubts. Although GNU/Linux initially had been advocated by only Galtineri and Barichello, the ease the children experienced during their first-ever WindowMaker session closed the issue for good. Linux is not a menacing black screen with an unfriendly blinking cursor, the children said, it is easy and fun too! Since the initial impact, the children have continued to react positively, quickly adapting to the new environment. It turns out that many of them were looking to discover a way to do tasks differently from the one they knew from the home PC. The teachers also made sure that children were not passive receivers but active contributors to the Project. Students were responsible for deciding, through internal contests, the names of each client and the desktop wallpapers. The latter were drawn by the kids themselves. Both activities were carried out with satisfying results.

Progetto Mottabit didn't end with a wallpaper drawing tournament. After the initial deployment, the school had to implement a centralized backup procedure. It also installed extra servers for e-mail handling, the management of the school library and databases. Some of these activities are ongoing. Today, the school has an ADSL Internet connection, and the clients run version 4 of LTSP. XFCE4 has become the official window manager. In addition, all of the FOSS activity at the school is being monitored by the Italian RASIS project, which studies, among other things, open-source networking solutions.

The last question I asked Galtineri was, "what is the first [piece of] advice you would like to give to any other teacher trying to do the same thing today, or [what is] the error that you would not want others to repeat?". Here is her answer: