Taiwan's Linux Education Revolution

Just as Hong Kong is still engaged in tug-of-war on the issue of electronic textbooks for booksellers, Taiwan has taken a step forward, not only actively introducing electronic textbooks for primary and secondary schools, but also teachers to test the CDs provided by booksellers spontaneously. Whether it can be used normally under Linux, providing Taiwan students with alternatives to Windows.

The test involved throughout Taiwan, including elementary school teacher, a test object including the South, Hanlin, 16 sets of CDs provided by booksellers such as Jinan Wenxue and Kangxuan, and electronic textbooks for the first to third grades, including social, Mandarin and Taiwanese, will add more subjects in the future. It is well known that there is a software called Wine on Linux that can simulate the Windows environment, thus "spoofing" Windows applications, making them think they are working on Windows. As a result, the school will save money on the purchase of Windows licenses, and gradually reduce the reliance on Windows, and allow students to access other operating systems other than Windows.

The teacher who participated in the test said that the test results are encouraging, some of the CD-ROM execution functions are invalid, but there is no problem in manually installing the exe file. Most of the functions include e-book tools. All work normally. Of course, there are still many areas for improvement. For example, the document name in the textbook file is garbled. The textbook cannot be opened because it is a PPT file of Microsoft PowerPoint. The teaching film cannot be played because it is Microsoft's proprietary format wmv. There are two Linux platforms tested this time, namely ubuntu 12.04, and the Linux version EzGo developed by Taiwanese developers based on Ubuntu. I hope that one day Hong Kong's primary and secondary schools will also be able to get out of the box and provide students with alternatives to Windows.