NewsForge reports a wonderful success story for an Iowa art professor who migrated his students from Mac OS X to Ubuntu for their digital arts course. Way to go!
I’m an art professor, and last semester I embarked on an exciting new adventure by erasing Mac OS X from nearly all of the Macintoshes in our digital media lab and installing Ubuntu in its place.
I began seriously planning this change last school year, when I realized how fully the current feature sets of free software programs could satisfy the technical needs of the students in my classes. I decided that the time had come to teach our undergraduate art students about free software programs such as the GIMP, Scribus, and Quanta Plus, instead of proprietary programs such as Photoshop, QuarkXpress, and Dreamweaver.
The switch to free software has been a big success here in the Department of Art and Design at Maharishi University of Management in Fairfield, Iowa. This semester I plan to take the switch further in my video classes by replacing Avid DV Express, Final Cut Express HD, Soundtrack, and iDVD with Kino, Cinelerra, Rosegarden, and DVDstyler.
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