Re: Linux in Universities
David P James wrote:
> > http://www.kegel.com/linux/edu/
>
> (1) I don't know how or if this fits, but for what it is worth the
> department of economics here at Queen's runs on Debian servers, and has
> some Debian-based workstations available for use by grad students and
> faculty. However, the workstations used by undergrad students (and
> many/most grad students) are all Windows-based. The difficulty, I guess,
> is that to have the workstations of undergrads being linux-based would
> entail some additional amount of support that the department really
> can't provide, even though I am sure they would like to be able to.
Pity -- but that's the core point: I'm after evidence of universities
that not only use Linux internally, but *support users who use Linux*.
> Just
> training students to mount and unmount a floppy for instance, as we use
> floppies for data storage quite a bit. Not a big task, but nevertheless,
> who is going to do it?
Yep, that's real. I'm rather hoping that supermount and/or the common
desktops make the floppy/cdrom mounting issue go away. Other similar
training
issues won't go away, and we really do need good free online training
for Linux.
FWIW, Element K offers a free Linux training thingy online (I haven't
tried it):
http://www.elementk.com/e-learning/htm/freecourses.asp
Maybe more free online training will appear before too long. There's a
fair
bit of interest in free courseware out there; I'm running phptest
myself.
> and, particularly worth reading,
> http://qed.econ.queensu.ca/pub/computer/advice.htm
Not bad.
> (2) In the second paragraph under the heading "Linux as an aid in the
> fight against Software Piracy" we see the following line:
>
> "Universities could avoid that problem by requiring the use of free Open
> Source software..."
>
> To me, the notion of "requiring" the use of "free" software is
> practically a contradiction in terms, and most definitely a
> contradiction in philosophy. A better way to go about it would be
> requiring adherence to open standards as much as is practicable. Then
> students would be free to choose between open source or commercial
> software as they saw fit.
I'll try to strike a better note.
Thanks,
Dan
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