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Perhaps you should try it before discussing it...

Installing software on Linux is easier than with Windows, and an admin could change your permissions to allow software installs without the security risk of giving you administrator privileges.
...And they wouldn't even have to leave their desk to do it.

How do you advocate Linux to people who are more comfortable using Windows?

Give them a live CD (or at least a link to one). It worked on me. If it doesn't work on them, you're wasting your time advocating, because it's not right for them anyway.

This is a message for all the kids living in any Theocracy, whether it happens to be in Iran or the USA:
Do you think your parents are spying on you and taking Draconian measures to mold you into a little puritan? Want to be free to learn about the real world and maybe even use your own body as you desire? Do you want to learn about evolution, but have fundie nut parents trying to censor your entire environment? Don't want to loose your legal home (which includes perhaps your only access to food, shelter, and healthcare?), and risk getting jailed for leaving it? If you are reading this, you probably have some place where you can access the Internet with minimal restrictions. Maybe you are lucky enough to be online at a friend's house or library. Maybe you hacked the filter at your public school or church. If you want to expand your access and keep your freedom, you will need to take some precautions. To get around any logging or filtering software running on a local machine, I suggest getting your own computer. Try ebay. If you can't afford a full computer, and just want to chat, I recommend the zipit, it runs Linux, so you can modify it and add features like encryption. If these are not viable options, you should use a Linux (or BSD, or OpenSolaris) bootable CD. If you suspect that there is network based monitoring, you should use gaim-otr or gaim-encryption for your chatting and gpg for your email. Learn to tunnel your network traffic through http, ssh, and other protocols. If you are using someone else's PC, you should also check for a hardware keylogger. Use the presumption of your ignorance to your advantage. Play the naïve little kid. If you get caught trying to circumvent censorship and spying, act like you have no idea what you are doing and just got lost. Act like the computer is broken and you are confused and frustrated.

A brief message to the parents: Kids like sex. Kids are curious. Remember back when you were a teenager? Wouldn't you have really liked a (select gender based on sexual preference) about ten years older than you (someone in their 20s), to fuck? As illegal and "wrong" as that is, it's what we've evolved to desire. You become sexually mature as a teen, and you want the most fit sexual partner. People older than you are probably the most fit. As you get older, people younger than you are probably the most fit. All the technology in the wold will not change this. It's human nature. Your irrational fear of pleasure is no excuse to stunt your offspring's intellectual growth. Do you really want to keep them from accessing the biggest store of human knowledge ever amassed, just because you don't like the idea that they might actually want to enjoy sex? Or...is it worse than that? Are you a religious asshole that wants to keep your kid from learning about science? If so, you are the reason why your nation is going to plunge deep into a second dark age of technological decay and theocratic war. Thanks a lot!

Then I'd need to determine if all of my hardware actually supports Linux

If I get past the hardware hurdle then I'd need to do some research on how to install it. What new commands do I need to learn? how do I install hardware drivers (since they're not just plug and play like Windows where everything auto-magic-ly works). Is there a specific order I need to get my hardware up and running? What happens if I run into problems? I need to find places where can I get help. How do I get online to ask for help if Linux isn't up and running yet? Even if I have a 2nd computer how do I transfer data between the two if one doesn't have drivers for the communication outlets (NIC, CD, etc.) yet?

Now I need to find alternative software, Open Office instead of MS office, GIMP instead of Photoshop, etc. etc. etc. some are apparent others I'm not so sure. I do a whole lot of burning do they make Nero for Linux? what about video editing? I do that on occasion. What kind of Micro-controller tools are available or will I have to dual boot windows just to flash my pic chips and debug/compile my MCU code?

I'd think the easiest solution is to get yourself a livecd and boot one of the machines from it. Here is a nice list

I'd like to give Linux a spin so I downloaded the Ubuntu (breezy) dvd install. Installed on my external firewire drive but 75% of the way through it told me it couldn't install the boot loader. Did some googling and it seems you have to jump through some hoops to get it to work right.

If all you want to do is give Linux a spin then download and try one of the Live CDs. http://www.frozentech.com/content/livecd.php

If you make a decision to install, then ask your firewire question here: http://www.linuxquestions.org/

Enjoy,

Oh shush up already.

Windoze being available in 6 flavors is nothing.

On this site alone, 309 (three hundred and nine) Linux distributions are listed and I'm sure it's missing some.

Filter down to the Desktop category and it still lists 144 distros. Filter down to x86 Desktop and you still get 136 distros.

So, who's making it difficult?

I would have rather they simplify things like Apple does (Desktop & Server) but hey. With the size of market they deal with, 6 distros isn't half baked.

Disclaimer:
I still hate MS' under-grade products.
I still like Linux for the sheer fact that they try to open the eyes of the blind majority.
I still only use Macs because in my view, it's still the best HW/SW combo, IMHO, for someone who doesn't want to tinker on his box (but rather tinker on their work).

Haven't you ever heard of iptables and port knocking for friends with dynamic IPs? --reject-with tcp-reset is your friend

Clearly a solution for the unwashed masses. We can't seem to get people from double clicking every email attachment, I'm sure their ready to setup, configure and tweak their own IPTables.

Well, there are a couple tools out there that make building/installing a *nix firewall a bit easier/friendlier than editing tables of rules, like "fwbuilder" http://www.fwbuilder.org/.

Admittedly, few of the "unwashed masses" will be running a *nix box, but still, setting up a workstation firewall for *nix *is* getting easier.

There are also a good number of liveCD-type firewall/router distros out there that require only very modest hardware, no hardrive, and a couple NICs to create a quite effective and easily set-up solution. Take a look here http://www.frozentech.com/content/livecd.php?pick= All&showonly=Firewall&sort=&sm=1

Strat

Several LiveCD Firewalls. Check out m0n0wall first.

Yeah, that point is kind of interesting. I haven't seen any other comment mentioning this bit of the Kutztown Area High School laptop usage FAQ yet:

Q: What if a student already has another model or brand of laptop computer?

A: Students will be required to use the school district issued laptop for school purposes. This is necessary to ensure that students have a computer that gives them network capability and the ability to run the software that students will need in their classes. For these reasons, other computers will not be used on the Kutztown Area School District network.

So... they want to claim that the students can't do anything "unauthorised" on the laptops because they belong to the school, but they won't allow the students to use their own damn laptops? Riiiight.

Heh, I don't know why the kids wouldn't just grab a LiveCD and boot with that, thus gaining full rights and access to the laptop hardware (well all right, on second thoughts I recall that Linux doesn't support Mac laptop wireless ethernet, so that might not work so well if they're using wireless networking :)). With a USB key (or just a loopback filesystem (possibly even encrypted if they wanted to be paranoid) stored on the Mac OS X filesystem) for storing the data you want to keep private, you're laughing.

And if there were one or more bits of software that they had to use during their classes, no problem. Reboot, remove CD.

When will people learn... you can't lock down a machine when people have full, unsupervised, physical access to that machine! *roll of eyes*

We don't need no stinking sig

No way is USB2 going to satisfy my need for throughput

You know, such blanket statements are quite silly.

Ah, the taunting drivel from an Anonymous Coward. And what is the technical competence of this coward? Why, he looks at manufacturer spec sheets, and concludes my position on firewire/USB2 is silly.

I, on the other hand, defer to the demonstrated reality:

From these results we see that Firewire trounced USB2 in two ways. The first was that data was read almost twice as fast as USB2. Writing data occurred at similar speeds using both Firewire and USB2. The second advantage appeared from the CPU utilization. On both computers, Firewire used a significantly less amount of the CPU than USB2 when transferring data. According to these benchmarks, Firewire appears to be the better choice for an external hard drive.

Don't be confused by the rated speeds you see emblazoned across USB 2.0 and FireWire product boxes. Despite USB 2.0's 80 Kbps speed advantage over FireWire, our testing showed that the additional overhead of USB 2.0 made it slower than FireWire. For high-bandwidth devices such as external hard drives, the difference was as high as 70 percent.

And just to make the point screamingly clear, what I said was that I found firewire performance less than satisfying, thus USB2 wasn't going to be otherwise.

(And those ATA specs sure look disingenuous. I'll have to rip that one apart later...)

There's a plethora of Live CD's to choose from at the live cd list. As for customization, check out this how-to or this site dedicated to making live cds.

Instead of a series of posts claiming "they missed ..." one by one, why not list them all in one go.

Not a review (either), but this website http://www.frozentech.com/content/livecd.php?sort= &showonly= list a lot more than 18 live CD's (and even it is not complete).

if you're brave you could remaster knoppix, I made a livecd thats supposed to start IceWM (couple tiny files need fixing)

its 681179136 which ls -h on it says 650mb, its got some stuff I'd have to remove if I were to distrobute it as I have flash on it, and Ultima 7

I'd link to the remastering howto on knoppix.net but thier wiki has been down so long the pages have been removed from google cache but theres a inwriting version of the howto on thier forums (too lazy to look)

oh and dont forget (I almost did) The LiveCD List that was linked a month or so on slashdot

Disclaimer: if this shows up with no breaks, its because preview tricked me

Live-CDs aren't only good for test Linux, but Live-Cds are wonderful rescue Cds and make Linux-boxes where only windows is available.
I usually use Slax because it fits on a small 8cm CD-RW.
Gentoo it's another Live CD to add to the list whatever I can i'm goint to test this one.

Here are a few places to look.

The only one that appears to be current is Gentoo and that's not an "easy" install but it should give you a feel for how well it works on the 'book. I provided a link to it in a previous post. There still doesn't appear to be a 2004.2 LiveCD yet.

This one's been around for a while. It's a useful resource, but some of the more specialised distros are easier to use for rescue disks.
http://www.frozentech.com/content/livecd.php has a good list of them.

10 MB? Yes, but don't expect a GUI. If you want a desktop Linux on CD, you can try Morphix in the LightGUI variant, but that's still 20x as big as you want it.

Or, with the help of Google, you could have found this page, which is a list of live CDs. But don't expect a complete desktop OS in under 10 MB. Even the basic font files take about half of that.

Yes, Windows can boot from a CD. But over the last few years I have seen numerous examples in which the only way for someone to make repairs on a machine is to boot with a floppy and go back to old-school DOS looking stuff.

Booting W2K, W98, etc from CD is the same as using the W2K, W98 boot floppies. Of course the CD is faster but gets you to the exact same old DOS looking stuff as the floppies.
Maybe you were refering to other DOS tools not included on the Windows CD's but you could also put those same apps on a bootable CD also.

I have used and tested quite a few freely available bootable Linux iso's to fix or retrieve data from a failed Windows (or Linux) machines. Here's a slightly dated list for starters. I do know where I got the one I use now but it is really basic and only like 20MB. Boot from the cd, start the network, mount a smb network share and the local Windows partition, fire up MC and browse and copy off what I need to the network. Some of the recovery disks have a GUI or a more guided approach but they all allow this basic functionality if you know the commands. Bad sectors and failing HD's require more work.

Nicholas Brand (who I believe has posted here before) has compiled a great looking List of Live CDs.

Looks like they are even categorized quite extensively too. You should find at least something to ease your paranoia. But if you don't, you can make your own with Morphix, which is sort of a customizable Knoppix, and even has a how-to for something similar to what you want.

IMHO, I think you should just install Knoppix 3.4 to the harddrive, (hint: use the 'knx2hd' utility from a root prompt once you've booted from the cd)

Then, send along a few live educational CD's, such as Freeduc. Freeduc appeals to a broad age group and includes quite a bit of nice packages on a bootable cd. For instance, it includes gcompris and the aforementioned Celestia.

See the Educational group of Live CD's for other cd's that you may be interested in cooking up and sending them.

But, if you really want to torment them with dealing with an old version of windows and allowing it to be turned into a spam zombie the moment it's connected to the net without a firewall, then you'll not be doing them any favors, nor any of us for that matter. 8)

-Vizionary

I would have to say... test out various operating systems with Linux LiveCDs. You can find an assortment here.

Besides that though, if you just want a first clean mount, I would probably recommend MandrakeLinux. My friend, who also is new to Linux, installed it a month ago and runs it as if he still has Windows installed.

I would have to say... to test out various operating systems with Linux LiveCDS. You can find an assortment here.

Besides that though, if you just want a first clean mount, I would probably recommend MandrakeLinux. My friend, who also is new to Linux, installed it a month ago and runs it as if he still has Windows installed.

Why on earth wouldn't I want windows to play back videos fresh out of the box.
I'm sure the average windows user wouldn't want to have to play around with selecting/installing video playback software when all they want to do is playback a clip they've downloaded.
My poor Mum!!!

give your mum one of those.

News? Not really.

I have been using this particular FreeSBIE disk for a couple of months now. Using it to post this, as a matter of fact.

I'm using it at work on a machine that normally runs XP and takes twice as long to boot to XP as it does to the live CD.

For some reason the giant list of Live CDs doesn't seem to include the BSD variants.

There are 8 different *BSD live CDs listed at LiveCDNews.com.

If you had read the bottom of the page, you would find this!

Know of one not on the list? Have comments/complaints? Send me an email.

So send him the list of these mysterious CDs, if there is over a 100 live cds, with more being created every day, of course theres going to be some missing!