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University of Michigan Linux
CosmicEntity writes "A while back there was a Slashdot article about the University of Michigan signing a huge distribution deal with Microsoft. In protest, students offered free copies of Red Hat Linux 6.1 and Star Office to people as they came to purchase the MS products. Now, it seems the university's College of Engineering is openly adopting Linux, and releasing their own version to students. They call it CAEN Linux (CAEN stands for Computer Aided Engineering Network.) It's a modified version of Red Hat, with all sorts of useful tweaks (like bug fixes and patches) and security "enhancements," to protect the new machines. It looks like there will finally be support for new students hoping to use Linux, but too unsure to just go out and do it themselves. Oh, by the way, the original name was going to be "Blue Hat Linux," but it didn't stick. " I think it'd be very interesting to see what could happen if some of the universities got together and created a University Distro - designed to handle their security needs, and a shared resource site for help on running and learning Linux - what do you folks think?
Like the subject says, I'm all for the Uni Distro. I work for the Engineering computing department at my school and we have mostly Sun UNIX workstations, but the labs are crowded and it would be kinda cool if more people used Linux in their dorm room and ssh'ed into the labs...
Definately a project that some people should get together on...
Well, Redhat may not be the end all to be all, but it's nice to see that someone is thinking along the right lines over there.
The same thing is starting to happen at here at NCSU, and hopefully we'll see Linux replace those darn NT machines yet. The LUG here is great about providing packages for Red Hat + NCSU-specific stuff. (well, we're sort of nearby, and whatnot.
If that isn't an option at your school, at least convince them to get some interoperability. Linux plays well with others. NT can be forced to do better if you buy the right packages. So far I'm pretty happy with what they have bought, but NT is still not that reliable (it leaks memory here, the mouse dies, etc. Solaris boxes are much better).
However, at least X-Win32 and Tera Term Secure Shell are making life easier on NT. Still not as easy as it is on my Linux box, though.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
North Carolina State University has had a group of students supporting a Red Hat-based distribution called EOS Linux for some time. Just recently, the university announced that they would begin treating it as an officialy supported platform. Details are sketchy - the announcement just came out - but it's a pretty big deal for the NCSU folks. Perhaps some Eos Linux people can provide more depth.
Actually, recent versions of EOS Linux aren't distributions, but a set of rpms that you install against a specific version of Red Hat. The Eos Linux group felt it would be easier to it this way, rather than taking on all the day-to-day maintenance responsibilities of supporting a full distribution. I think this is a better model for site-specific Linuxes. It's a good discussion topic, anyway.
Last but not least - I don't know if it would be possible to build a global "University Linux" as the article suggests. The main benefit to Eos Linux, and presumably to the University of Michigan Linux as well, is that it integrates tightly with all the on-campus systems and networks. It's site-specific, and that's why you want it. It's hard to imagine how you could build a single distribution that would be site-specific at all sites.
-Graham
That's a good thing. They had to block that port at the central routers here because people left them wide open without knowing. Linuxconf is bad for your karma anyway.
Uhhh... no?
GPL doesnt' say you have to make sure it's accessible to everyone, it says that *if* you redistrubte, those you distribute to cannot be constrained into who they distribute to.
I am perfectly free to refuse to give you a copy of redhat, but to give it to the next guy. But I cannot prevent that guy from giving it to you.
And I have to provide source to the first guy if he asks.
In other words, as long as UMICH doesn't *contractually*, or by way of license, inhibit it's distribution..... it's not a problem.
I'm double posting here I think.. but..
GPL does *not* force you to distribute software. You can give it or not to whoever you want.
GPL ensures that anyone in *receipt* of that software is free to distribute it as they want.
In other words, the *software* has it's freedom.. nobody can take 'ownership' and prevent it's spread. Everyone who receives is has the right to redistribute.
Nothing in the GPL forces UMICH to put it on their website and let the whole world have it..
If you were ever in doubt about our impending victory or the futility of efforts to block our path this is some evidence to help change your mind.
The way you fight a product that beats you on price, quality and hype ( the top 3 factors afecting a buying decision ) is by bribing people in positions to choose for others. I.e. I have some crap furniture to sell at inflated prices. I wouldn't go to individual clients buying for personal use. I would go to a major bureaucrat. Take her for diner and a movie. Maybe even sleep with her if she's interested. Toss a bit of money under the table to boot.
At the end of the day I will have spent $10,000 to get 2,000,000 worth of business and made a whole bunch of employees angry.
The problem MS now has is that this won't work against Linux. They don't have the budget to bribe all the decision makers in all the big organizations that could care. Most can't be bribed with personal luxury anyway. You have to ofer them subsidies on some other stuff. Deaply discounted machines to go with the software you are giving for free to make it all "competitive with Linux".
Those that do go the MS way despite the trend will have to explain the choice and they don't know how.
Why ? Because it's ok to be wrong when everybody else is wrong in exactly the same way. When it's you alone then you just look incompetent.
Worse yet Linux is "free" ( beer not speech ) so you can't claim to be "buying one thing instead of the other." After all you can buy Windows and let those who don't want it use Linux right ? No extra expense, right ? ( There is some but it won't matter when you are trying to justify the ban ).
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
You know, although I think it's good to give people copies of RedHat and StarOffice, I have to say that the MS college deal has been very useful to me. I've gotten MS Office for $5, Visual Studio for the same, and I've found them to be very good. I for one would like to thank Microsoft for giving colleges this opportunity, and giving away a high-quality office suite and reasonably good development tools to people that need them.
:)
StarOffice is a good product, but when one has the choice of getting MS Office for almost the same price, I have to say that MS wins hands down. Which is not to say I don't appreciate free software - I regularly use FreeBSD. But I think that "protesting" against a deal that benefits both students and Microsoft may be stretching things a bit.
Just my $0.02 at 3:30 am.
-lx
A good deal of the faculty in the CS department at my school uses Linux. The first day here as a Freshman, our Prof told us to install Linux. A lot more people would have if he would have handed everyone a school-tailored distro.
"You ever have that feeling where you're not sure if you're dreaming or awake?"
"You spoony bard!" -Tellah
I'm a student at UCSD and consutant for their Academic Computing Services; here are some of my observations/thoughts on the matter, relating specifically to UCSD undergraduate concerns. I'll leave the consideration of other situations to those with the requisite knowledge and experiance. (So don't flame me with "what ifs") :)
:)
We use Linux (Red Hat specifically, I think) for some low-level operating systems classes, but that's about it. We get many of our engineering/cs related computer through grants, so we have labs full of brand-spanking new Sparc Ultra 10s and zippy Intel (NT) machines. Unless VA or Redhat decides to start giving us computers, this may not change much. Even so, there is a large "Linux following" within our dept and the school in general.
Remember also, that (grants aside) the purchasing decisions are generally not based upon the wishes of the students (though they do have an impact), but upon the requests of the professors and departments. Most professors are more familiar with Solaris then Linux, so that is what they teach.
Another consideration is what systems students should have experiance with when they enter the job market. AFAIK, most established cs/engineering companies use either a commercial Unix and it's accompanying development software or Windows NT and Visual C++ for their development workstations. Linux is beginng to make inroads, but is far from entrenched.
As time goes by, Linux will likely become far more widely used for class purposes because it has some very appealling qualities (low cost of software and hardware, available and modify-able source, use by students at home), but there are quite legitimate factors working against it.
Of course, I may entirely wrong and we will have new labs brimming with glittering new Linux boxen next year. I sure hope so.
The above are my own opinions and observations and do not represent the views or policies of my employers.
Any factual and/or logical errors may be blamed on Harry the Drunken Dwarf.
-- Tom Joynt
--==Hail Eris!!==--
Actually, it's kind of wierd. If you look at the GPL in section 3 it seems to give you the option of distributing the source with the binaries, or of offering the source to anyone who asks. I'm not sure that this allows them to refuse to give the source to someone. Anyone have clarification?
...
Here's the text in question:
a) Accompany it with the complete corresponding machine-readable source code, which must be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange; or,
b) Accompany it with a written offer, valid for at least three years, to give any third party, for a charge no more than your cost of physically performing source distribution, a complete machine-readable copy of the corresponding source code, to be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange; or,
Scuttlemonkey is a troll
While any IT student who is serious about their profession should install Linux or a BSD on their computer, without a large committment of support resources it's not practical for a university to provide Linux (or Windows, for that matter) for their students.
Perhaps American universities have that luxury. If so, maybe I should consider a move :)
Disclaimer: speaking for me only
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Very good news indeed.
There's a strong argument for getting software in front of students. If someone learns product x at school, once they're employed, they are, in many cases, more likely to recommend any employers purchase that product in the future.
This is why all of the commercial app companies are always so desperate to get their products installed for use by students. Just look at all the educational pricing deals, etc., offered by these companies.
I will get really excited (well, as much as one can about software) when I hear of educational institutions removing Windows/Office in favour of, say, KOffice, for use by their non-geek students.
Ofcourse, with continuing budget squeezes, and the rapid improvement of various pieces of "free" (as in beer) software, it's getting to the point where the universities have to start seriously considering installing Linux and friends to keep the bottom line in the black (or to free up resources for other areas within their organisations).
It helps that Linux is such a techie orientated product - everyone knows of stories of Linux slipping in the backdoor of organisations because one of the tech staff needed something done cheap, quick, reliably, etc. From some of the other comments posted it appears as though this has been happening at a lot of uni's, and is now reaching some sort of critical mass where it is being offically acknowledged by various university administrations.
I will be _really_ suprised if we don't see announcements from the big Linux distro companies shortly regarding them offering favourable support deals to educations institutions in return for being their preferred supplier (if they haven't already made such deals).
...j
They should look at setting up a system like autorpm (which is for registered version Redhat) at the University to make updates for things like security problems. They could put all the files locally to avoid a huge amount of downloads from redhat when the updates come out.
Only potential problem with this is if someone breaks into the machine with the update archive--instant r00t on all the boxes.
USyd uses RedHat. I was given a copy of RH4.1, IIRC, a few years ago after I attended a summer school there. I'd been thinking about installing linux for some time, and so that's what I used. That cd included source, but later distributions got too big to fit source+binary on the one cd.
Unfortuately, they haven't updated much, and 5.0 + very few errata updates was what was given out last year. No idea what's planned for this year.
There's actually two bits on the CD - a standard RH with errata updates, and an install batch file which runs a self-extracting zip of a loadlin linux. The whole thing uses umsdos. The first time you boot up it asks you to select your mouse/video card/etc. I think they use the standard RH *config for it now, but it was just a simple shell script in the first versions. The umsdos version is missing things like ppp setup - its basically only meant to be used for windows people to run blue, which is only available for unix. (We have sunos at the uni). It is useful though - there's an icon on the desktop, and when you quit it boots back into windows.
I don't think its officially supported, but there is a CD with X 3.3.5 and a few other updates available for overnight loan to support newer video cards and so on. There's also a messageboard for cs1 students which fields questions about this sort of thing.
Blue's a nice teaching language, although IMHO its limiting for people who have programmed before. (The CS courses don't assume any programming knowledge, even for the advanced class)
I found it quite unsettling how much work it takes just to get a standard Red Hat 6.1 install to have decent security
/usr/local/bin in PATH</I>
t these bugs</a>? We're always glad to be told about problems so we can fix them.
This is fixed in 6.2. Have a look at the current beta. We're now disabling all questionable services by default.
Also, the servers and clients are now separate packages so you don't need to install a finger server just to do a finger @finger.kernel.org.
<I>Are they EVER going to put
Yes. 6.2. Look at the beta.
<I>some of the stuff they do is so brain-dead</I>
So why don't you <a href="http://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/">repor
Especially when you can even include a fix.
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- It is least likely to happen. This means decreasing the spendings on Iron and Software and most Computer Science Departments are very non-interested(at best). This means decreasing their budget. Forget it, they will shoot anyone that suggests it if they can. Note that the department to do it is the Engineering, not CS.
- If it will grow large enough in non-CS departments the moment it will try to go Cross-University it will be taken into the CS Dep domain and happily drowned there for same reasons.
So do not expect it to grow. Unless someone funds it with an amount of money to compensate for the losses of budget due to less software and hardware purchases.Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
Overhere on the Techical University of Eindhoven (The Netherlands) we have a group of students trying to do the same. All students can buy notebooks with a large discount, so pretty much every student (from the same year) has the same type notebook. This allows to completly preconfigure our (Debian based) distribution. Our goal is to make a completly handsoff network install (insert bootdisk, reboot, wait, enter root passwd). As we are using Debian we also consider creating a single configuration packages for those that want some more control over there install. For those that want to do everything by hand we are writing install guides tuned for our notebooks.
Response was huge. Within in days after telling others about our ideas dozens of people told us they wanted to try it. Interest among students is really big.
OTOH a Morgan distro would be good for those who wanto to IPO, and a Hive distro would be good for security (since it already comes with a Perimeter Defense).
While any IT student who is serious about their profession should install Linux or a BSD on their computer, without a large committment of support resources it's not practical for a university to provide Linux (or Windows, for that matter) for their students.
That's just not correct. All the support students need is freely available on the web, via IRC. Go to any irc network and join the #linux channel. Or #linuxnewbie or whatever. You only need ONE student connected to irc, via Linux, Windows, Solaris or whatever, and all the other students can get enough support to get their own machines up and connected.
The way I got my Linux configured, starting as a complete newbie, was by rebooting to Windows, going on efnet, asking stupid questions about PPP, applications availability, configuration, whatever, then rebooting to Linux and trying it.
Once you get your Linux connected to irc, things start moving faster - you don't have to reboot any more.
Linux just doesn't require the same effort to support as Windows, because there's a whole community out there ready and willing to provide the needed support for free, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
Life's a bitch but somebody's gotta do it.
Actually it's not quite the same.
What's the last time you downloaded a free update from Windows NT 4.0 to Windows 2000? If you need to update to Red Hat Linux 6.2, just go to ftp.redhat.com. We don't force anyone to buy anything.
Also, the issue is definitely not a bug. It's a questionable preconfiguration (enabling everything by default). How would you want to "fix" older versions? Re-Release 5.2 with a different installer?
For real problems (bind rootshell exploit), Red Hat has issued updated RPMs for versions down to 4.2.
As for bug reporting, nobody (including both Red Hat and Microsoft) can fix bugs/add changes they aren't aware of. Reporting a bug is always a good idea.
The difference here is that, last time I checked, Microsoft didn't even have the beginnings of a bug reporting system. That's part of why they never get some trivial bugs fixed.
Most Linux distributors do have a working bug reporting system - and most bugs reported there WILL get fixed (or at least you'll get the reasons why they won't be fixed).
I wouldn't condemn Microsoft for telling their users to report bugs (if they had a bug tracking system) - actually that would be a good idea.
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Okay. If you guys are running NT machines with simple applications that don't change, and you're getting serious reboot and crash problems, then you have some very incompetent NT people. Myself- I run linux at home and introduced it into the network at work. But we are still mostly NT, and there's not been a BSOD since I mis-installed NT for the first time. And our few crashes are inevitably application crashes, not OS crashes. For the purposes you guys have, NT should be plenty reliable. Hire some knowledgable NT people.
When the machine dies on me / reboots, the temp dirs are cleared, and I can't get my paper back!)
Have you considered using AutoSave? Just set it to save every minute if you're that worried. Sorry, but this is such a lame criticism. NT is not the OS one would prefer, but you're making it sound like W95.
When I'm singing a ballad and a pair of underwear lands on my head, I hate that. It really kills the mood.
-Tom Jones
--
Again, the NT boxes and Unix boxes are used by almost everyone at the Univ. The stabilty of the NT boxes would be higher if there was no application that leaked memory perhaps.
Also, keep in mind that constant login and logout and clearing of temporary drive space makes NT performance lower over time. Tuning NT means getting it set up one way then leaving it alone and monitoring it. There is a vastly huge difference between a server and a workstation environment. Workstations take constant uncotrollable patterns of use/abuse. Servers run services that are known, constant, and are affected by load and have to manage resource availability.
Proper NT installation only accounts for initial use after bringing the machine on the network. Why? Because there are upgrades to applications... there are changes to profiles... modifications to security models... gosh forbid service packs... logging to non ideal locations like c:\winnt\system32 by default with no easy work around for many ill written applications that of course provide no source code to allow for conformity to a sysadmin's standards...
The only proper way I have ever seen NT run in a high churn environment is a stable build that is maintained and kiosk like features enabled only... i.e. you can only access a browser.
I am the first to say there are people that talk trash about NT installations without merit... however, in this case -- a high churn user environment -- there is simply no way to keep NT boxes stable. They will be taken offline eventually and reinstalled. Also, how many uni's do you know that can afford things like TME10 or CA unicenter to take a totalitarian control over the desktop? Isn't it easier to hire $4.50 an hour ops that can recognize NT at a distance of 30 yards?
In short... NT workstation is better than Win95/98 by a long shot... however, don't make it appear as though some "knowledgeable NT people" will ever provide the stability and avaliablility of a Linux environment in a high churn university setting.
If someone can post numbers or papers that are relevant I will retract my comments.
Latra,
Jay
http://www.mp3.com/fudge/
http://fudge.org
"Mond Linux is designed specifically for PCs attached to the University of Cambridge's PWF networks." (Unix Support home page, University Computing Service)
It's a centrally-administerable distribution. Each workstation has a UMSDOS root (which is checksummed on boot, for security) but gets most other stuff of a central server. This means the whole thing can be upgraded without having any access to the workstations, which is important because workstations may be geographically far apart, and since most of the time they run NT it wouldn't be possible for root to log in and make changes.
perl -e 'fork||print for split//,"hahahaha"'
While it's been quite a few years since then, I've found the ratio to be about the same -- around 2 to 5 percent of the people I've worked with on a regular basis are really into computers. To the rest it's just a high paying job that they're not very good at. Encouraging these people to go into the field is doing everyone a disservice, so IMO giving them these development suites that do all the hard work for you is not in the best interests of the industry. Just give everyone Linux and reroute your support number to the career counceler.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I think that one of the most valuable places for Linux to continue to grow is the academic setting. Not in terms of profesors, but in terms of students using it - beyond the CS/Eng. departments. With distributions like the U-M of one, and it sounds like other unis are doing it as well, we can make our case clear to the general population. Linux is more stable, faster, and does everything that you need. With easy-to-setup packages for students, students don't have to muck with areas they don't know about, schools can admin networks more easily. The older generation is pretty set in with Windows - let's co-opt the younger entirely.
Yeah, I'm that guy.
Regarding School and Linux, if I am not wrong, back in the old days when Linux was still _very_ young, there was a university in Florida which roll their own version of Linux.
Let me first state that my memory _may_ be incorrect, but in the remote possibility that I am right, can anyone tell me what has happened to that Florida university's version of Linux?
In the same School and Linux vein, there is a group of people actively developing and grouping GPLed school-related softwares that primarily run on Linux, their location is at www.seul.org.
If you are interested in academia and Linux, please check them out !
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
We're working on just this at Boston University. Our original plan, as reflected on the BU Linux web site was to base our distro on Bastille Linux -- that was back when Bastille was in super-early development and was planned as an actual distribution. They've gone the route of a hardening script, something we'd like to avoid. (We'd like all of our changes to be to RPMs, rather than pasted on afterward, for better system upgradability and managability.)
So, we're starting work on a distro of our own, integrating ideas from Bastille with Red Hat, and adding things we need like Kerberos IV, AFS (Arla, probably), Amanda, etc. If this sounds like what you're doing, please contact me at mattdm@bu.edu . It seems worthwhile to at least share ideas, even if we don't end up combining our work.
--
In the field I'm currently in (advertising), it's hard to convince people that Microsoft Word is not what was used to write the ten commandments, and that when the ancient Greeks did mathematics, they didn't store the results in an Excel file.
It may seem tangential to the larger issue of free/Free software, but the thing that most excites me about campus-linux distribs (or as the case may be, a set of patches which to most students would seem like the same thing, but I don't need any "technical error" flames;) ) is the way they poke users in the eye with the fact that files and file compatibility are just as important as individual applications they might use to manipulate those files.
It seems I spent a total of many hours as an undergraduate in those horrible classes that require "groupwork" trying to convince the others in my group of the benefit of using plain text or other low-level formats for exchanging information. Usual response: blank stares, slack jaws, and "... but don't you have Word?" And yes -- some of that time I did (the dreaded cheap campus software giveaways), but I still thought it was a bad idea.
If it's accepted that people will be using different OSes as it suits their needs, the advantages of file agnosticism should become better understood.
just thoughts,
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
But the really cool thing is that MIT has started putting Linux machines in the Athena clusters to complement the SGI O2/Indy and Sun sparc/Ultrasparc workstations that are already there.
Very cool indeed.
You aren't paying $5. Student fees/computer fees/tuition/and maybe even tax dollars pay for the university wide liscence. Your $5 only lets you get a copy for your personal use. It's the same at my university. If your machine is on the network you can install and use any of the software that's in the computer labs. You just have to run the keyclient. If you're not on the network you can get a CD for a small fee. But we pay $100 a semester in computer fees and even more in other student fees. They (and other software companies) do offer eductional discounts on software purchased through the university book store, but nothing is $5.
Beauty is truly in the eye of the tiger
Will we see any "I didn't get MS Office, but $80 of my tuition went to subsidize this guy's copy" posts in response?
It's a beautiful setup for Microsoft. Lower the apparant price, and you reduce people's incentive not to buy MS software. But you've got a deal with the school, so you get paid for all that software anyway. Everybody wins, except for those people who still don't buy MS products.
Wow, that's helpful.
Believe me, I pored over all the documentation I could find, played with all relevant documented flags and tried them several times. I found no way to make the version of ps2pdf that came with Ghostscript work. Look at what you typed, though. Why should the Windows version automatically be fine just because the Mandrake version was? Doesn't follow at all.
Oh come off it, that's just paranoid, What reason do they have to break a utility like that - and what mechanism do they have for keeping it broken?
And no, I don't get Word files. I don't like Office, so I don't use it. I could if I wanted - I'm a student so can get it very cheap. But I don't.
I can make a reasonable stab at loading anything up to Word 7 files via WordPad or WordPro - but my memory says that WordPerfect can do that, while I'm pretty sure Star Office could in the review I saw recently. So I'm no further down the road than you, unless I choose to buy some additional software purely for that feature. Sure, you haven't got the software available to you on Linux, but what percentage of Linux users don't have any version of Windows on their machine and never did? Some, but not many I'd guess.
Greg
Greg
(Inside a nuclear plant)
Aaaarrrggh! Run! The canary has mutated!
from any good drug dealer :) then you come back, and back . . .
There's lots of companies that give it away to college students. The first I remember was MS in the late 80's, with an "academic" version of word--the regular disk for about $30, but no documentation. At that stage it wasn't to hook you, but because they figured you'd steal it anyway.
Look at apple's distribution of computers to schools. It's not due to their concerns about education.
THe real biggie is Lexis & WesLaw at law schools--get you hooked for free, and then it's a couple of hundred an hour in the real world after law school . . .
what's the point? there are already too many, which cause a diffusion in the field, blurring the diff between systems so that you can't just sit down on a 'linux box' and know which files are where, what to poke when things need doing, etc.
I've been a longtime linux user (since the 1.1 kernel days) and I have to say, all this distro scattering is enough to drive me to FreeBSD. I'm serious - they (*bsd) have it right - one distro, a clean pkg system and a clean ports system. like irix 'inst' but done right ;-)
so what was so lacking in redhat or debian (the 2 primary US-based distros) that they had to roll their own? pride? ok - I understand that. I see the fun in rolling your own. but not at the university level. is it because they wanted to be neutral between distros, not showing favoritism? well that argument went to hell when they chose M$ and stood that party line (exclusively) for quite a while.
if they need local customizations, have them create tarballs or rpm files (or deb files, etc) that layer their own localizations on top of an already established distro. that would suit their needs just fine. but when you fork from a mainline, you have support costs, separate bugfixes and security checks to track; in short, its unjustified overhead - just for ego's sake.
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"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
so they let solaris on the scene, eh? and only if you give them root? screw that - no way I'd hand over root to some huge body of folks that really don't have my best interests at heart.
control can be gained in a lot of ways. my preference would be at the network level. if you are found to run your system incorrectly (cluelessly) and folks break in and screw the univ., then I can see them partitioning your repeater/switch port and cutting you off. that's fair and makes sense. but other than a port scan (from the OUTSIDE of the box) for a security test, I see NO NEED to hand over root access to them. that's insanity.
I'd probably run a firewall and somehow make it seem that it was running 'doze only - but behind that NAT box, I'd run some form of unix. and only I'd have root control.
--
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Sorry. Guess I underestimated how non-standard your setup is, and more significantly, how destructive your users are (as another response pointed out). Yikes. I'm blessed with intelligent users.
When I'm singing a ballad and a pair of underwear lands on my head, I hate that. It really kills the mood.
-Tom Jones
Here at Cornell we use Kerberos for authentication for virtually every network service. We've haven't really ever been able to maintain *nix support as well as Windows and Mac, which the majority of users have. We've sort of left the Linux bunch out in the dark because there are only kludgy Kerberos implementations for *nix. It would be great if there was an effort to create a standard University distro, catering to the more idiosynchratic university needs.
Jazilla.org - the Java Mozilla
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
I'm going to have to disagree, for several reasons:
While integrating Linux (and students running Linux boxen) into CS courses is, IMHO, a very good idea, it needs to be thought about carefully, and properly resourced. An ad-hoc approach, handing out a few RedHat CD's without any backup, just won't work.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Last I checked, Andrew Linux didn't work _in_ CMU either. It gave me horrible errors about not finding an X server, which you had to manually configure. This was back when it was RH4.2-based, though -- I think they're up to RH6.0 now.
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If I could write articles with decent formatting & dynamic supra and infra references in the footnotes & the occassional graphic in anything except MSWord, I would never boot-crash-reboot Win95
Have you tried Wordperfect 8? It works fine - it's the standard for the legal industry, for one thing. It's fully capable of handling large, complex documents, and it's cross-platform.
Abiword is coming along fine - it's useable now, in version 0.7.8 for simple documents (actually, it's a real pleasure to use) and by the time it gets to verions 1.0 it will be a killer app.
Life's a bitch but somebody's gotta do it.
This is just crazy. Ghostscript has been around for a long time and there isn't a competing Microsoft product, so that one would look a little unlikely. Caldera's issue (well, Digital Research's issue if you go back to who had the problem rather than the current owner) was that they were selling a competing OS which looked rather better and was rather easier to squash with Windows than a silly little utility like this.
The real killer, though, has to be ps2pdf itself - you get at it via the command line. Not via Windows at all.
Sorry, but this is absolute paranoid rubbish. And, as for calling me a Microserf, anyone who knows me would be able to tell you I'm a long-term Amiga user who only reluctantly made the move in November '98. I'm also heavily involved in KOSH.
My love for Microsoft is quite possibly less than yours - but I don't tend to accuse them of something without a mechanism or motive for the offence. They have neither here and it looks rather strongly like it's simply a duff copy of Ghostscript.
Greg
Greg
(Inside a nuclear plant)
Aaaarrrggh! Run! The canary has mutated!