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?

Comments

the MS college deal

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Providing support would be a pain

[Goonie]

I was head tutor (approximately equivalent to a TA) for an introductory university C programming course. To allow students to work from home, we provided a CD including the Cygwin tools and a couple of other free development tools for Windows. It drove me absolutely nuts trying to provide installation support - and, being an Australian university, there weren't enough other staff to help. This was for a simple software package, not an operating system that has to cope with the vagaries of a huge variety of hardware and the joys of repartitioning and reformatting hard disks.

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