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NCSU/Red Hat "Open Source University"
Aithlin writes "According to this story at Business Wire, Red Hat and North Carolina State University are partnering to open an "Open Source-based university". This means that students at NCSU's engineering school will standardize on RH." Basically, it means that the School of Engineering will standardize on "Open Source" technologies.
Well, being an NCSU student I'd like to point out a few things. Sometimes what you are forced to take is helpful...wether YOU LIKE IT OR NOT! I didn't like taking a presentation speaking class, but it has been helpful. I would have never taken this class and instead pursued a degree purely in technical work.
Engineering in never purely technical. There is communication, organization, and so on. I would agree on a ever-growing university, changing to the needs of the students at a much faster pace. Better tools, better labs, but many of these problems boil down to the Professor, not the department.
Just for the record, I think the Engineering School fell in love with Redhat over the summer when they installed their first few linux machines...much much cheaper than the Ultrasparcs that we've been using lately. But will it ever be completely open source? No, there are too many EE/CPE/CSC tools that are not open source. I'd like to see Cadence open sourced personally.
But its good that there are some smart decisions being made. They first tried to go with NT, and now they are on the right track.
simon.
as an ncsu student i think this is pretty cool. now how about getting some software vendors to actually write some useful software for linux. let's say for instance... cadence.
a few questions and thoughts though,
1) who is going to benefit more? redhat or the ncsu students? I man can red hat really improve the learning environment here?
2) yet another environment is introduced into the campus. we already have nt4, 2000, a few 95, mac, and solaris around here. talk about confusing the hell out of most people
3) what exactly does this mean for the students? all the article talks about is how redhat is going to quickly propogate everywhere. this doesn't help if all we have our programming tools. there are a _lot_ of other applications that engeineers need. i hope redhat has some voice in getting companies to develop what we and other universities need.
once again i think this is a great idea. i'm a big linux fan, but there are some things that i really hope they can take care of first.
hi =)
...and it isn't a purely financial issue. It is a technical issue that NT doesn't fit into an envrionment where you've got 30,000 people sharing the same computer and want to have roaming profiles, need for security, etc. Notice how you have to enter your password twice this semester in the NT lab? It is because NT is a royal pain to support.
-Michael [Remove two parts of address to mail me]
I happen to know for a fact that if I GPL my homework and put it up on-line here at Rutgers University, I am liable to be prosecuted for cheating. That sure isn't Open Source. I wonder how they'll handle that sort of thing at NCSU?
it's gonna be some highly customized installation set up by the school that has little if anything to do with the regular retail install.
You are correct when saying it is a customized install. But between 5.x, 6.x and 7.0, the amount of customization gets less each time...mainly because Red Hat is taking our improvements and integrating them into the base install, which means we have less work customizing each release. Their kerberos support was added by Nalin who recently graduated from NCSU and had worked on the Realm Kit for RHL. There are several other examples, but I won't bother detail them.
"why not debian" "why not slackware"
Several years ago, slackware was using in an integration attempt. Red Hat is used for technical reasons (eg- Kickstart, RPM, dev staff is partly NCSU alum) mainly & the students who are doing the work use Red Hat on their personal systems.
-Michael (NCSU Comp Sci JR)
-Michael [Remove two parts of address to mail me]
NCSU Information Technology Department (ITD) is given headaches by trying to support NT on campus. You can't install anything because NT is a single user OS an they don't want you modifying stuff on the local HD (NT is on HD, Solaris/Linux pulls from AFS). ITD/ITECS has locked down NT beyond the base install, while Solaris/Linux security remains about the same.
All labs on the campus require a password. It just happens that all the labs running Red Hat Linux have hardware that was purchased with ETF Engineering Student fees, and therefore can only be used by engineering students. This is enforced with hesiod ACL records. If you want RK4RHL in unity labs, ask ITD, not COE -- btw - this is a good point that does need to be addressed.
-Michael (NCSU Comp Sci JR)
-Michael [Remove two parts of address to mail me]
All of NCSU's eggs aren't in 1 basket. We've got Solaris, NT, and Linux boxes. NCSU teaches Fortran, C++, Java, Perl, MSVC, x86 asm, mips/risc asm, plus numerous others. We do get a wide range of exposure to various languages an OS's. The goal of the NCSU CSC dept is to teach you various concepts & languages are only tools to implement those concepts. Ideally, once you are gone hopefully you can use any language/os in the post graduation world.
-Michael [Remove two parts of address to mail me]
EOS? It was Dec 2100's runing Ultrix... then there were some PAMs (math school) machines that were RS6000's and the Sun IPX's... then there were the HP's... oh.. then the Dec 5000's that showed up with color... oh... then the first EOS Sun's showed up... oh then the NT showed up... all of this stuff was connected via AFS and the file servers were Dec 3100's or better boxes... oh and then there was the smattering of Alphas around campus. Dialup was always interesting... eventually you could even ssh into campus vs. telnet...
But now there will be Red Hat. Hmm. RH was already connected via resnet. Also, when the PC price drops happened you could have more firepower in your room connected than by going to the uni computer rooms.
I still think that uni's will always have a hard time maintaining a bleeding edge on the hardware side of things. *shrug*
Eventually having a computer when you come to school will be like having a phone was when I went there. The uni will provide a phone jack and a data jack (or maybe the same thing). However, I remember how much trouble it was just to bring cable tv into dorms let alone data access.
Red Hat, Solaris, HPUX, AIX, MacOS, NT... whatever...
Now, if there is something that gives back perks to the university like being able to have grad students working at Red Hat and on projects that have real world value that would be even better. Let's see if that happens.
Oh, and if RH can spring for some rug cleaner to get the smell out of lez100 that would be really cool too.
http://fudge.org
Most mechanical/aerospace and electrical/computer design firms are heavily rooted in UNIX. I work for a semiconductor design and technology firm and all our EDA (electronic design automation) tools not only run on UNIX, but 75% of them either don't have Windows ports or are "crippled" on Windows (because of issues with multiuser, remote display, etc...).
About half of those tools now have full, native ports on Linux. Specifically you ask? Try Synopsys, Mentor Graphics, ModelTech, etc... Although Sun just came out with a powerful new UltraSPARC III chip (powerful from an FPU, and therefore engineering, standpoint against x86), Linux gives you much more "bang for the buck" on single/dual processor x86 hardware than SPARC.
Furthermore, many of the preceding companies have been touting the price vs. performance ratio of Linux clusters versus traditional shared memory Sun systems (in favor of Linux, of course ;-) and have modified their Linux ports just for such implementations.
-- Bryan "TheBS" Smith
-- Bryan "TheBS" Smith
Independent Author, Consultant and Trainer
Granted, it's a very nice basket, but I wonder about any university's computer science department that blesses only one platform/language as the one for them. IMHO, I think their doing their students a bit of a disservice by not exposing them to a wider range of OSes. I thought an university would tend to try to give students (especially undergradates) as broad of range of experience as possible.
George Lee
Yeah, I know. It's a disaster waiting to happen.
Even though there is an NT lab for CS (but since I'm not a CS student, I don't have to take that class), the UofU's Center for High Performance Computing (where I work) has a 170 node Beowulf cluster, among other things. The only MS to be found here is in about 1/4 of our desktop machines.
OK OK OK, I admit it, one of my four computers dual boots Win2k (an old P5-233/256M; you don't really think I'd polute my dual-head Athlon 500/256M with MS, do you?)
Dave
I was looking into which colleges to apply to and had narrowed it down to five, but now it looks like I've got a bit more research to do...
Speaking of which, to all you college-grads and current college students out there: what college(s) would you recommend for computer science studies? I know what the USNews top 18 are, but what are the best from YOUR experiences as far as environment, education, facilities (and open-source-ness)?
NCSU was working with RedHat as an alternative to the computing environment before the company started tipping their hats toward the project.
That statement is correct, but has been kept sorta quiet (I'd guess so they can generate nice press releases and such).
I can remember about 2 years ago that running linux was almost frowned upon at NCSU, now it has everyone's support all the way up to the Chancellor. It is amazing how fast NCSU has had a change of face on Linux.
And as far as the choice of distributions, that was a choice made primarily by the students who have done all the work on the project, not CEOs, Deans, and Provost type people.
I agree that exposure to a Linux environment that is easy to use (GUI/Menu) and provides a wealth of applications is great exposure for Linux.
-Michael
-Michael [Remove two parts of address to mail me]
...actually a few years ago profs at NCSU had problems with NCSU legal releasing their code under GPL. For the most part, that has changed recently at NCSU.
-Michael [Remove two parts of address to mail me]
http://bugs.linux.ncsu.edu/ . If we don't know about them, they can't be fixed.
/tmp, it will probably be larger in the 7.0 rollout & there have been some patches to tmpwatch that clear it out better.
As far at
In the 7.0 rollout, security will be even tighter. Consider placing a bug report about lilo security in bugzilla for us (above URL).
As far as UIDs go, Katz is in the process of working on a kernel patch (and arla) for the 7.0 rollout.
-Michael [Remove two parts of address to mail me]
Where Your Vote Should Go
great comedy company.
First, you can change your window manager.
Next, if you have problems, http://bugs.linux.ncsu.edu/
If you have problems with UI improvements, would you like to go back to using punchcards?
I honestly can say that I don't think NCSU should still be using MWM as the default WM on Solaris, but they haven't changed it yet. And yes, you can use gnome stuff from solaris (add gnome).
-Michael [Remove two parts of address to mail me]
Since the university will be open source maybe someone will be able to figure out how financial aid is calcualted. :P
As x approaches total apathy I couldn't care less.
WTF? Yes, Dell did win the hardware bid, but there was -NO- bidding for Linux distributions. It was chosen by the students who did the work on the project. Stop bashing Red Hat.
RHAT gets a nice PR release from release.
IBM gets a nice release about Open Source & S/390-Linux.
NCSU gets to attract bright students from release.
Problem? I don't see any. It is a natural part of the marketing division of each.
-Michael [Remove two parts of address to mail me]
..that when Microsoft donates a bunch of money and a ton of resources to an institution, we all lambaste the university for selling out and becoming a "Microsoft"-Institution.
When Redhat does the same, we praise it and start sending our applications to it.
A smell of whiff of hypocrisy amongst the slashdot posters... oh wait, what should I expect?
How about an OS-agnostic institution? Now *THAT* I would prasie.
Yeah, NCSU Comp Sci dept is migrating from C++ to Java for Comp Sci, Electrical & Comp Engr students. Everyone else in Engr is still taking C++, now using gcc/g++ compared to previously AT&T Centerline compiler.
-Michael [Remove two parts of address to mail me]
... but I think that this will help everyone out in the long run. I'd rather see a university convert to Red Hat than yet another school move over to exclusively NT. Besides, this might introduce more students to the idea of *nix and Open Source in general, and may move on to systems like Slackware or FreeBSD.
"An American Voting for Bush is like a Chicken voting for Col.Sanders"
Excellent post. Yes, it might be "better" if they used Debian or Slackware, but even using Red Hat is a very good thing. All Linux distros share some degree of similarity, and having used one in school will probably make the students more likely to give it serious consideration when they have to choose an OS for something later. A lot of people, from what I understand, wind up using Windows and MS products because that's what everyone else at school/work is using. This has the potential to have the same effect.
-RickHunter
That's not true. UNC (Chapel Hill, I'm assuming is what you're talking about, since that's where SunSite is) does, indeed, have a CS department. They have for a while now. UNC is also definately a proponent of Open Source, but they're a bit more practical, in that they're not shoving it down all of the students' throats. And actually, UNC's shell accounts are running under HP-UX, I believe.
- A former UNC-CH OIT employee
The why is easy. Redhat is headquartered "right up the road" from NCSU. Not to mention several of the
former admins/developers from NCSU have gone to
Redhat.
As a former student and someone who has seen both
the early attemps and the current incarnation of the workstations just let me say i'm very impressed. Both redhat staff and the hardworking
NCSU staff have put together a very nice system.
An amazing thing has been done with these machines. Completely integrated into the existing
AFS system and functionally very similar to the
existing solaris machines that the students are familiar with.
Like the man says, you may not like Redhat but this relationship between NCSU and Redhat has wonderful potential. I can already imagine the
boost to enrollment in the comp sci/comp eng schools.
This is where Red Hat has an advantage over Microsoft (and to some extent Apple/Be/etc). If Microsoft donated $350,000 in software to a Universtiy so that they would employ NT everywhere in the Engineering department, it would be called market dumping and would be another thing the DOJ and the EU could raise in their investigations. Couse, though that doesn't stop the Bill Gates foundation from doing it (mostly in Europe iirc).
Burn Hollywood Burn
We've had RedHat visit us on several occaisions - but this is the first I've heard of any "all open source" ideas. From what I understand, most admin systems are switching to Win2k. Of course, considering how all the other machines are Sparq 4's and 5's running a rather belligerent version of SunOS5.6, I don't see how the use of RedHat can be too bad. As long as I can get to a command-line interface, I'll be happy. As for the exploitation rumors and such, well - I don't know of any professor here who trusts a computer enough to keep all their scores in it :)
~Reave
"There are two ways you can leave this office - through the door, or through the door with my boot stuck up your rear en
I agree with most of what you've said here, but I'm a little puzzled at the lack of optimism in open sourcing the entire program. I for one believe that time (and not necessarily much of it) will change the engineering landscape dramatically, causing open sourcers to yell and hoot in reckless abandon. That is, while the tools you speak of aren't open source, how long to they are improved upon by ones that are?
Well, as far as the "not idiots" part, that's always a matter of interpretation. It has been my experience (I went to NCSU and worked there for a while) that alot of the stupid things the "IT staff" (that covers a whole lot of various offices) do would get them fired in the real world. Universities are far more forgiving due to the nature of the environment -- low pay, over worked, stress, etc. I really shouldn't fault them as it is difficult to do 12 hours work in 8 hours.
And no, they are not handing out the stock RedHat installation CDs. At least the College of Textiles had plans to include the software students would need. That was about a year or two ago. Six (6) years ago, I create a "stock" installation image for the COT. It was based on Slackware as redhat really wasn't usable for unattended custom installations. One floppy, a few questions (network info), and poof complete linux system complete with AFS, ZMail, the NCSU xdm, maple, matlab, xess, and the associated modifications to integrate it into the campus kerberos authentication system. It was (and still is) a masterpiece. Heck, it even flashed NT (or was it Windows 3.11) onto the thing. [I've still got it all on a backup tape around here somewhere.]
Hey now, some of us used to be ops in lez100!
I am a very satisfied Debian user, but there certainly is a difference between a Debian install and a RedHat install, at least for a Intel desktop machine. RedHat does a much better job of finishing off the last niggly bits like automatically setting up X Windows, or getting your sound card to actually beep at you.
That being said, for servers, Debian's apt-get is a clear win. Perhaps RedHat will up the ante with their new update system, but I doubt it.
My place (informatik.uni-muenchen.de) has been using mostly OpenSource for years now.
All of the roughly 150 clients in the computer pool are running SuSE Linux (to be replaced with Debian next year). The only non-free software that's essentianl on them is Netscape and StarOffice 5.x, but is's just a question of time before they are replaced with Mozilla/OpenOffice. There is Windows access for those who need it via a WTS client for Win3.1 running on WINE, but nobody actuallly uses it.
Also the servers are completely Linux, except the news server (Sparc, never touch a running system).
So why is this article a big deal? It just shows that the US is "behind", compared to the free world.
I just use fvwm2 on Linux, Solaris, and everything else, (except for NT, of course...) so I don't see what the problem is.
However, I didn't learn how to change my window manager from E115, either, so *that* could be a problem. Solution: they need to teach that.
Otherwise, send a zephyr to instance 'help', and hopefully someone will hear you crying out in the wilderness. I *know* they teach that in E115...
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
The really pathetic thing is, though, that the *last* version didn't do that! However, my heart goes out to all those poor techies that tried to make that crap work, (sorry, James, NT just sucks sometimes... :) because all I've seen it do is eat memory and waste cycles.
;)
Remember, folks, if all you need to do is use Word, then "add Office; Word"; I like having 1 GB of RAM!
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
B1ood
Note to self: pasty-skinned programmers ought not stand in the Mojave desert for multiple hours. -- John Carmack
I am also a wolfpac student and have been working with redhat regularly since 5.0 and slackware for much longer.
I believe that a piece of the picture is missing here. NCSU was working with RedHat as an alternative to the computing environment before the company started tipping their hats toward the project.
Whether or not redhat supports this movement I believe is irrelevant. Students in computer science and engineering fields have been using Linux whether the University and departments supported it or not. I think it is a good move on the part of the staff of the University to start acknowledging the use of Linux on campus and provide support in its use.
Many students may never have heard of RH and many slashdotters may find that unbelievable. However, when they sit down at a terminal, yes, they will see a red hat on their screen, but the exposure to using any distro of linux is better than none at all.
This is me... and that is all I can be.
Cool, a free university where anyone can come and go to classes as they please. What, that has absolutely nothing to do with this?
Red Hat, being an open source software company, needs to rely on support revenue to make a buck. If they want to remain a viable company, they have to sell a lot of service contracts.
Large companies are risk averse. Selecting popular technologies / vendors is percieved as safe e.g. no on gets fired for buying microsoft, ibm, etc.
*Thinking out loud* Why do so many /.'s bash RedHat? Yet no one bitches about Mandrake who've released 12 security/functionality fixes for 7.1 since RedHat 7.0 was released. Is it b/c they have become a mainstream representitive of Linux, thus it is no longer 31337. Most /.'s want to see Micro$oft replaced with Linux. 31337 distros like 'Mike rolled a distro while rolling a fatty' aren't going to achieve the mainstream recognition that will be required to supplant MS
"Hatred is the coward's revenge for being intimidated"
Sure, the department here at UIUC. There are hordes and hordes of Sparcstations running Solaris, but the only Linux I have seen on campus has been in dorm rooms, in the ACM office and ACM lab, and one stray server in the optical physics lab. There has been talk of starting to replace the zillions of engineering workstations (Sparc 20's, Ultra 1's, Ultra 10's, a few HP9000 and SGI) with Linux machines, but so far it's been little more than idle speculation.
:) (glancing at the Indy on my desk)
On the other hand, having all these Unix workstations around is kinda fun too, especially when some of them get donated to ACM and we get to play with them for a while
IIRC (it's been awhile since I had to deal with the Gnome RH installed by default), isn't there an option on the Gnome menu to change the window manager? Just changing it to fvwm or fvwm2 would clean up the desktop a lot, I think. Also, I found the fvwm config stuff a lot easier to figure out.
I do find it odd that RH would give a default Gnome install to a bunch of engineering students. Seems more appropriate to admins and word processor / spreadsheet types.
0x0000
"The Internet is made of cats."
There's plenty of places on the web you can get contrasting opinions. You might try www.microsoft.com, www.redhat.com, or maybe www.sex.com if you're looking for a bias that favors some other POV... the web has something for (almost) everyone.
Keep an open mind and someone will come along a dump a bunch garbage in it.
0x0000
"The Internet is made of cats."
0x0000
"The Internet is made of cats."
I wouldn't call it a reigious belief, but more of a question as to why Red Hat gets relegated to the script kiddies, when it has the same vulnerabilities that any distro has. What decent admin would put a box out that is available to the whole of the net without doing some serious lock down on assorted services. Wait, I take that back, I share an office with a supposed sys admin who brags that he runs "out of the box" installs that have never been cracked. But seriously, although every .0 release has some growing pains, I like the fact they push new technology and find their products to be pretty solid, so where did this script kiddie stuff really come from? From my experience Red Hat addresses their problems quickly and makes every effort to work with and support the goals of the community while attempting to show that there is some profit to be derived from OSS projects. Am I really a Red Hat loyalist? No, I would switch distros tommorow if someone came up with something I liked better, and I may very well switch when the distros with 2.4 start hitting. But I am also pushing Linux on to my corporate desktops, and one of the main reasons I can even consider this is because the suits have heard of Red Hat and read about their support and partnering efforts. Think I could walk into a meeting and push Debian because it is "more pure" than Red Hat? Sorry, I like my job. Maybe I have missed it, but it strikes me that stuff like Corel and Mandrake do our community a greater disservice than Red Hat ever has? And I am not really slamming either distro, I don't care for them but I also firmly believe that any distro that gets someone to try Linux is worth supporting. Oh well, opinions vary. And the bias is obvious, it's just easier for some to right it off as fanatacism.
To fail is human, to blue screen MS!
FYI, those rankings are for graduate engineering programs. I think these rankings are a valid consideration when choosing where to get a master's degree in CS.
That which does not kill me only makes me whinier
I'm not taking on RedHat.
I more than happy with their success, but I'm worried what their policy will shape into, now that they have big investors and big projects to worry about.
I know how any company is tempted to behave like when they hit the big time, and I'm just getting rather concerned on whether RH will follow that path. (Commercialisation VS making-things-the-way they-should sort of thing).
I'm NOT saying they are, I'm just saying that they better pay attention this doesn't happen (as I also said in my misunderstood initial post, thank you very much).
As for Mandrake, well, this time it was RH's turn. Don't worry. I don't spare anybody when I have something to say.
Trian
I'm no longer fed up with MS Windows: I go rid of them
everyone bash it!!! Red Hat could donate all of their equipment and facilities to the FSF, donate all of their coders to Debian, and hand out free copies of their OS at the airport, and still someone here would have to complain Red Hat is evil. Strange things are afoot at the peoples republic of slashdot? Could it be anti-RedHat bias from our parent sponsor? Noooo, this is an unbiased web site. I read almost every other day here how Red Hat sucks, maybe one day one of my Red Hat machines will crash so I can join in on the bashing? I patiently await your downward moderation=P
To fail is human, to blue screen MS!
Linux has been around NCSU for a long time. I ran the computer labs for one of the departments for a while, and one of the first things I did was set up several linux (1.x back then) servers for the windows and mac-based student computing labs. I set up a jumpstart system for Windows 3.1 machines in the lab (stick in the floppy, power it on, and the machine is imaged from the linux servers). Although the administrators of the Netware system, which was used prior to the conversion, balked, the system worked very well, and allowed us more control than Netware did. I could actually serve Macs and Windows machines from one server with their native protocols! The Netware wonks insisted on using the Netware for Mac client, and wouldn't enable long filename support. Slackware all the way, baby!
We went on to set up Linux-based web and email servers. We were excited when we saw the first screenshots of Enlightenment. NCSU was working on a Linux distro back then, but it came to nothing. It's good to see that they're still going to Unix and open computing (and now open source!) and haven't been subsumed by the Microsoft Mentality!
________________________________________
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
You have a good memory! Gibbs was a Convex
that, uh, frustrated a lot of folks. After it
was decommissioned it was sitting in the hall
outside my office. I kept hearing these loud
bangs that I couldn't figure out. Turned out
it was users *kicking* it on their way by!
The campus mail system used to be all AIX but
we now use AIX primarily for our AFS fileservers
and backup machines.
We have at least one of almost everything here
in my dept (one of the best things about working
for a university he said writing from an SGI)
but HP-UX is a notable exception. CS dept used
to have a lot of HP-UX...think that's dwindled
as of late though.
I showed you Solaris!? You'll have to stop by
some time and catch up.
Chris
Come one.. this is where free software started. Any decent University has been an "Open Source University" from day one. Partly because the governmental funding required them to be open & release the results of their funded work. Also, research universities generally have that community feeling toward development, which encourages people to contribute their share for all.
Yeah, I'll drop in sometime and surprise you (I still live in Chapel Hill). Hint: I was around when Bill was there, Jim was there, and Lee Howe was there. I was there for the most recent move from the back of the undergrad library to the current spot in the bottom of Wilson library. I didn't know much back then, but now I'm an Oracle developer.
Funny, I never thought I'd run into anybody on Slashdot...
- Later, Nine
Both. The press release states (in the first paragraph) that the school will "standardize on Open Source technologies" and that "the first deployment will be Red Hat Linux on Optiplex hardware".
I'll wager half of my karma, a couple nat portmans, 3/4's of a beowulf (that's how you spell it dammit) and 2 penis birds that NCSU's amount of hack attempts doubles after they begin rolling this out.
RH7 - *shudder*.
hell, redhat PERIOD, *shudder*. it comes with more holes than a sieve by default...
"It's funny, laugh."
(or just mod me up =D)
and for those of you looking for a valid argument... bash MS all you want, but W2k (and NT) have MANY less opportunities to be owned remotely, you have to give them that.
From a motherboard manual, error beep codes: S-L-L-L-SS: Speaker Error
UNC has a graduate CS department. Not undergrad. Undergrads have to join the math department, and "focus" on CS, which (as of '97) meant taking 4 or 5 CS classes. (See here).The graduate department is indeed amazing, and it's cool if you know someone in the graduate department so that you can get in some of the neater VR experiments. But as an undergrad, that's as close as you will probably get to the interesting parts. In fact, when i was there (3 years ago) the first 3 CS classes (Comp 14,15,114 ) weren't even taught in Sitterson (which is the brand-spanking new mutli-million dollar CS building)....
--BlueLines "The cost of living hasn't affected it's popularity." -anonymous
The NCSUGINA written by Jason Young (ITD at the time, ITECS now) was single signon. NCSU is now using the NovellGina for login authentication & runs a seperate program to get kerberos tickets/afs tokens. NCSU really didn't want to have to continue to support their own Gina, so that is why they switched to Novell.
-Michael [Remove two parts of address to mail me]
...I post as I expect to be modded again down to troll / flamebait.
But that won't keep me from saying things, unless people convince me I'm troll / wrong.
I'm no longer fed up with MS Windows: I go rid of them
Some of us used to have an office in Leazar. Some of us spent 8 hours a day, for seven years in Leazar...
Tried to read the story and the link just gets me a blank page. But I did find it by:
1. editing the "location" down to their main page
2. using their "search" (look carefully, it's a VERY small tab)
Interesting story, just wanted to post this in case others have problems finding it. And, by the way, I LIKE Red Hat!
Teen Angel - a Ghost Story
[Note: it is not clear from the article if NCSU engineering is going 100% RH or just endorsing it. For this post I will assume the former. If that's wrong, I apologize]
..."
Why don't I hear anyone crying "Monopoly!" and "Freedom to choose!"? Change the name from RH to MS and the product from Linux to Win and the arguments would be totally different.
Tell me how this makes RH different from Microsoft (trying to nail a market by getting students to use their product so they will demand it as professionals)
Flawed logic in other posts:
1) "Not surprising, most engineering is UNIX
Just because it's popular doesn't mean it's good. We could say that "standardizing" on Microsoft is good since most Universities are Windows-dominated. I don't think any Linux advocate buys that.
2) "I'd rather see a university convert to Red Hat than yet another school move over to exclusively NT"
Who said a Univ has to choose any? What I suspect this poster means is that (s)he would rather use Linux. Just because you like Linux, does that mean it should be shoved down the throats of your classmates?
3) "...noone connected with [other] distributions are doing anything along these lines to promote Linux"
Is Linux promotion the ultimate good? Do the ends justify the means? It's one thing to advocate or endorse Linux to convince a user. It's quite another to work with the higher-ups and decree Linux is best, regardless of the actual task at hand.
Personal example: I prefer Linux, my wife prefers Windows. Despite the fact that I'm the techie of the house, I have not forced her to switch to Linux (even though I have a thousand reasons why it's better), and I think everyone would agree that this is the right choice. If you complain when someone makes you use Windows, then why not complain when someone forces you to use Linux?
While ITECS (Information Technology and Engineering Computing Services) is working with RedHat to do the right thing as far as Engineering Computing Services is concerned, the administration in the College of Engineering here at State is still busy blundering.
;
This next semester, we've finally made the move to Java as the required (not just recommended) language for Electrical Engineers, Computer Engineers, and Computer Science majors. This means new students will be forced to endure 5 Java classes as the core to their coding "education" (Introduction to Programming, Programming Concepts, Discrete Math Sturctions, Concepts of Operating Systems, and Data Structures).
The irony here is that while more and more of the software we use here is open source, fewer and fewer of the students will be able to read that source. C and C++ have simply gone the way of the dinosaur as far as the faculty are concerned, making way for Java, savior of the world.
While a Java-oriented degree program may make sense for some, it is quite myopic for Computer Engineers and Scientists. I pray for the first NCSU student who has to walk into the job market with no idea what a pointer is and why he needs to free what it's pointing at. Java is a great language, mind you, but it's hardly taken over the industry. I strongly doubt a de facto standard interpretted language will ever take the place of C.
Oh, and if you want a link to NCSU's Eos/Linux information (rather than a Business Wire article), try http://www.linux.ncsu.edu/eos-linux/
Thanks for your time,
Ben Creech
Junior, Computer Engineering, NCSU
(Part Time ITECS Help Desk employee)
there's more than one way to do it, but your way is wrong
One reason, possibly the most important, that we're basing our realm distro around redhat can be found on redhat's about page. To quote: "Red Hat is based in Durham, N.C." You'll notice that Durham is only about a half hour drive from the NCSU campus.
Ben Creech
Junior, Computer Engineering, NCSU
there's more than one way to do it, but your way is wrong
The differences are mostly the packaging system (where Debian aboslutely rocks) and the easy configuration of sound, video, printers which is great under RH (for Debian, you have to roll up your sleeves).
You would feel the difference had you tried Slackware which IMHO brings the worst of both worlds: RTFM configuration and sorry ass packaging system. Add to this some incompatibility to boot, and you're pretty much SOL.
--
Information wants to be beer, or something like that.
I'm a redhat user and below is my account of a forway with another distribution.
I started dicking around with redhat 5.2 and from 6.0 used it as my sole desktop, before that I'd had a small ammount of experience with Xenix and QNX, (not system administrator, just a normal user).
About a week ago I set up an apache/php/postgresql server for my department on company intranet. The distribution I used was debian powerpc.
From what I'd heard I was expecting a pretty rough ride, "redhat is for newbies", "debian is for the experienced", "redhat is making thier distro incomapitible..." etc.
I've got the say the differences I found were minor! All I needed was a bit of "find / -name... " to see where debian puts things and SMALL ammount of RTFM for the rest. This was all done on the command line and I've got to say that anyone who can't handle the differences is probably in the wrong proffession!
When it absolutely positively has to be there.
Our shell accounts at UNC are on AIX boxes. :-)
All of our incoming mail is courtesy of Linux.
But the majority of the mail complex is Solaris,
including everyone's mailboxes.
I think I can say that definitively as I run the
campus mail systems here at UNC.
Chris
Longtime listener, first time caller, and
a former admin of SunSITE.unc.edu.
err. as the guy who started sunsite^Wmetalab^Wibiblio, I should pipe up. the project which preceded sunsite was an internet bulletin board server called laUNChpad. it was our goal, as it is now, to help make information sharing possible world-wide. Sun was nice enough to help foster that project for a number of years as was Cisco, Real, and others. Red Hat was a sponsor to some extent from early in that company's life. And we will be announcing some other sponsors soon.
UNC has one of the best CS departments in the country, but it is a very research focused department. NCSU, where i went to school in the late 60s, has a different focus for their department of CS which is also a fine program. But the information sharing work is not in CS but at UNC in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication and in the School of Information and Library Science where I hold joint appointments.
The UNC computer support folks, called ATN, run AIX, Solaris, Linux and other OSs as they feel is appropriate.
ibiblio is most certainly a part of UNC
Certified Black Helicopter Pilot *** Unwitting Dupe of One World Gov'ment
And these redhat machines really suck. I am sorry to say this, and this truly is not meant as a troll. I'm just telling it how it is for those of you who care.
Previously, the labs all had Solaris installed on Sparcs and Ultra Sparcs. This was fine. I had a very minimal desktop with no special effects or wallpapers. When I sit down to code or browse the web, I just want to open my applications and get the homework done.
Well, now there is this nice glitzy redhat program on the computers. As much as I support linux, it is extremely annoying to have all of the unnecessary graphics that go along with their included Gnome desktop. I do not have time to fiddle with, or learn, the settings to take all that shit off. At one time, only browsing the web, I had a full square inch filled with buttons and task bars! And that was only one portion of the screen; if you had added all the space wasted by buttons and bars, it probably would have been 30% of the desktop. I know you can slide the TWO taskbars out of the way, but its annoying as I don't know what. Especially coming from a minimal Solaris desktop.
All of these graphics noticeably slow down the entire computing experience in the labs. Oh well, it got so bad, I only go to the tiny little lab in Daniel's Hall which luckily doesn't have redhat (yet!).
Again, I am not putting redhat down! All I'm saying is that it is compeletely unneccesary and actually degrades the performance of the labs. (nevermind all of the simulation software that now doesn't work)
----(o)----
UNC in a liberal arts college. NCSU has the top Comp Sci program in the area. UNC is often bashed for having a weak Comp Sci. undergrad program. The standard retort is, "Our graduate program is one of the best in the nation."
Click here to see the real story.
NCSU is 28th, Duke is 33rd, UNC is not ranked.
coderhacker
Now, if all of these kids are determined to go out into the world and support RedHat's potential monopoly and work for Oracle or whatever other company makes "RedHat-only" software, then this was a good move.
Some how I doubt it.
Lazy tonight and wife is hassling me, giving her freeciv to play would make my life peaceful...
~ppppppppö
Folks are writing too much into this event. Project Eonity (Eos for the engineering folks, Unity for everyone else) supposedly worked under the "A given set of requirements is sent out and various vendors bid on them. The winner gets to provide that round of workstations." So this round RHAT wins on software and Dell wins on hardware. If any other vendor can meet the bid requirements and win the bid, they'll probably get it on the next round. And it isn't particularly surprising that the University finally went with PCs. In 1998 the University had to respond to things such as AutoCAD being available only for WIN32 (And parents complaining "My kid is in computer science, but doesn't have a clue on how to fix my Windows 95 machine when he comes home" :-). Toss in a series of Vice Provosts were grooming themselves for corporate jobs and the average idiot bean counter and it becomes a no brainer that a PC based Unix of some flavor would eventually become the standard.
As for the open source claims, I write them off as hype. There are other issues in the area that lead to explanations that are both more plausible and more salient.
Formerly cddukes@eos.ncsu.edu
please try and keep on topic. the original story was about an engineering department. debian clearly belongs in either a political studies or theology department.
thankyou.
you need some more schoolin' there boy. UNC has the top research program in computer science in the area and one of the best in the world -- particularly in virtual reality and in nanomanipulator work. www.cs.unc.edu for more.
the reason that UNC doesn't show in the ranking for *engineering schools* is that UNC's CS department is not in an Engineering school. Founded by Fred "mythical man month" Brooks, the UNC CS department was one of the *first* (if not the first) CS departments in the US. yes it's graduate focused for the main part. and YES I'm a NCSU grad (BS in CS 1972).
Certified Black Helicopter Pilot *** Unwitting Dupe of One World Gov'ment
perhaps I should apply to NCSU now...
-LW
Though this is news to me, it is nice to see a change. We have slowly been switching from SUN Solaris to Dells running NT. This has been terrible, the reliability of the network has been crap since the shift to NT, and the system guys have been getting pretty anal about students installing or modifying anything. (under solaris you could run/install/modify anything in your own user space, under NT you can't touch anything) Unfortunately right now the Redhat labs are all pass coded, the public labs aren't running RedHat yet.
--Mikado
(Sorry about AC post I'm at work)
I think people should be doing non-redhat specific training. For example see linuxcertified.com -drD
You're not bitter, are you Lou?
Then again I have no sense of smell...
I'm glad we're running Linux. NT is a support nightmare in our environment. Linux reinstalls are easy with kickstart. No nasty CD's to cart around.
P.S. For an undergrad that was a nice office for me to use for a year and a half. Huge compared to most. =)
Gary Gatling
-- If there's one thing i can't stand, it's intolerance!
It's kinda funny that Bob Young donated alot of money to UNC to change the name of Sunsite^H^H^H^H^H^HMetalab^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^HIbiblio, but never tried to push Red Hat down UNC's throat (AFAIK, UNC still uses AIX for their main student mail/shell server).
Oh yeah. Maybe it's because there's no engineering department at UNC. Or undergrad CS department. Makes you wonder how Sunsite ended up there in the first place.....
--BlueLines "The cost of living hasn't affected it's popularity." -anonymous
Oh, come on now, I used to work in the IT department of a college for years. Anyone would tell you it's not the source, it's the logic, which for which going mad first is a prerequisite. Once you've lost your mind, it's all very easy, just connect some dots and don't eat too many crayons.
--
Chief Frog Inspector
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Not bitter at all. Glad its working ok. I spent many hours helping set the wheels in motion and am glad its working well. Also glad to be away from the smell in Leazar and Daniels.
I run Redhat both at work and at home and am quite happy with it. I have no problems with Redhat as a company, and none of the problems in the distributions I've used have been severe enough to convince me to switch.
That being said, I actually think a university standardizing on Redhat is a bad idea. A big part of the whole college experience involves diversity and new things. At my school, I got to play around with Sun and SGI boxen, running Solaris and IRIX respectively. J. Random Student can (and, if he really gets into Unix, almost certainly will) install Linux or one of the BSDs on his own PC. Things like Solaris or IRIX aren't nearly as easy to come by. Furthermore, to truely appreciate the depth of Unix and the various issues related to writing portable software, it helps to have experience to more than just Linux.
And now you're stuck in Daniels Hall basement...so are you saying you miss lez100? ;-)
Gary! What's up!
geez, are you still there?
-Dan Streetman
Oh, that's nothing compared to what our Engineering Department did to us.
I had my freshman Intro to Programming class in C. MSVC, but still C since it was an intro class. (I feel sorry for the non-electrical engineers who had to take it in Visual Basic!)
Then, the next year, all of us who want to take the BRAND NEW Computer Engineering Curriculum take a class called Software Methodologies.
This class (and pretty much all subsequent ones) are now in Java.
That means all our knowledge of pointers is now null and void, and in addition we have to learn the language as we write a VERY large project. Needless to say, mine didn't work. (Still got an A because it almost worked though... fuzzy grading I guess)
In the CS department, my Data Structures class was in Java, but Operating Systems has so far been in C. There might be others involved, like maybe Fortran, as we might actually get to use our VAX for something more than a Web page storage system. I don't know yet. Ask me next week.
Of course, for Senior Design, we can use ALGOL-60 if it works for our project. It would be a bit tough to create an object-oriented GUI from that, though.
Glückwünsche, haben Sie Slashdot ermordet, indem Sie zum korporativen Druck beugten und Subskriptionen einlei
So I hope someone plans on protecting this "Open Source Network" from all the kiddies of the world... Otherwise, ncsu.edu is gonna be banned at all major routers. Hooray for RedHat exploits.
...why is my tution going to be $300 more next semester @NCSU? And why has it DOUBLED in the last 5 years when it took more than 30 to do the previous 'doubling'? HUH???!!! HUH?!!!!! I thought so.
Anyway, down to serious stuff.
1) State runs toooons of shit. It will NEVER NEVER EVER EVER be all one sys. NEVER. The middle east will be 100% white dove brother hugging and loving peace before that happens. Trust me.
2) RH has been in the [95% Open to ALL students btw, if you don't have a login, you shouldn't be on campus folks, quit bitching, we don't want the street bums taking up the good nap couches in the Library anyway] labs, esp Leazar, for a good while already. So has Sun, NT, and god help us, Macs.
3) State computer guys couldn't find their own rear ends with a flashlight. But at least we have uber-bandwidth, and the Gaming crowd is strong. You can always frag a friend online, on-campus.
-CPU/CSC/EE damn right! TRI-program...at least if I don't go insane first.
I'm an NCSU student, and I have to give this news a fully qualified "Huh?".
/tmp larger are my two suggestions for now) and some of this is tougher. I'd prefer a *real* fix for the 16-bit UID problem, rather than just trying to cram them all into 16 bits, (we have a lot of accounts here at NCSU) but that would require a kernel patch, and could break other things, including potentially a lot of userland programs. But this is a fix that I imagine a lot of people will need eventually, and might help the adoption of Linux into large businesses organizations.
Yes, we have some boxes running "EOS/Linux" now, yes, they're based around Red Hat, yes it has some problems.
Of course, it's better than the NT realm configuration (I don't know *where* that came from!) that the OTHER Dells on campus have, but it isn't as stable as the Solaris boxes yet.
Some of this is just how the kit is put together, (Katz and 'jag could fix that easily--tighten the LILO configuration some, and make
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Only select portions of NCSU (mainliny in Engineering & PAMS - Physical & Applied Math Sciences) are using open source software at the moment. The business logic for the financial aid office isn't one of them at this time.
-Michael [Remove two parts of address to mail me]
Seems like RedHat might be in this the same way MS and their little deals with colleges were done. Influence the university to require/use their operating system to force continued use and/or a os-centric student product.
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ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
At my beloved alma matter the University of Utah (go Utes!), M$ gave a ton of cash and some new computers to the CS department, resulting in a mandatory NT programming class ( worst class ever... ). I guess that ensures that everyone gets exposed to NT, and maybe someone will like it (uhhh.... yeah.... go with that chief.. ). At least now Linux can compete for student eyeballs.
Even if it is one distro, at least we have the oppertunity to expose students to Linux and get them used to configuring and building systems. If nothing else, "forcing" them to use Linux looks good on the ol' resume. Also, Red Hat has a lot of interest in embedded systems, so that might mean that there will be some more emphasis toward programming for small platforms, and not just a 128 MB dual processor SPARC. My point being, it gives competition to M$ and it gives a change of pace to the SPARC dominated university world.
Then again, what CS majors are not already using linux????
Do you have Linux and a DotPal? Click here now!
Personally, I didn't bother with the upgrade-to-RH7-gasp-its-broken-time-to-switch cycle. Before I got around to buying Red Hat 7 (Fry's was out of copies, no high-bandwidth connection to download ISOs yet) I ordered Potato disks from CheapBytes.
It took about a week to get everything up to the point where it's running as it was before (and I anxiously await 'official' XFree4 packages so I can have decent 3D with my Diamond Viper 770) but I like it a lot. When I finally shell out for DSL, I can tell apt-get upgrade is going to be my best friend...
Jay (=
that schools catch up with whats really going on in the buisness world. Now if community college could just catch up. Considering the fact that universities are major backers of the unix community, why has it taken so long for a credible school to fully endorse a linux related path of education? Heck, Windows was in schools in shorter time than linux was.
"sex on tv is bad, you might fall off..."
I lost my concept of community when my community lost all concept of me.
...once they open source my tuition.
BOSTON SUCKS!
OK, that was bad.
Incorrect. NCSU libaries offer Laptops for check out with the Realm Kit for Red Hat Linux on them. But you are correct in saying that the computers for surfing are Windows.
-Michael [Remove two parts of address to mail me]
I'm just curious - is there any CS department out there left that *isn't* using at least some Linux or BSD boxes?
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Although NCSU has been infested with Linux sympathizers for years and NCSU is only one of hundreds of universities offering CS programs, I can't imagine Microsoft would idly sit at this news. Throw a few bucks at them, maybe a dozen scholarships, then twist a few arms?
--
Chief Frog Inspector
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
We want linux to be popular so vendors will support applications...but only in the right venue do we want this distro or that distro. I'm all for this type of integration. Many people will be converted to linux and thus create that broad user base we need for vendors to start supporting the applications we all want. One way or another it's _still_ linux, support it in whatever form because it's making camputing experiences better for all of us.
It doesn't suprise me at all that the first post in this topic is a redhat-bashing post. Yet, Redhat is again taking some really positive steps to promote linux, and help bring it to the next level.
Sure, they slap the Redhat name on it, but you know it's gonna be some highly customized installation set up by the school that has little if anything to do with the regular retail install.
But, they are again putting a lot of effort, dedicating people to promote linux in areas where it needs it most, and again, they seem to get nothing but contempt in return.
"why not debian" "why not slackware" I'm sure we'll see dozens of times in this thread. The facts are that noone connected with those distributions are doing anything along these lines to promote Linux.
You may not like Redhat as a company. You may not like Redhat linux as a distribution. But you should recognize, and give them credit for at least some of the efforts they are making, because we all benefit in the long run.
________