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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 =)
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?
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
Where Your Vote Should Go
great comedy company.
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.
... 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"
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
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.
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.
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"
For instance, there is nothing stopping anyone at the university from modifying the system to suit its own purposes, or poke around to learn what's going on. Thus open source software promotes, rather than inhibits the ideals of a university. Even standardizing on a single distro like RH cannot heavyhandledly control its destiny.
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You were a moderator with 5 points. You should have read the moderator guidelines before you did any moderating
State has and will always be (hopefully) a unix shop, but even when they standardized on various operating systems there was always something that required one OS or the other. I think the systems folks that run EOS/Unity do a FABULOUS job keeping everything humming along. I never really had respect for the job they did at State until I got out in the real world and realized how screwed up most corporate networks are!
As for blessing a language...I took classes in Java, C++, perl and smalltalk while at State. Granted they do tend to 'prefer' one or the other but they do allow you to choose as you see fit. However the responsibility is on the student to sign up for those classes.
Looking @ the top lists on US new and world report is dumb. Tufts which is higher rated than ym school.... uses JAVASCRIPT for its CS introduction.. We produced bruce schneier.. ok?
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.
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
[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
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
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.
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
While it is highly admirable for ncsu to support a program like this, we do need to be realistic about it. This decision is a good decision, and I wholeheartedly support it, but at it's core, it is a financial decision. As the workstations in the labs on campus became outdated, the "powers that be" wanted to replace them with pc's. A study found that in order to replace them with NT workstations and provide adequate support, an additional 90+ sysadmins would have to be hired, thus erasing any potential savings from investing in pc's vs. traditional unix boxen. Adapting linux to work with eos was a logical (and frugal) choice...especially with rh just down the road. -dmb What do you think it is, a space helmet for a cow? -- the 4th Doctor
What do you think it is, a space helmet for a cow? -- the 4th Doctor
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
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
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 (=
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.
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