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Office-Worker Linux: It's Here and It Works
A few weeks ago, dot.kde.org featured a great why-should-this-be-amazing story about Linux being used as the day-to-day desktop operating system for city employees in Largo, Florida. Roblimo got a chance to see the system in action to find out how ordinary office workers are proving that the old "Linux is tough to use" shibboleth is nothing but FUD, and how a medium-sized city is saving buckets of money by minimizing the tax dollars spent on licenses and hardware. Oh, and they've also pre-empted the kind of costs (in hassle and money) that can face any organization that Microsoft suspects may have some licenses out of order. This is the kind of thing every elected official should have politely waved in his or her face by concerned taxpayers. The Largo system uses KDE on Red Hat, but since both KDE and Gnome are paying much attention to user interface, similar systems could easily be running on various combinations of hardware / distribution / desktop system.
This story is nothing but mental Linux masturbation. It's an article posted on a Linux oriented website (dot.kde.org), linked to on an admittedly pro-Linux weblog, and being discussed by a group of pro-Linux computer users.
Your post is totally on topic. That's what I love about slashdot, the official blurb didn't mention the potential bias, so you did. The same thing happens with usefull links here too.
Hopefully a (linux) independant news site/paper will pick this up and confirm the numbers and get new quotes, stats, budget figures, and new interview material.
Such an article could be very powerfull once coaberated. Our government agencies occationally need a kick in the butt to resist slothy/financially stupid behavior.
Novel theory: Modern Man evolved from psychopath
I just had to shove Windows 2000 down the throats of my sales force. Transition from NT4.0. You should have heard the bitching/whining/crying/demands/etc... It doesnt matter what you put in front of them, they will piss-and-moan if it is different in any way. (Hell 2 years ago when I got here and made NT4.0 erase the login-name from the login screen for security they tied to hang me!) Changeing them to KDE or Gnome is no harder than any other change. In fact the Linux change will make the admin's life a dream. (No more idiots installing software that makes the system unstable!!! Damned AOL on NT!)
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I had this probem with SO once,where I was unable to start it after a crash. What I found out was that there was a dialoge box popping up asking me if I wanted to restore the auto-save files. For some reason, the window manager (Sawfish) didn't like this, and refused to display the pop-up dialoge. Star office would appear to just hang. I was able to start X wihout any window manager (xinit) and start Star Office, the dialogue box popped up, I clicked yes, to restore my auto-saves (I had over 10 documents open) and everything worked smoothly thereafter.