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Perception of Linux Among IT Undergrads
iconian writes: "The Linux Journal has a story on IT students and their perception of Linux. One of the funnier myths perceived to be true is that 'Microsoft's technical support is the best in the industry and is superior to that offered by the Linux community.' It just goes to show how little real world experience students have. It's a bit disturbing considering they will be the next generation of technology workers."
You need to know where to look.
A few weeks ago the Exchange 2000 server decided it was going to roll over and die and to corrupt the mailbox stores with it. We tried restoring (which took 30 minutes to pull off of tape) but it was a no go. When the system state backups didn't fly, we realized we might need to rebuild the server from scratch...
Instead of wasting 2 hours pulling off a stock Win2K Server image and reconfiguring everything, MS support actually referenced a few obscure cases and we had it resolved in about 25 minutes.
A few months before a power surge sporked out a rackmount running Samba on Linux 2.4.x. Fsck laughed at us and we had a LOT of data to pull off too. It was going to take about 3 hours to restore the data from tapes. So we gave IBM a call while we were restoring. Only took about 20 or so minutes to get an answer and back up and running.
Verdict? I don't see any problem with Linux support as long as you have a contract of sorts. I wouldn't dare leave big messes or small disasters to usenet or forums -- for ANY OS. That's fine for configuration quirks, or trying something new on a test server, but when something needs to be fixed and you've tried everything in the run book, you need someone you can rely on.
And for the record, with the exception of a burp each, both the Linux and Windows 2000 servers are humming along without a problem. I have no real preference -- they each do their job and do it well.
I attend the Univ. of RI and I am a CE major. Its nauseaing to see all the incoming freshmen, even sophmores and juniors that have no clue about Unix based OSs in general.
"If anyone had told me back then that getting back to embarrassingly primitive UNIX would be the great hope and investment obsession of the year 2000, merely because it's name was changed to LINUX and its source code was opened up again, I never would have had the stomach or the heart to continue in computer science."
-- Jaron Lanier
I completely disagree.
I have been teaching classes at a local college for six years and my experience has been completely different. A majority of the students in my evening and weekend classes are "working stiffs," but many of these "working stiffs" are working in CS fields and are more knowledgable than the whiny brats in my daytime classes that are attending school and are funded by the "Bank of Daddy."
Age doesn't necessarily determine whether or not someone understands and uses *nix or the "other operating systems." The "working stiffs" in my evening and weekend classes tended to have more practical experience in computer science, including more exposure to a wider variety of operating systems, than their daytime counterparts.
When I teach evening classes, I am used to people being able to follow along when I use Vim and Cygwin so that I can feel at home and productive in the school-mandated MS OS. My first daytime class was an eye opener! I spent WAY too much time explaining that ls is the same as dir (except better), that less is type (but with functionality), etc. At first, the blank stare "deer-in-the-headlights" looks that I got when I didn't explain such things surprised me. Then I realized that a majority of my day students seemed to care more about their grade than about the quality of the education they were receiving.
Yes, there are generalizations in what I have typed, but after my second daytime class, I vowed never to teach another class between 8am and 5pm.
.sig wanted. Inquire within.
I understand what you are trying to say - but the resume thing is a poor example.
I personally use Linux as my main OS (read as 90% of my computing time - the other 10% is Black and White playing). But... My resume is still done in Word2k.
Why? Well, I first did it years ago in Word95. When I opened it in StarOffice 5.2 - it opened just fine (I use a bunch of crazy formatting to make it all fit so I was amazed). So I thought, great! But then I edited it in SO and saved it in Word format and e-mailed it to myself so I could print it out at Kinko's. Lo and behold when I got to kinkos and opened it - almost all of the formatting was lost and I had to redo the whole thing in Word2k. (have recently tried beta6 with same results)
I wouldn't want a potential job to be given to someone else because their formatting stayed, and mine didn't - so I am going to stick with using Word2k for my resume.
My School is great (UMR) - we even learn assembly on Sparc processors, and we usually don't have to code in any particular language or for any particular OS. But unfortunately most HR departments out there are not so open, and Word is the defacto standard, so that is what I have to use.
BTW - This post stuck out to me because I use a pirated copy of Win2k and Office2k to do my Resume - so you really struck a nerve.
Derek
Have you ever called a paid support line and been told "We don't have a fix for that problem handy, however, if you'd like to upgrade to our platinum support package, I could...blah...blah...blah...[Insert Sales Pitch Here]"?
I have. It left a pretty bad taste in my mouth for commercial support offerings.
Here at Iowa State University, linux is perceived as the god of all operating systems. More students are fed up with Microsoft and their holes, and even more faculty and staff, as well as departments, are following right along. Unfortunately, ISU signed off on a Microsoft campus agreement making linux on the average desktop a no-go, but most students who work in IT-related fields are installing linux. The Ames Area Free Unix Group for Information Technology (AAFUGIT) is rapidly growing and there is an increase in newby questions.
I think the sample for this census should've been expanded to more Universities/colleges. Perhaps the places where this is really a problem is places like Vatterott and DeVry and what not, where people are trained to do a particular thing and not the science behind it. Anyway with a decent background in computer hardware and software can't deny the power of linux. As I've told many people I've converted, "if you really want to learn networking and what-not, you can't learn by clicking a few buttons (like in Windows) - you have to go to the source...in a matter of speaking."
Show me a student with $200 to fork over for support. On the other hand, show me a student who could use learning about databases by setting one up. I have SAP, Sybase, Oracle and MySQL discs lying around that I got for free by writing to the companies. They aren't all licensed for commercial use, but they all have kickass support - and the Open Source one has some of the best, for free, pay by incident and contract.
If you're not talking "support for a student" level stuff, I've had eight Oracle consultants under my department farting away time in the cubicles we provided as they played the blame game with IBM over an Oracle on AIX installation... for nearly three weeks. In retrospect, walking in and wiping all partitions and telling them to rebuild the damn installation would have been quicker and cheaper. When I needed support from TCX, I had bought a year of support, ran into a problem with a persistant connect through a firewall. I gave them an account on my system, went home, came back the next day, and *they* had called the firewall company, gotten support, and had provided precise step by step instructions to fix the problem... on the firewall. They knew it wasn't their problem - but they got it working.
You're the one who brought up Databases, so I figured I'd reply in that vein. As for Linux itself, I've *never* run into a problem that a little Google or mailing list archive searching didn't resolve quickly.
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Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
But you're right. I get answers faster through IRC and/or USENET posts than though MS tech support almost every time
My $0.02 - We had a problem with Services For Mac on a win2k server - it was causing the SYSTEM process to go to 100% and stay there. Logged a call, paid the $200. - Got first level support on the phone withing in 10 minutes - Useless as tits on a bull. They basicly search the KB for you. - Then the problem was escalated to regional support.
Got a phone call from a guy called Leon Booth @ microsoft regional support, and he was FANTASTIC! - Got a direct phone number @ e-mail to use for communicating with him for the length of this problem.
To cut a long story short, 2 days later still no success, so we started monitoring thread creation calls (they send some utilities to do this) - Leon sent this to the guys that wrote the services for mac service, they suggested a registry hack, which actaully fixed the problem.
Our support guy was saying that if it did not fix the problem the MS would send a tech out with a debug box? (a box that sits next to our server and traces every call), and send the results to the US for analysis - all for the $200. Now try and get that service from a guy at the end of IRC!
Anyway, Leon organised a refund of the $200 support charge because it was deamed a 'bug'
At my university (of Arizona), MS sponsors all sorts of activities for the CS department. This has a huge influence on what the student hear and think. I'm a CS minor, its a hobby, and all the TA's for the intro course, in Java no less, are all MS "enthusiasts." Its an odd sight looking around at the kids grinning like idiots over their Windows based laptops, and the "teachers" wearing XBOX caps. The Prof did an informal survey at the begining of the course, and like others suggested, by far most students are in it for the money, having little previous computer experience. They are ripe for the picking by MS. It is really sad. The CS department wouldn't even set up remote homework collection for our class, because most of the TA's had no unix experience, and would not be able to access our turned in homework via ssh. At least every single piece of the UofA's network/ CS department servers are Unix. Its odd though, the fact that a school does not use MS products for their networks, yet breeds graduates that toe the MS line.
Funny, calling MS about issues with AutoCad or Oracle hasn't ever gotten us anywhere. We always had to call the company who we bought the product from.
However RedHat will support anything on their distribution CDs and I know where I can find BSD support for damn near anything (most of the core team is available for around $350 US an hour for phone support, Jordan used to do onsite support for a little more plus airfare -- and they'll support 75% of the ports tree (6000+ programs)).
MS supports what they ship, just like Oracle, Redhat, PGSQL Inc, and various other companies support their own products.
It's seldom that you can call a single vendor unless it's Dell or Gateway as you've had custom configured boxes sent your way -- in which case they support exactly what they ship too!
Rod Taylor
A few months ago, I had an issue with sound under the latest 2.4 series kernels. This was with the trident driver and an ALi 1535+ southbridge. I have been using Linux as my sole desktop operating system for a while, and sound is very important for desktop/gaming use. This bug caused an OOPS when the module was loaded, which became a serious problem.
I read Documentation/oops-tracing.txt, and I submitted my report with whatever information I could figure out. What did I get in response? Within four days, 7 people were talking on this thread, including kernel giants Alan Cox and RML. Within four days, I had a patch that made this problem go away. (turned out to be bigger than just my card)
Do you really think that I could have gotten that kind of support from Microsoft? You might say that four days is a lot. But do you think I'd have ever gotten anywhere with MS? Even if I could get the level of debugging as I did from ksymoops, I'd have gotten shoved around. Microsoft would claim that its the manufacturer's responsibility, and the manufacturer would certainly not be receptive to any kind of technical description of a problem from a customer.
We're the guys who call the DSL company and have to say "Your access concentrator is sending a PADT packet to terminate the session," with the only response being "Sir, can you tell me if your modem is on?" I've actually tricked at least 2 of their techies into believing that I'm running Windows.
Verizon: Now open up Network Neighborhood.
Me: Hold on a second. It's still warming up... Oh damn, it hung. Let me reboot.
I didn't pay a cent for support. In exchange for a few minutes of my time learning to use ksymoops, I got replies from some of the top kernel developers, and got the problem fixed. Beat that, Microsoft.
Michael F. Robbins
We didn't have to deal with UNIX/Linux much outside of a couple classes, though, so it was really easy for students to hate it, and not know how to use it, which was really quite sad.
The first step was to specify the assignment in number of words, 200 or 500 words instead of 1/2 page or 1 page. After that, it was sort of a carrot and stick thing.
Carrots:
- My web pages worked in their favorite browsers.
- The web was (still is) trendy.
Sticks:Use the office hours to find a way in which they are willing to try it and be prepared to meet them more than half way. If you make the experience convenient and useful, then they'll also tell they colleagues. But if you don't ask, you don't get.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
nam37 writes:
when Ive had a NT/2000 or MSSQL issues I've paid my $200 bucks and got it worked out... everytime.
If everytime I've had an issue with a Microsoft product, I've paid the $200 to open a trouble ticket with the dialup support, the non-profit organization for which I work would have gone broke. To that end, I haven't tried their phone support.
I have tried other companies phone support (iPlanet, Network Associates, FICS, off the top of my head), and generally found phone support to be a useless waste of time and money. Often I find I know more about the product than the person I'm paying to help me with it. I avoid it whenever I can.
On the other end of tech support, their manuals and documentation, I do have a MSDN Unlimited subscription, which gives me access to a large quantity of their technical documentation both on and offline. I have to say their documentation has some good parts, more than I had expected. I also have to say that the indexing(offline) and searching(online) features of their library are very very poor, and often inaccurate. This makes their documentation much harder to use.
Likewise, I have never tried Linuxcare or any of the other Linux telephone support people. I have found documentation for a typical Free Software package more complete (with a few exceptions) and much better organized (with a few exceptions). Also, with a Free Software package, you have the ultimate canonical documentation, the source code.
Anytime I've had a Linux issue I have basically been told to RTFM.
If you haven't read the manual, you shouldn't be asking on the lists/IRC chanels/newsgroups/whatever, nobody is on the list to read the manual for you. If you are looking for someone to hold your hand so you don't have to read documentation, hire a consultant.
Whenever I've made sure to read the existing documentation first, and made sure to ask a mailing list having something to do with the package I'm having trouble with, I've often gotten higher quality help faster than I've ever gotten with any corporate phone support.
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Open mind, insert foot.