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Feasibility of Linux for Public-Access Labs?
Benanov asks: "I'm doing a literature review on the Feasibility of Linux for a public-access lab (i.e. not Computer Science students at a university but instead the entire student body would have a login), and I haven't found any detailed studies about any places where this is actually done. If you know of any citeable sources about studies / reviews, I'd really appreciate it."
The Technical University of Darmstadt had quite a few dual-boot Linux/Windows machines in public labs. This was 3 years ago so I don't know if this is still the case.
Blaze a trail to the New World
Carnegie Mellon has a large network for about 5,000 current undergrads, 1,000 current graduate students, and hundreds of staffers (not to mention 'miscellaneous' accounts). Most people use it to log into Windows or Macintosh systems on campus, since that's what they're used to. Furthermore, the default window manager on Linux and Solaris is mwm (Motif Window Manager), which is absolutely horrible. Among other things, it completely ceases to work if NUM LOCK is on. There's been talk about switching over to GNOME as the default, but as of now people have to ask each other how to switch to Windowmaker, FVWM, or the current GNOME environment.
One time early in the academic year, I noticed a user had forgotten to log out. In the xterm that had been opened with mwm, I saw:
% netscape
% netscape
% netscape
% netscape
% aol
bash: aol: command not found
% aol
bash: aol: command not found
% aol.com
bash: aol.com: command not found
% aol.com
bash: aol.com: command not found
% netscape.com
bash: netscape.com: command not found
Make all the jokes you want about LARTing the newbies, but there were absolutely no options on screen. Furthermore, there are no solid equivalents for popular Windows or Macintosh software packages on Linux or Solaris. IE for Solaris is lackluster compared to Windows, Mozilla is still unreliable and doesn't render some sites properly (they were designed for IE; live with it), GIMP is no substitute for Photoshop, and StarOffice is still nowhere close to Microsoft Office.
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Just kidding...
Well, at Columbia, they have all these dumb terminals, which run Linux and an X session. They're not bad for checkin' yer mail, but they don't allow you to do much else. For some application where the types of software needed are very limited, I think that it's prolly great.
For the real computers labs, for the non-cs types, they are mostly Windows (NT or some such) or Mac. The NT machines are pretty well locked-down and something like this would be quite easy to achieve; it would probably even be more secure (well maybe) with Linux.
I guess the real thing is choosing software. OpenOffice is alright, but I don't know if random people are actually going to want to write papers with it. I mean, I have, but...well...people might have some issues with their floppies. That's probably the biggest thing. Dang floppies.
You should really use DOS and WordPerfect 5.1, maybe Lotus 1-2-3.
The University of Texas at Dallas does it. There is a lab full of Red Hat Linux computers and Sun Ray terminals.
Though their web site is a bit sparse on details, you could probably shoot an email to a member of the staff. They're friendly people, and I'm sure they'd be willing to help you out.
Having been responsible for a school computer lab, I say screw those users. They can use what I offer them or they can go somewhere else. I lost count of the number of times I had to re-image my relatively few machines because some idiot decided they absolutely had to have AIM (which hosed one of the math programs we used, which was the actual purpose of the lab).
What are open school labs for? Internet chat? No. Games? No. The purpose of open labs is to provide computers for people who can't afford their own so they can get their work done. That means word processing, spreadsheets, maybe some web browsing. All of those things can be done using Linux and various free packages. They need to edit or print out their MS Word document that they wrote at home? OpenOffice will do that just fine. The only problem I've ever had with it handling MS documents was some wrong background colors in an Excel spreadsheet, which is easily fixed.
As for the confusion, that's what lab assistants are for. "That icon is the web browser, that one is the word processor..." Quick and easy, and exactly the sort of brain dead stuff every lab assistant has to deal with all day, every day, regardless of Operating System.
For the few people who absolutely have to have Windows or Mac programs, have a few specialized labs set up for them. That's neither new nor different in a college environment, where just about every department has at least a small lab with some computers set up for the specific needs of the students taking those classes.
If a student wants to use a program not offered in the open lab, they can go find the department that would use that software and make an arrangement, or they can get their own damn computer.
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I know this was meant to be "funny" but the last few releases of RH ship with basically everything off by default except for an ssh-server. And if ya can't trust OpenSSH, what CAN you trust? :)
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