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Aussie Uni Dumps Dual-Boot In Favor of Linux
kNIGits writes "News.com.au is reporting that the University of Wollongong have dumped their previously dual-boot installations in favour of booting Linux only. Among other reasons, staff enjoy the ease with which they can 'lock down' first year students, stopping them messing with the systems prior to learning anything about them."
I've met a tech who was working for a high-school, and 90% of his time was used in fixing Windoze computers after students messed-up with them. That changed when they installed some cards (don't remember the name of the cards) with RAM on them that effectively made the hard disks read-only, and stored in RAM whatever was written on the hard-disks.
So, whenever a PC was screwed-up, all you did was power-cycle it once!
The Uni of New South Wales Computer Science and Engineering department has been running unix/linux for years, no duel boot.
8 years ago it was Sun Solaris.
5 Years ago they moved to Intel Solaris
Now they have (or are) moving to Intel Linux.
anyway, good stuff at Uni of Wollongong.
- secure it - and most linuxes are reasonably secure out-the-box these days
- set a strong root password. Give the students limited sudo access if necessary
- Probably a little bit of hardware stuff (disable floppy booting etc)
- Maybe setting up a restricted shell or GUI environment
But basically, students would be pretty safe on a linux box without root access. And it's simple and well-known to set up. Compare that with Windows Policy Editor. Does anyone really use it? Maybe a few but I'm sure it's not as well documented or as well tested and probably not as robust as simply locking out root access to a linux box.Why would anyone want to use a text editor that is not vi?
By locking down, I think they mean students can go in and randomly format the drive like they could in a stock Win9x setup.
They also mention that they like linux because it's easy to give to students. They don't have to worry about costs or licensing, they just hand the students a CD and they're on their way.
"We'd rather explain how things work. We do that by taking things apart and putting them back together again, rather than just showing people how to use particular GUIs that other people have designed. It's our belief that open-source software better explains those concepts," he said.
That seems pretty logical to me. The article really wasn't about taking away freedom at all.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
People have been saying for years that Slashdotters don't read the article, so I thought that I'd test the theory. I'd submitted the story and highlighted something insignificant about the article in the submission. Browsing through this page, I see lots of people discussing merely what I wrote at the top - 'locking down' students. If people actually read the article, they'd see that it was more about teaching software development in an open source environment, and also the fact that they can give free Linux cds to the students to replicate their training systems at home.
What I'd like to know is - how can the Slashdot Effect exist when no-one clicks through to read the article?
This karma-reducing social experiment was proudly brought to you by kNIGits in Australia.
It is making ground in IT courses because Linux is both easy to lock-down, easy to pull apart and offers simple licensing for distribution to students.
Please stop fixating on the whole locking down bit!
Timothy craftily negelected to list anything but the potentially inflammatory and sensational 'lock down' phrase. It's EASIER for them to use Linux (and makes more sense and it's CHEAPER), not "they can't lock down Windows". These are newbies who DO know how to fuck up a Window machine pronto. They'll have to do some learning before they can pull a good cock up of their Linux box. And since this is a Uni, students learning is kind of high on their list of 'things we want to happen'.
And please take note this is not the whole Uni. My girlfriend works there and she (and her whole department) uses Macs. But it is a step, IMHO, in the right direction for UOW.
- I am made of meat.
Being at UoW and knowing the people who did this I can't say it's a surprise. The only things that windows were really used for in those labs were software engineering type programs and Word/Excel for the first years and non-compsci people who used the lab.
There are other compsci labs around that haven't been dual boot for longer than this. The article also doesn't mention anything about the proportion of CompSci(linux) machines compared the number of mac/wintel machines around the uni which I'd estimate at around 85-90%
At least the compsci department support staff are always trying new things, actually being taking initiative about things. kudos guys. see you for a drink soon.
"Dr McDonald said in teaching open-source platforms to students it is important not to "just ram open-source issues down their throats. It's important to explain why there is a difference in philosophy, why it's reasonable to not to totally tread the path of one particular vendor, one particular monopoly."
I wonder WHICH monopoly he refers to?
I think it's important to teach skills and not languages. The platform shouldn't really matter. But what I read there is "we're gonna teach non-proprietary solutions". I don't think the OS matters for the undergrads.
I learned programming on Solaris and later Linux, and honestly there's no real difference between them for 95% of what you do in school, since you are NOT administering the box, and the interesting tools are opensource, portable, and provided by the school - you just have to USE them. This probably holds true for BSD as well.
I do believe that we shouldn't be teaching kids to develop in MSVC++ and MFC. I think that's god-awful - we should learn to use makefiles and know the dependencies in our code, and not waste time on things that aren't portable to our jobs, on a yet-to-be-determined platform.
I worked as a tech at a local high school for a year.
I can tell you that the lab tech who obsesses over Quake is going to lose. You've got 0 budget and the products to secure the network are chosen by unqualified people who got the job of head of IT in the district because in 1985 they were teaching second grade and happened to tinker with an Apple II at home...
The smart ones just secure against the stupid people and look for the smarter ones and bargain with them that you'll let them play quake if they keep out of the pr0n and viruses, and they kind of keep their eye out for stupid people trying to ruin it all for them.
BTW, Rarely are the colleges any better. They have better heads of departments, but their main workers are CS students without the motivation to find a higher paying job in industry. (I generalize, of course, but I haven't seen many exceptions.)
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(OBTopic: nice win for Linux. I always thought that Linux might make a superior corporate solution for precisely these reasons. In a non-development environment, only a system administrator should be able to install an applicaition, for example.
However, I know that Apple tried to play both sides of the fence as well, and they never had much success breaking into the desktop side of Multinationalica.)