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."

Comments

Hehehehe...

[Pig Hogger]

Linux to lock down... Who'd have thought...

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!

Re:Hehehehe...

[Jester998]

The cards you're thinking of are often called "Sheriff Cards".

Apparently they have them in my old high school now. Poor kids... hacking the network was one of the more fun things about high school. :)

Re:Hehehehe...

[ChrisBennett]

There is a software solution for Windows called DeepFreeze. It works very well. I love seeing the look on faces when they delete random .dlls or change wallpaper only to find that they magically re-appear when the system reboots.

Re:Hehehehe...

[Anonymous Coward]

A undergrad lab at my alma mater (Stony Brook) had an ingenious solution: a pile of network-booting machines that automatically mirrored the "official" disk image upon detecting changes. This way, students could come in, install some other operating system for a while (other than the default FreeBSD install), and then just reboot the machine to return it to its original state. No reliance on any special software like that Windows deepfreeze thing, or assumptions about not having physical access to machines. Very elegant.

Re:Hehehehe...

[Feztaa]

Older versions of DeepFreeze were pretty funny. Set the system clock sufficiently far into the future, and it magically crashed. The first thing you do after that is delete DeepFreeze, and you have no more DeepFreeze problem ;)

Re:Hehehehe...

[Black Copter Control]

Either way, PE is a lot easier, as well as the numerous other packages avail., than re-OSing the campus, or installing hardware into every machine.

Windows was originally designed around the presumption that there was really only one user on the system, and that user could/should do whatver (s)he wanted. To that was added the eventual realization that Oops! That's not always the case.

This has resulted in the back-ending of all sorts of security hacks onto what is still, essentially, a single-user system. A side effect of this is all sorts of special cases and wierd holes in the design of Windows that results in the need for things like PE.

Unix, on the other hand was designed as a multi-user system almost from day one. In this context, a single user system is simply the special case of N==1. Locking down a Linux system requires little more than putting passwords on GRUB and the CMOS editor, and possibly pulling the setuid bit from some questionable binaries. Once that's done, there's little that a non-root user can do beyond trashing their own account, or various DOS type stupidities (which can often be responded to by a good sysadmin).

Beyond that, the ability to prevent first-year stupidity is only one of the reasons why Linux was chosen as the standard for first-year students. Not having to worry about being sued when the students post the source code that you gave them (under some sort of non-disclosure agreement) on the net when asking for an answer to a question is another. Multiple GUI desktops, extensibility and totally free access to the source code are some of the others.

Re:Hehehehe...

[jonadab]

> Yeah, I'd say that learning Windows (aside from administration)
> is really just learning an application: explorer.

Um, have you ever tried to administer a Windows box? Knowing
Explorer is what you take for granted; it's the undocumented stuff
that you have to know to survive. You're dead in the water if you
aren't comfortable with the registry, for example. First time any
problem crops up, you'd best know how to work with cabinets, and
which undocumented batch files that get created by install processes
are run on startup and, if broken, have to be deleted in order to
restore the system to a bootable state. (And no, I'm not talking
about AUTOEXEC.BAT; if you thought that was what I meant, you'll
end up formatting the drive the first time anything goes wrong, but
not until after you pull out your hair first.)

The difference between Windows and Linux is not one of complexity;
Windows and Linux have roughly the same amount of complexity. The
difference is one of documentation: Linux has some. (The other
difference is consistency in terms of the visual appearance of UI
widgets; almost all Windows apps use the same widget set. (That's
a good thing.) RedHat is working on this problem, but their
solution is incomplete at this time.)

Re:Hehehehe...

[Jeffrey Baker]

If the program was any good in the first place, it wouldn't let you set the clock. There is no legitimate multiuser system where a normal user can diddle the clock.

UNSW

[Slurpee]

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.

The article.

[Anonymous Coward]

Linux taking over at uni
Chris Jenkins
17Dec02

LINUX is making inroads into the nation's universities, pushing Windows, Unix and Apple operating systems off the desktops of first-year IT students.

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.

At the University of Wollongong, which has about 1700 computer science students, machines in first-year labs that used to boot from either Windows or Linux have been changed to Linux only.

"We get large number of inexperienced people in first-year and we are really trying to keep down our overheads and concentrate our professional support more in the later years," said Les Ohlbach, operations manager for the university's Department of Informatics."

"The best way to control the first-years was to put them in a Linux-only environment where you can lock it down pretty well."

Students moved to Unix and Windows in second- and third- year, he said, with Macs used for multimedia training.

At the University of Western Australia, which has around 1650 students in its computer science courses, Linux has totally supplanted more traditional Unix distributions, such as Sun's Solaris in the school of computer science and software engineering.

UWA's senior lecturer in computer science and software engineering Chris McDonald said Unix was dropped from teaching around 1995, and was no longer specifically required for any research projects.

UWA recently dropped Apple from its IT education programs in the school, for the same reason that Unix was abandoned -- expensive proprietary hardware.

"It wasn't so much the [Unix] operating system costs, because it usually came with the machine or we could get pretty good prices as an educational institution," he said.

Linux was easier to give to students for home use, Dr McDonald said.

"If we were using Solaris or HP-UX or something like that, I'm sure there would be very different and costly licensing issues involved," he said.

"We are trying to move to an environment where what we provide in the laboratories can be mirrored in the students' home."

Mr Ohlbach said the University of Wollongong favours Linux for first-years for a similar reason.

"We are teaching programming, so they [students] need to run all sorts of IDEs and development environments. On Linux they can quite easily do most of their code at home at fairly low cost," he said.

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."

However, Dr McDonald said UWA's school of computer science and software engineering was part of Microsoft's academic alliance program, which allowed the free distribution of Microsoft operating systems to enrolled students.

The school used Linux and Windows to teach operating systems.

"It's good to show not just the similarities, but more importantly the differences."

Linux allowed better teaching of the principles behind software development, he said.

"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.

"Personally, I think that just showing students how to use operating systems tools and networking tools, is more training than education.

"From 2003 UWA's school of computer science and software engineering will be using Linux, in preference to Windows, for our first-year Foundations of IT unit."

Mr Ohlbach said it was important for students to have exposure to multiple operating systems and development environments.

"Anybody wanting to be a professional computer science person, or an IT person, generally doesn't want to be seen as just a Mac or a PC party, " he said.

This report appears on news.com.au.

Re:The article.

[WaKall]

"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.

Re:The article.

[Lumpy]

I do believe that we shouldn't be teaching kids to develop in MSVC++ and MFC.

we shouldn't teach ANYONE to program in any of the Microsoft visual environments. it promotes sloppy coding, bloat and tons of other things that make just plain old BAD programmers.

you want to teach windows programming? then use the free solutions out there teaching the API interfacing and other parts of fighting with a windows environment is so much more important than the drivel the MS visual dev.

Give the studen MORE understanding and a tool they can freely take home legally. you get a better programmer.

and as a side note. every teacher should at the end of every semester force all the student to program in an embedded environment or put tight size cap's on the compiled program.

Anyone can make gigantic bloatware, a good programmer makes fast tight code.

Another Solution - Windows Policy Editor

[RaboKrabekian]

I'm not fully versed in all its wonders, but the Windows Policy Editor (or whatever its called now) can completely lock down a machine. It's a vastly underutilized tool for environments where you don't want users messing with the machines. I remember getting annoyed the first time I sat down at a box which wouldn't let me even look at the start menu. Any and all Windows admins should look in to its proper use in their environment.

Re:Another Solution - Windows Policy Editor

[tconnors]

t's a vastly underutilized tool for environments where you don't want users messing with the machines. I remember getting annoyed the first time I sat down at a box which wouldn't let me even look at the start menu.

In our undergrad labs at cs.usyd.edu.au, there was a low-end pentium for the sole purposes of ftping files from your floppy to your 3meg quota'd ugrad account on the nix machines. It was win3.1 (even though this was in 1998-2000), and all it _appeared_ to have was a crappy ftp client and 2 other semi-useless programs. You were given a 3 minute time-limit to use this machine. But one day, I recursively transferred the wrong files, and the ftp client was crap, and couldn't recursively remove directories, so I went to the c:\windows directory (or whatever), in the ftp client, selected command.com, and clicked the "run" button. I then was in a dos shell where I could deltree.

Moral of the story: There is no security in removing the start button :)

Re:Another Solution - Windows Policy Editor

[mferrare]

But consider how much you have to piss-fart aoround with WPE to get a good config - partially because no-one uses it - and compare that with 'locking down' a linux box ie:

• 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.

Re:Another Solution - Windows Policy Editor

[foo fighter]

Windows Policy Editor was used for the 9x/Me series.

Starting with Windows 2000, admins have access to "Group Policy". Essentially, any user interface setting -- and most system settings -- can be controlled via this either on the local machine or remotely.

Group Policy kicks ass. You can completely lock down a machine so that cmd.exe doesn't work no matter what and the only .exe's that do work are the ones you specify. You can let the user specify their Display preferences, but nothing else. Or everything except the Display preferences. The point is, Linux has nothing to compare with this.

The fact is, under Windows 2000 (and XP), administrators have never had an easier time setting up, controlling, troubleshooting, and fixing a user's desktop. If Linux had anything to easier to compare to this I'd be using it (admins being essentially lazy).

At length, I've evaluated Redhat, Suse, Caldera, Debian, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and Mac OS X. (At length means ~40 hours on each setting up desktops and administrative consoles and testing things out.)

I have many Redhat machines running on servers at work. I have a Yellow Dog machine running my web site and email and OpenBSD running my router at home.

The FACT is no one has a better way to administrate and trouble-shoot end-user desktops than Microsoft right now.

Re:Another Solution - Windows Policy Editor

[mystran]

There also another view. In windows you have to options: either you allow people to do everything or you allow them to do nothing. The policy editor just stops working once you allow someone to run an .exe from his desktop since he can break the system (with one of the numerous exploit that for example the GUI gives you).

In Linux (and unix in general) you can allow people to do almost anything with their own account. If they mess their homedir (and it's quite unlikely to get your personal stuff to the point you can't login at all by accident), just clean it by resetting the configfile that breaks the thing.

You can have people run custom window managers, code their own software (even that damn window manager), whatever, if they happen to know how, while at the same time making sure they don't mess the system up if they don't.

Now, imagine that user has to do some task, and they have messed up their configs. Now on Windows you either repair their profile (which can take quite a time if you can't login as them, if possible at all) or take backup of files, create new profile and copy the files over, on linux you just throw the default configs to their homedir and all you lose are few hacks in some files (say .bash_profile/.bashrc or may .Xsession)

About the config thing.. if you setup linux in ~40 hours (for shared use) you are pretty fast. If you can do the same (in ~40 hours) for Windows you are superman. Start counting from when you get few hundred PCs with blank harddrives, with no images ready, etc..

And once you get new systems with different hardware you have to do it again :) With linux you dump the same image and switch either kernel or module config.

Windows has it's strong points, but administration isn't one of them. At least if you are trying to do it well. In a Uni even "we are not mission critical, we don't need the best security" isn't argument, since what would better target for a hacker than a Uni with a lots of computers and students doing all kind of things with irregular patterns.

Btw, the Windows 9x/ME policy system is a joke :) If you can't get past it whily you can still do something with the system, you probably shouldn't be securing anything ;-)

Re:Another Solution - Windows Policy Editor

[Mongoose]

Listen that's not true at all. You can run anything you want when you rename the EXE to a runnable like 'notepad.exe'. Add to this Word VBA scripting and you'll have admin on the box in seconds. In our lab we have people still installing porn and crap b/c it's so easy to do this.

On a floppy copy an alternative shell for windows and name it say winword.exe. You most likely can run anything you want off the floppy, so then you just run say the kernel debugger or the MS hole of the week ( ie is weak to loading HTML scripting attacks off disk also. ) -- and then you can use policy editor to start mounting all those hidden windows shares and hijacking other user's computers.

This is why windows is a joke - suid programs and permissions controls by name of a file.

Re:Another Solution - Windows Policy Editor

[mpe]

That's irrelevant. Ghost is not windows. Ghost is not unix either. Ghost is a separate program you can buy. You could set up linux, some unix, bsd, or whatever the heck you want and ghost it to a 100 boxes in the same amount of time.

Except that you could clone 100 identical unix hardware workstations using basic unix tools. No need for a third party product.

People read the article!

[Mustang Matt]

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.

Windows Policy Editor - could it be any worse??

[dan_barrett]

Yes, you *could* use windows policy editor, but there are some major issues with it (having just locked down a standalone windows box for kiosk use I'm well versed in the pain of poledit for Win 2000..)

Note that policy editor is now primarily designed for a computer in a Active directory tree - without active directory you have to edit a "local" policy, ie edit the registry directly.

A disclaimer: maybe an active directory policy is nicer to play with, I don't know - local policies were enought of a pain for me as it was..

here's the fun with local policies..
firstly - the policies affect ALL users, INCLUDING the administrator. (WTF?!?!? you say?) so.. lock out all registry tools, disable "command prompt" and run on the start menu - and you're screwed - no more windows administration. time to reformat the box. (or at least attempt to "rescue disk" it..

second - policies quite often are applied in REAL TIME. hmm.. disable registry editing.. (screen flashes) - oh bugger, policy editor has stopped working..

The way to get around this is to remove access to the %winnt%/system32/GroupPolicy dir for the administrator (that's right, you remove access to the root user to prevent the policy applying to that user.) of course, this dir has to be accessible to make any changes. And the changes apply immediately. Forget to reapply the restictions to the admin user and it's reformat time, again.

if you want to use policy editor I suggest having a recovery cd lying around, as I guarantee you *will* be locked out of your system, unless you're extremely careful.

I love windows security, it rocks.

Why use anything other than Linux for comp sci?

[Omega]

When you think about it, Linux really is the best operating system for comp. sci students. It offers open source access to the kernel, so you can see the actual code for the operating system and how it interacts with many different types of hardware. Also you have low level access to many devices through the dev. tree so you can teach device programming methods. Not to mention the fact that the primary unix networking protocol (TCP/IP) is the same protocol that runs the internet. What better way to gain an understanding of packet based protocols than by experimenting with BSD sockets? "The Unix Time Sharing System" by Dennis Richie is one of the most elegant descriptions of an operating system that I have ever read. And by working with the text and the operating system together, students can gain a fundamental understanding of many basic low level concepts in modern computers.

If all you want is to be an MCSE, then why waste you time with college? You can take a weekend course for a few hundred bucks (instead of 4+ years for several thousand dollars). This quote from the article by Dr. Chris McDonald of UWA pretty much sums it up:

"Personally, I think that just showing students how to use operating systems tools and networking tools, is more training than education.

Exactly. Showing someone how to point and click isn't teaching them anything. It's only training them how to use someone else's tools (and there are books that can teach you that in 24 hours). Real computer science education, where you gain a fundamental understanding of both high and low level concepts of the computer requires more than just clicking a start button.

Slashdot Social Experiment

[kNIGits]

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.

Re:Slashdot Social Experiment

[sco08y]

The people who karma-whore try to get their posts in as quickly as possible because, as the FAQ says, if you get in sooner more people will read it and it's more likely to be higher ranked.

Because of the karma system, you're only seeing people who employ karma-whoring strategies rather than intelligent commentary. That means making politically correct comments about whatever the submitter said. That means mouthing the standard, "freedom-reducing lock down is bad!" kind of remarks.

Re: Windows Policy Editor - could it be any worse?

[agallagh42]

Just because you don't know how to use a tool, doesn't make that tool bad.

A properly configured local policy can lock down exactly what you want to lock down, and affect only the users you want it to affect.

Also, in Active Directory, you use things called "Group Policy Objects" to apply policies to workstations, and it's WAY more powerful than local policies.

Go here for an overview of GPOs.

Don't fixate! Read! Read!

[BiOFH]

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.

As someone at an Australian university...

[CaptainPotato]

...who wishes to do convince the IT powers that be to do the same, I am very happy to hear about other institutions that are doing the same. Whilst there remains a need for Windows-based machines, Macs, and whatever else is used, there are many compelling reasons for switching to Linux - these are just a few I have (whilst on University time...).

1. Control. Whilst I would normally shudder at the thought of restricting IT access, I do appreciate UOW's desire to better manage their machines. We recently had some new machines running Win2k installed in my area, and within a day, one was in poor shape thanks to a particular idiot installing the latest Windows Media Player version on it and somehow stuffing up the OSA installation. He was able to so do thanks to the IT stroke of genius of giving everyone admin access. Whilst this may be an human issue rather than an OS one, every bit helps :)

2. Cost. We are all aware of the studies that compare the cost of Linux to other OSes. In any case, regardless of the outcome, I do know that my insitution will be spending multiple millions per year (as of next year) for desktop software licences for MS products because of the new licence arrangements. In a country that has mounting financial challenges in university funding, alternatives to MS software need to be found.

3. Ethics. Maybe this is too strong, but IMO it is not. Why should tapayer money be spent on making a single corporation (even) richer? A centre of teaching and research ought to have academic independence of multinational corporations.

These are just a few, IMO, valid thoughts about the issue. Regardless, UOW deserves to be applauded for the initiative.

uow labs

[Tristessa]

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.

duel boot

[Joakim A]

>The Uni of New South Wales Computer Science and
>Engineering department has been running
>unix/linux for years, no duel boot.

Well, duel boot, that is something I would like to run. Just install windows and a few linux/BSD dists, turn on the machine and leave it over night. Then we finally could settle this thing.

/J

Ps My bet is on that spiky fish eventhough that little red bastard with the fork might be nasty. I mean, how hard can it be to beat a geek from redmond or a penguin? Hmm, could be a whole army of penguins of course, well that might get tricky.

Re:duel boot

[NoOneInParticular]

I'm not sure about the geek from redmond, but before you belittle penguins, consider these words from Linus Torvalds:

"Some people have told me they don't think a fat penguin really embodies the grace of Linux. Which just tells me they have never seen a angry penguin charging at them in excess of 100 mph. They'd be a lot more careful about what they say if they had."

Just a Thought...

[Hasie]

I see their point, and I agree that Linux has a place in any computer-related university curriculum as an introduction to UNIX (even ignoring the other advantagess it has), and I am a major Linux fan (to the point that I actually find Windows difficult to use).

(You all know what comes next:) BUT, I don't think that Windows should be completely eliminated. Windows is still the de-facto standard in industry and universities owe it to their students to give them skills they can use. It is also essential that universities maintain neutrality in the sense that they do not give the impression that they are promoting one system over another - a university's role is to eductate and do research, not dictate what the world will do or follow current fads.

Before everyone gets the wrong idea; I use the same argument to motivate the use of Linux at the university where I work (it is a very good way to teach students UNIX rather than only teaching them Windows). So what is needed is a balance.

Dual-boot?

[Z0mb1eman]

>machines in first-year labs that used to boot from either Windows or Linux have been changed to Linux only.

That sounds like a LOT of hassle for the admins in the first place... University of Toronto has separate Linux Redhat, Win2000 with Netware, and (still a few) Solaris labs. Separate rooms, separate operating systems, just go where you need based on what you need to do. The Windows machines are even more "locked down" than the Linux ones - you can't even change the wallpaper, for example. Can't move/remove icons, can't change the start menu, can't (really) install programs. I've never seen a trashed Windows machine, whereas I've seen Linux machines that have gone belly-up with a rather pissed off admin trying to fix it. Then again, I spend more time in the Linux labs.

The dual-boot idea for a public lab makes very little sense to me in the first place - if the university's THAT desperate to save money, maybe it's not the best place to go. More likely though, the admins realized the way they were doing things wasn't really the best way, and changed to something more logical and easier to manage (and not all that new or innovative at that) - how does that constitute news??

Going towards it here...

[imevil]

At my school the math section has linux-only PCs for the students. The CS section has Solaris (SUN) and Windows-only machines, and they justified the no-linux by saying that the companies use Windows so no point in teaching Linux to the students. I think they got it all wrong: more and more companies are migrating to Linux, and in a couple of years there will be a need for Linux experts.

GNUWin: open your Windows!

Re:Going towards it here...

[Peyna]

A CS degress means you know how it all works, but you don't have be an expert in any particular langauge, operating system, or application. Instead you should be able to easily adapt to a quickly changing field.

For all we know, there may be some new radical ideas in the next few years that void the need to be an expert in Linux or Windows. What a horrible waste of time to work at perfecting a restricted set of skills for a proprietary system.

This is significant news

[heffrey]

If the prestigious and world famous Department of Informatics at Wollongong University have taken this decision then I'm pretty sure the rest of the world will follow suit in short order.

This story is typical Slashdot. Small university department moves to Linux (= big story); Multinational Company switches from Sun to Microsoft (=no news).

Small earthquake in Chile, not many dead.

Yawn.

In other news, the University of Queensland...

[little_fluffy_clouds]

... dumped all of their UNIX machines in computer science and bought new Windows labs about 3 years ago. I know, because I was there starting the undergrad. As of March, they claimed the course was not going to change at all - by November they had dropped such "obselete" subjects like Algorithms and Data Structures and picked up crap to do with web applications nobody will even remember in 2 years (it's been three and I have no clue). I was disgusted by their sellout, and moved to another, UNIX oriented University (University of New England), where each undergrad (I was external) is *required* to install Linux or another UNIX/UNIX like OS in first year, and all assignments from the very first are submitted on a Linux machine, where they must compile properly (I develop on NetBSD, but never had any issues at that level compiling and submitting on the Linux machine).

Fuck UQ and their sellout for the almighty buck. If that is not what is was, I apologise, but it sure looked just like that from where I was at the time. I feel for the academics caught in the middle of it all.

Re:it's a solution--just not a good one

[g4dget]

as opposed to per machine is a HUGE advantage in my book

You must be talking about what Windows used to be like a couple of years ago, since networks of UNIX workstations have never been managed like that. Come on, people have run UNIX networks with thousands of machines since the 1980's. Do you think they didn't figure out how to deal with those issues long ago?

There are several common ways of setting up such networks, and they are generally much simpler to deal with than anything Microsoft offers even today. Adding a new machine to a UNIX network requires no more than just plugging it into the network and possibly adding it to a list of recognized clients. Users, data, and applications are installed centrally. Applications run transparently over the network, or locally, whichever way you prefer. "The latest patches" or "new applications" aren't even issues--things are just automatically consistent.

Windows has taken some of those ideas and thrown them together into an inconsistent and cumbersome juble. But where networks of UNIX workstations just tick along by themselves, Windows-based networks require constant handholding, fixing, patching, and reinstalling. Microsoft is trying to paper over how messy and dysfunctional their system is with lots of dialog boxes and GUIs, but it just doesn't help: in the end, managing Windows networks is still a lot more work. Oh, of course, you can try and buy lots of expensive third party software to get some of the UNIX-like manageability, but that only makes things even more expensive and complicated.

I used to manage networks of UNIX workstations with dozens of users on the side. If I had to spend more than an hour or two on it per week, that was the rare exception (and then it was usually due to some hardware failure on the server). And I certainly didn't need any expensive or complicated third party software for doing it either.

As a former lab tech... Re:Hehehehe...

[Eneff]

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.)