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Oregon Government Supporting Open Source

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the lets-get-em-all-on-the-wagon dept.

amountlad writes "In a pair of articles released today on N4N.org, Oregon continues to lead the way in government open source adoption in the USA. The Oregon State University's Open Source Lab will host a Government Open Source Conference in October. The GOSCON has strong support from within the state government. The State's Department of Administrative Services released a white paper detailing their use of Asterisk for audio conferencing for more than 500 conferences a week. The set-up includes a web-based interface for judges to manage recording the hearings. In doing so the State joins Metro, a Portland area regional government which uses Asterisk along side its Beowulf Cluster."

1 of 124 comments (clear)

  1. Why? It STILL isn't ready for Joe Sixpack by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    I started (or attempted to start) using Linux a few years back when I started university, just out of plain curiosity. My buddy and I downloaded the ISO images of Red Hat Linux 8.0, and from that point forward, it all went to shit.

    I figured it would be no problem, I used Sun's Solaris quite a bit so I understood the shell at least. Install went well, even though I was confused why I needed seven million partitions which I had to allocate manually and to have a root password since it was a single user machine. After my install, I restarted my machine, saw a bunch of ugly crap being spewed to the screen, and before you knew it, X Windows loaded up and I was in Linux. "Ooh, this looks neat, just like Windows. Let's see if I can surf the web!"

    This is the point where I discovered the 'magic' of Linux. It couldn't find a driver for a simple ethernet card. So I got onto another computer running Windows, and found some type of driver for it. All right, I'll just burn it to a cd, pop it onto the Linux machine, and we're good to go. I started looking around for the CD ROM icon...where was it? Apparently I had to mount it manually, luckily I know UNIX. Then it asks me for root password. Okay, so I enter it. Then I can see the CD ROM, great. Oh look, the driver is in the form of source code, I have to compile it. So I tried to compile it with the configure script that came along. Oh wait, I need some !@#$ing stupid C library. All right, so I download that as well in the form of a RPM, which luckily worked, and then I was able to compile the driver.

    Okay now what? According to the instructions, I had to recompile the kernel making the driver a part of it. 'Recompile the kernel?' I thought, 'What kind of sick operating system makes you recompile its kernel...' Apparently I didn't know what kind of twisted people designed Linux. Oh wait, it wants the stupid root password again...good God. So after about 5 hours, I had Internet...given that I knew how to use a UNIX machine. Four days later I tried installing something else, it asked me for the same stupid C library but version 1.2.3.4.5 instead of the version I had...God forbid...1.2.3.4.4 (oh what a fool I was for not updating every 10 minutes!) Within an hour, my drive was formatted (twice out of spite) and running Windows XP.

    A few months back I was inspired again to run Linux. If you read the tech news, there's no doubt about it, it's taking over the server market. A Linux sys admin will make 20 grand more than a Windows sys admin (Makes you wonder if 20 grand is worth eventual suicide), so I felt I should pick it up. Of course now I was more prepared, I've read books, admin guides, worked as a student UNIX operator, 3 years under my belt as a computer science student, two internships, and had studied the Linux kernel in depth.

    I decided I would try a whole bunch of distributions, I tried Red Hat 9, Fedora Core 2, SuSe 9.1, Debian, and Mandrake 10. All special in there own little way...like retarded children. As soon as SuSe loaded up, I was like..."nice nice, very sleek...", then a hissing came out my left speaker that wouldn't go away. Nice autodetection for the sound driver. Bye bye SuSe. All right, let's try Red Hat 9...oh look Red Hat won't give any more automatic updates because now that it has a little bit of money...!@#$ open source, let's become the next Microsoft! Oh Debian and Mandrake, just plain ugly and slow.

    What about Fedora Core, Red Hat's latest method of getting code for free rather than having to pay programmers in India $0.85 an hour to do it. Why pay someone when you can have some idiot from GNU or some grad student do it for free, then sell it for 400 bucks a pop. It was surprising though that that experimental piece of crap worked better than all the other distributions, even though its autoupdate some how corrupted my kernel and I had to overwrite it.

    But what I find most stupid is the philosophy behind it. Why make something so complex for free? I'm an excellent software engineer, good software is hard to m