Slashdot Mirror
Windows Incompatibilities Frustrate D.C. Schools
capouch writes "The Washington Post reports that school administrators for the DC public school system are having an awful time getting their new administrative software to work properly." From the article: "'In my experience, the combination of an Oracle database, Windows operating system, Unix hardware and an Apache webserver is a bad combination,' Barlow wrote in the memo to Thomas M. Brady, the school system's chief business operations officer. 'In fact, through our research the last few days, we have found an advisory on the Apache website that states, 'Please note that at this time, Windows support is entirely experimental and is recommended only for experienced users.' The Apache Group does not guarantee that the software will work as documented or even at all...Barlow said officials plan to replace Windows with a different operating system."
As an aside: Please consider Donating to help the victims of Katrina
/tmp or the installer will dump core. After the installer is done, edit /etc/X11/XF86Config and add a section called "GL" and put "driver nv" in it. Make sure you have the latest version of X and Linux kernel 2.6 or else X will segfault when you start. OK, run the Quake 3 installer and make sure you set the proper group and setuid permissions on quake3.bin. If you want sound, look here [link to another obscure web site], which is a short HOWTO on how to get sound in Quake 3. That's all there is to it!"
Linux is *not* user friendly, and until it is linux will stay with >1% marketshare.
Take installation. Linux zealots are now saying "oh installing is so easy, just do apt-get install package or emerge package": Yes, because typing in "apt-get" or "emerge" makes so much more sense to new users than double-clicking an icon that says "setup".
Linux zealots are far too forgiving when judging the difficultly of Linux configuration issues and far too harsh when judging the difficulty of Windows configuration issues. Example comments:
User: "How do I get Quake 3 to run in Linux?"
Zealot: "Oh that's easy! If you have Redhat, you have to download quake_3_rh_8_i686_010203_glibc.bin, then do chmod +x on the file. Then you have to su to root, make sure you type export LD_ASSUME_KERNEL=2.2.5 but ONLY if you have that latest libc6 installed. If you don't, don't set that environment variable or the installer will dump core. Before you run the installer, make sure you have the GL drivers for X installed. Get them at [some obscure web address], chmod +x the binary, then run it, but make sure you have at least 10MB free in
User: "How do I get Quake 3 to run in Windows?"
Zealot: "Oh God, I had to install Quake 3 in Windoze for some lamer friend of mine! God, what a fucking mess! I put in the CD and it took about 3 minutes to copy everything, and then I had to reboot the fucking computer! Jesus Christ! What a retarded operating system!"
So, I guess the point I'm trying to make is that what seems easy and natural to Linux geeks is definitely not what regular people consider easy and natural. Hence, the preference towards Windows.
Would you use IIS on FreeBSD? Why run Apache, designed for Unix on _that_? Dont blame Apache, it runs ok on freebsd :D
...not even a very good troll.
I find your ideas intriguing and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
Thanks for the Katrina link, I just gave them $20.
I started (or attempted to start) using Linux a few years back when I started university, just out of plain curiosity. My buddy and I downloaded the ISO images of Red Hat Linux 8.0, and from that point forward, it all went to shit.
I figured it would be no problem, I used Sun's Solaris quite a bit so I understood the shell at least. Install went well, even though I was confused why I needed seven million partitions which I had to allocate manually and to have a root password since it was a single user machine. After my install, I restarted my machine, saw a bunch of ugly crap being spewed to the screen, and before you knew it, X Windows loaded up and I was in Linux. "Ooh, this looks neat, just like Windows. Let's see if I can surf the web!"
This is the point where I discovered the 'magic' of Linux. It couldn't find a driver for a simple ethernet card. So I got onto another computer running Windows, and found some type of driver for it. All right, I'll just burn it to a cd, pop it onto the Linux machine, and we're good to go. I started looking around for the CD ROM icon...where was it? Apparently I had to mount it manually, luckily I know UNIX. Then it asks me for root password. Okay, so I enter it. Then I can see the CD ROM, great. Oh look, the driver is in the form of source code, I have to compile it. So I tried to compile it with the configure script that came along. Oh wait, I need some !@#$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
I'm a small business woman and in order to control costs, I have looked
at open source software as an alternative to MS. As a non-technical
person, it has been a very frustrating journey.
First of all, the term "free" seems misleading. It seems that you can
aquire a "starter" version of a Linux distro that is not production
ready for free. But if you want want that is tested and stable, one
needs to purchase an expensive yearly maitenance fee for each computer
it is installed on. My understanding is that one can aquire something
called "source" to the expensive linux distro version, but that the
source doesn't actually run the computer.
When researching, I read about "Redhat Linux" (sic ?). It seems that
they allowed one to download the complete "working" version for a while
but then they did a switchero and hid the working version download and
made it available to paying customers only. To pacify the rest, they
gave a "starter" ("Fredora" (sic?)) version to them. It seems they cut
off affordable support to those with the working version and replaced
it with something more expensive than MS.
My IT consultant put FireFox on my computer and it looks like another
switchero is in the works. With the members founding a corporation, it
looks like they will start charging for the good version and leave the
a "starter" version for the non-paying customers.
So is the business model of open-source to bait people with free
software when their software isn't as good as the commercial offerings,
and when it does become good or they get enough people on board, do
they just jack up the prices as much as possible? Seems to me this is
a poor business model, and I can't understand why a saleman recommended
it to me as a way to keep costs down. I would rather go with a vendor
where I can expect things to stay the same and a vendor that has a
clear business plan. That way they won't just change the rules halfway
like open source seems to.
Maybe it is a wrong impression, but that is what a good business woman
like myself sees.
PS Please consider Donating to help the victims of Katrina. They need your help.