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22,000 Indiana Students Using Linux Desktops

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the open-school dept.

Anonymous writes "Indiana's Department of Education has moved 22,000 students onto Linux desktops, and it's looking like that's only going to accelerate with SLED 10, Linspire, and other distributions getting better."

2 of 321 comments (clear)

  1. Re:One or two Linux "flavors" are not enough? by oyenstikker · · Score: 1, Troll

    I agree with you, but there are two problems.

    1) Linux is not well documented. Fundamental computer skills would have to involve wading through tens of thousands of entries in mailing lists archives, reading pages and pages of forums, patiently asking the same question for 2 days in an IRC channel before somebody knows the answer, trying driver versions 0.96.3-r1, 0.96.3-r2, 0.97.5, 0.97.6 (oops. with .6 it switched from firmware version 1.5 to 1.6), and 0.98.1 before you find one that works, even though the changelog mentions no changes that should affect your particular model (but then when 0.98.2 comes out, it doesn't work anymore), and what to do when you want to upgrade MajorApp from 2.2 to 3.0 because it has a new feature you want, but not it requires libDoStuff 1.5, but your distribution doesn't have a package for that, and all your other applications need 1.4. (Most distributions have a way to handle this, but it is absent from the documentation and only partially explained on a HOWTO in a forum, or on some incomprehensible Wiki page.)

    2) Hardware support. Or more accurately: wireless card support, video card support, and non-post script printing. I tried every version of the driver for my wireless card that my distro's package system had before finding that for no documented reason, only one particular version that isn't packaged works. I finally got a combination of no framebuffer, a video driver, and an X configuration that supports 3d acceleration, but it randomly and inexplicably crashes the kernel (Not just the console, but the kernel. I can't even ping it anymore.) when I switch VTs or log out of a session stared with XDM. And everybody knows what a mess printing is. I know, this is the fault of Intel, ATI, and Hewlett-Packard. But blaming them does not make the problem go away.

    --
    The masses are the crack whores of religion.
  2. Re:In indiana... by oglueck · · Score: 0, Troll

    Fine. Can you demonstrat the same with kde and all it's dependencies, please?

    With Gentoo portage it's as simple as:

    # emerge kde