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Does Your College Or University Support Linux?
yuna49 writes 'Lately I've been visiting colleges with my daughter, who is a senior in high school. Every school has proudly announced that they support both Windows and Macs, and most of these schools report having about a 50-50 split between the two. However we've been a Linux household for many years now, and my daughter routinely uses a laptop running Kubuntu 9.04. Sometimes I would ask the student tour guide if Linux was supported and was usually met with a blank stare. We're obviously not concerned about whether she can write papers using OpenOffice and Linux. Rather we've been wondering about using other computing services on campus like classroom applications, remote printing, VPNs, or Wi-Fi support (nearly all these campuses have ubiquitous Wi-Fi). Given the composition of Slashdot's readership, I thought I'd pose the question here. Does your school support Linux? Have you found it difficult or impossible to use Linux in concert with the school's computing services?'
Most universities/polytechs/etc. are quite Linux-friendly here. They generally have a mix of machines, and avoid doing anything particularly hostile to any one platform.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
Unless she intends to pick a job in the future based on whether they use Linux, then whether the University supports it is probably a moot issue. It's like having cable TV, or private bathrooms, or a pool table in your particular dorm. Nice to have, but not essential.
Either she'll get a school that supports Linux (Good), or she'll get a school that doesn't, and be well prepared for what the rest of the real world is like, where Linux people are a minority who do what they want because they want to, not because their IT department puts their stamp of approval on it (Also good).
Seriously? These are usually freshmen or sophomores in some club (for resume building) that are hyper outgoing and love showing off their brand new school. In addition they're trained to know quite a bit about everything. I bet they couldn't even tell you what some of the graduate students were working on either.
If you want an answer, find the school's IT department or LUG and ask them. I bet that my tour guide wouldn't be able to tell you that our CS department hosts a Linux Mirror for quite a few projects or that Debian was started by a student, doesn't mean that it didn't happen.
Let me ask you a question in return..
Do you think the average college helpdesk is prepared to answer random Linux questions?
Asking the tour guides is just plain silly. You might as well ask them what brand ERP the college uses.
Most colleges would allow a linux installation but are unprepared to provide support to every possible linux variation and configuration.
Never ask for directions from a two-headed tourist! -Big Bird
I am currently attending UCF and my main laptop on campus is running ubuntu 9.04. I have no problems using any of the online course work/websites and have no issues connecting to the internet.
Does. I'm actually the president of an organization that prominently supports and promotes free software (Laboratory for Recreational Computing). http://pohl.ececs.uc.edu/
The reason you get a blank stare is because said student is usually a business or communication major and has no clue what Linux is. Heck as I computer science major, I don't know what you mean by 'support' Linux. Do you mean, do they have it in labs? Do they allow you to connect to the dorms using Linux? Do you mean as in what limited Tech support on campus and does it support Linux? Or do they have Linux in the computer labs?
Assuming you mean computer labs, I can tell you here at UNT they do not have linux, but they do have (on every computer) an ssh client that allows you to connect to your Linux account (CS Major).
Posting with out proof reading since 2001.
Here at the University of Kentucky, Linux support is kind of spotty. Some IT guys support it, others don't. When I was doing biology research at the University back when I was a high school student, the sysadmin for the building with my lab was a diehard Windows/Dell guy, and discouraged use of other stuff, saying he couldn't guarantee data integrity, etc etc. When I moved on to computer science research, the sysadmins in that part of campus tend to be anything-but-Windows types. In the fine arts department, the sysadmins tend to be more partial to Apples.
If you live on campus, though, the campus internet (ResNet) people officially only support PC and Mac, and they only support it if your computer is directly connected to the connection they provide. If you have a router between you and the campus network, you are required to remove it and directly connect to the cable modem or other gateway device that they provide. I think the policy is bollocks, but judging from the stories I've heard of how inept some of the L1 techs are, maybe it is better that way...
I'm the Devil the Windows users warned you about.
As a recent grad I can speak to the fact that NCSU supports Linux in a big way by deploying it in computer labs, supporting it for students, having a very active LUG (the mailing list is very friendly, they meet several times a month and host regular install-fests), making Linux desktops available remotely through a Virtual Computing Lab and giving students remote access to a couple of on-campus beowulf clusters. To the best of my knowledge support is strongest in the College of Engineering and in the College of Physical and Mathematical Sciences. I believe most of the other Colleges (Life Sciences, Humanities and Social Sciences, Textiles, Natural Resources etc) tend to use a mix of Windows and Mac workstations (and I'd heard somewhere that Design uses exclusively Macs).
Doesn't matter; you need to pass high school level English to get in no matter where it is.
"Sometimes I would ask the student tour guide if Linux was supported and was usually met with a blank stare." I doubt that it was a "blank" stare. The student tour guide, and everyone else in earshot, was probably wondering if you're a complete jerk, or just utterly clueless. Why would you ask some 18-19 year old kid giving tours stuff like that? Are you trying to prove something, or do you really, honestly believe that some random kid giving tours is going to know what "Linux" is?
I don't respond to AC's.
My bet is for personal systems, they'll allow anything. We do where I work (I work for a university). However support? My bet is no. For one Linux is by far the minority. Not worth it to hire.train people to support something only a fraction of people use. Also Linux isn't standard. What applies to RedHat doesn't apply to Gentoo and so on. No way you can support all the different distros.
As a practical matter, support for end user computers is generally very limited. They'll give you general advice and help, but complex issues you are on your own. The university doesn't have the resources to spend time fixing every issue that students can come up with. They can offer advice like "Here is where you download the campus AV software," or "These are the settings to check your e-mail," but they are not going to walk you through getting X working on a custom kernel with non-standard drivers, or something of the like.
Also, if your kid wants to use Linux they need to learn to support themselves. That is how life is with Linux. Heck you should learn some self support either way, but in particular for Linux. Most IT departments don't have a lot of Linux people, if any, on staff and none of them have any patience for cowboys. If a company does use and support Linux on the desktop it'll be well defined. They will support one version, in one configuration, setup their way. They well not at all be interested in spending time doing things your special way.
That's how we do it here. We do support Linux on campus research/educational machines in the department where I work. However, if you want it centrally supported you run Fedora, we install it with our config, it uses our auth/file servers, we have root, you don't (you can have sudo), and you don't fuck with it. You wanna do your own shit? Best of luck to you, we don't support it. We have a very limited amount of staff and a lot to deal with, we cannot spend time hand holding for special configs.
Even that's wrong. Quite a number of fortune 500 companies rely on Linux heavily. Almost every investment bank certainly, but I'd wager a number of others too. Maybe not on the desktops of the employees, but still, Linux is certainly a viable and well-used platform in fortune 500s.
A good chunk of the labs at my school (Carnegie Mellon) are linux. We actually are in the process of finishing a new Gates building, in which all the labs will be linux. There are definitely groups on campus which can help you and a large percent of the student body probably can too. Go find a few computer labs and wander through them. If you know what you are looking for, it shouldn't be hard to find out.
Due to a few bad decisions in college and the economy imploding at work, I am now going to Indian Hills Community College, trying to at least keep it together for a semester or two before I invest in a four-year college again.
I have no idea whether it's required, but there is a Unix/Linux class. But then, there's also a Visual Basic class.
Aside from the fact that a few things (VB?) will require Windows -- though they at least have the decency to have an MSDNAA license, meaning free copies of Windows and nearly everything needed -- there's also the fact that Macs sort of get a passing reference saying "We hope it works, but we can't support you," and Linux gets no mention.
The wireless fails out of the box with Ubuntu, yet works with Windows. Talking to the help desk, they basically said "We don't support that, we don't know much, but our vendor assures us that the problem is not with our equipment, but with Linux."
To get it working again, I had to switch DHCP clients. Neither dhclient nor dhcpcd worked, but udhcpc did. It's worth mentioning, this is not a common problem -- I used NetworkManager's point and click interface pretty much everywhere, and it worked pretty much everywhere, from hotel rooms to hospitals to crappy little Linksys routers -- it even worked if I plugged into ethernet in school -- everywhere except the school wireless.
The conclusion to this story? I mailed the helpdesk again with my findings, and with the little script I wrote to disable NetworkManager, bring up wlan0 manually, and run udhcpc. They seemed very glad to have a solution.
So, I'm not really sure what to make of it. On the one hand, it was obviously a priority, and I was pretty much left to fend for myself. On the other hand, no one actually has a problem with me using Linux, most of the time.
I realize that doesn't answer your questions about printing or VPNs -- I haven't had to do either yet. Printing, I've only done from lab computers (all Windows, naturally), and they don't require a VPN, though my personal VPN works fine from the school wireless. Their website is an abomination, but it mostly works fine in Chrome, with only one place so far which requires Firefox, and I haven't had to use IE yet, except on lab computers.
Just for fun, another anecdote: Iowa State University, when I was there, had a lab full of top-of-the-line Linux workstations. In the classes I was taking, they were used mainly to run rdesktop, which seems profoundly retarded, but I never had a problem due to running Linux or OS X. This was around 2005-2006.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Yeah, no one has Samba servers or firewalls running variants of Linux. No one out there runs Apache.
Any IT department that doesn't at least have some familiarity with Linux is rather like having a garage that doesn't know how to fix Jeeps.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Like Mac OS X, Linux anti-virus is primarily there to intercept crap on their way to a Windows machine.
- oZ
// i am here.
Lately I've been visiting colleges with my daughter, who is a senior in high school. Every school has proudly announced that they support both Windows and Macs, and most of these schools report having about a 50-50 split between the two. However we've been a Linux household for many years now, and my daughter routinely uses a laptop running Kubuntu 9.04. Sometimes I would ask the student tour guide if Linux was supported and was usually met with a blank stare. We're obviously not concerned about whether she can write papers using OpenOffice and Linux. Rather we've been wondering about using other computing services on campus like classroom applications, remote printing, VPNs, or Wi-Fi support (nearly all these campuses have ubiquitous Wi-Fi). Given the composition of Slashdot's readership, I thought I'd pose the question here. Does your school support Linux? Have you found it difficult or impossible to use Linux in concert with the school's computing services?
I work in central IT at a Big-Ten university, and I'm not surprised you got blank stares from the campus tour guides. All our tour guides are students trained into the position, and are very knowledgeable about buildings, academics, that sort of thing. Ask a technical question, like "Do you support Linux on campus?" and unless the guide happens to be an EE/CS student, you're pretty much guaranteed to get a "huh?" response.
Our university officially supports Windows and Mac. But we don't specifically prohibit Linux. In fact, many people who work the call-in help desk know about Linux and will do their best to support you (even though it's "unsupported") in getting connected to the wireless network, or checking your email.
In practice, I suppose most universities are the same. Nothing to actively break Linux, but not really looking out for Linux's best interests either.
Our basic services don't care - central email is platform-agnostic; use any system you like as long as it talks POP or IMAP (or use our webmail system.) Wi-Fi is open to anyone with a valid university account, nothing else required. I've connected to our VPN using Linux vpnc. Calendar has downloadable clients for Windows/Mac/Linux, or use the web interface. Our web-based file share for students supports all major browsers, doesn't care about the OS. (There is a desktop client for Windows that integrates the file share at the Windows desktop, but this is just a convenience.) Similarly, our web registration and many other central web-delivered services only check the browser, not the OS.
That said, you may run into problems with things like e-learning if you aren't using Windows or Mac. Check first. The e-learning platform used at each institution may dictate what OS you can use. Some commercial e-learning systems may only support Windows and Mac. I think I had problems accessing our remote classroom system (to participate in a remote meeting) when using Linux. It would be better to ask things like "What is your campus e-learning system?" (which a tour guide would likely know, by the way) then google that e-learning system later to see what clients are supported by the vendor.
Specific systems at the college level may also depend on platform (CAD or GIS, as two examples) and departments may run their own web systems that assume Windows or Mac, and may break for Linux (use of ActiveX or Silverlight, for example, if that's what the collegiate web developer wanted to use to build that system.)
Based on what major your daughter is interested in, you may also ask students in that college about their use of Linux in the program. If you explain "I'm visiting with my high school daughter", students are often inclined to answer questions about the program and what they use.
The major also could be a clue. Engineering or Computer Science? Probably running Linux. English or Fine Arts? Probably Mac or Windows. Physics or Chemistry? Could be anything. Or, just wander the lounge and see what students are running on their laptops - that may give you an idea. At our university, I can walk through the lounge on any given day in the semester, and guarantee seeing at least one GNOME or KDE desktop.
Baseless accusations, much? For the TL;DR folks: UW uses Linux extensively, and it is required for many of our CSE clesses.
The UW offers OS courses on both the NT and Linux kernels - Neil chose to take the NT one, but in terms of degree progress the Linux version of the OS course is exactly equivalent. The CSE undergraduate labs are a mix of Windows and Linux boxes. The department offers a few Windows servers for student use, but the majority of the servers, including the file server, mail server, and cycle server are all Linux-based.
As for the required courses, one of the earliest courses in the curriculum teaches basic Linux knowledge, ranging from shell familiarity and manpages to scripting and regular expressions, plus gcc, make (and writing makefiles), and so forth. Later classes include security (one of the programming projects specificaly requires Linux and GDB knowledge), embedded systems (the latter half of the class uses an ARM chip running Linux, and we are required to modify a kernel driver and use the ALSA API), Networking (this one varies, but usually involves developing for a device like a router or N800, running Linux).
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...