Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: Linux Support In Universities?
An anonymous reader writes "I study Computer Science at a university in Melbourne, Australia. I recently went to a 'Directions of IT' seminar run by our central IT department, where students were invited to discuss issues with the senior management of IT. During discussion about proposed changes to our campus-wide wireless network, I asked if the new system would support Macs, Linux and other Operating Systems. Several of the managers laughed at this question, and one exclaimed 'Linux!' as if it was the punchline to a joke. The head of IT at least treated my question seriously, but I didn't get a concrete answer. So, I would like to ask Slashdot: Does your university/college provide support for Linux/BSD/etc users to connect to the on-campus wireless? How does IT support Linux users generally? Have IT staff ever ridiculed you for asking questions about Linux?"
Does your university require some sort of special software to access its wireless network or something? My university has hotspots just like any wireless service. You can connect to it with whatever OS or device you like. They don't support Linux directly, but they certainly don't block it from the network.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
How does IT support Linux users generally?
Not in university, but I would assume it’s still the same old “if you use something other than windows or maybe mac, you are free to do so however you are on your own to figure it out and resolve any issues!” attitude. Which really I think is fair. At least now Novel is mostly dead so you don’t need to deal with that shit ;p
I guess the question here would be, what specifically about the network do you need to support Linux. Basic connectivity should usually just work, unless they use some weird connection tool (do those even exist any more). Whatever web based systems your school is using _might_ work. Whatever standard tools your teachers dictate you use will probably be one platform only (and if they laughed at the mention of Linux, you can guess what platform that will be).
And some general advice: don’t go too crazy trying to do _everything_ in Linux for the principle of it. If it’s easy, do it, if not, just get a windows VM up and running to do your work. Unless you enjoy that kinda stuff, the frustration of trying to get a teacher to accept the work you did in a tool he has never heard of on a platform he isn’t familiar with just isn’t worth it for the warm and fuzzy feeling.
Given the high usage of Macs in education to ignore them would be a gross act of stupidity within a university.
In my opinion it would have been useful to ask about support for iPads and Android tablets too.
Surely the wireless network would be using standard encryption mechanisms though (i.e., WPA2)?
During discussion about proposed changes to our campus-wide wireless network, I asked if the new system would support Macs, Linux and other Operating Systems.
What is the authentication and accreditation methods/technologies involved with this "new system?" It's entirely possible the meeting was for 10,000 feet people and not the actual IT folks. For instance, your current system appears to support Linux (PDF Warning) and I would be surprised if the plan was to drop this.
When I went to the University of Minnesota 2000-2004, the wireless was more or less agnostic to the operating system and their documentation has gotten much better. When I was there I helped set up some Gnu OCR stuff on Linux so that people could scan books in the labs and at halls--perhaps if your response had been to investigate and volunteer documentation for a Linux solution, they wouldn't have treated you as the punchline to a joke? (I know that not everyone has as much free time during college, this is just a suggestion.)
Have IT staff ever ridiculed you for asking questions about Linux?
Yes, of course, back in 2000 when I was fresh off the farm, I was constantly ridiculed for asking questions about Linux. But for different reasons. Because I didn't know the difference between Linux, Unix, Solaris and BSD. The labs at UMN supported all of those widely with many many seats (well, maybe not BSD) and when I sat down at one I was temporarily outside of my comfort zone and would ask incredibly stupid questions. If you adopted the role of being the friendly helper to your administration, perhaps they could, as did I, eventually realize the amazing awesomeness and power of these operating systems? If they don't, you can always argue that diversity is great and offer to help with supporting your operating system of choice by making some documentation.
My work here is dung.
You would get the same answer in Romania if the question was about Windows :))
Does your university/college provide support for Linux/BSD/etc users to connect to the on-campus wireless?
No, although many faculty run Linux or OpenBSD. I have been able to discuss several different methods with faculty to connect to the WPA-PSK network; general consensus is that wicd works better than NetworkManager, and OpenBSD works better than wpa-supplicant based distros.
How does IT support Linux users generally?
They don't. Officially recommended to run MacOS or Windows.
Have IT staff ever ridiculed you for asking questions about Linux?
Yes. They seem to be from the MS School of thought. You remember those people...everything must run MS and if it doesn't, it sucks. The guys who run Ultimate editions of everything even though they don't need it, and brag about having a beta version of Office. Well now they work in IT.
It's not supported at College of Charleston, so setting it up was a pain, but I digress; it was self inflicted pain, I purposely used Gentoo and wpa_supplicant. I don't even bother with "real" IT, but the tech guy in the Computer Science building is helpful and fine with it.
Generally, they're laughing because they've had the same discussions internally. I work in a university, and my servers mostly run Linux, but sometimes the software required for various user/student/client activities is only available on Windows (and if we're lucky, Mac). Linux just doesn't have enough of a userbase to be a roadblock to some software being adopted. Mac didn't used to, either, although that has changed in the past few years.
And, keep in mind, like in a lot of places, the most technically minded people aren't always the one making the final decisions. Heck, sometimes it's not even IT making all of the IT decisions.
Who is still talking about Linux ?
You'd be surprised.
Well duh. Go to a real Uni that hasn't blown its whole budget on a broken ERP system.
A University with a Computer Science study that laughs when you bring up using something else than windows simply can not be taken seriously.
A computer science program that doesn't support Linux is worthless. I know you were talking to IT, but the computer science department should have enough involvement with IT to force support of Linux.
P.S. Everything these days is tied to operating systems. Yes, any wireless method should be platform independent but that means all platforms support it, not that there's no connection between the wireless method and the operating system.
To me, support of Linux is a litmus test of whether you support openness or you are tied to a specific platform. Don't support Linux? I'll call you proprietary.
If I used a sig over again, would anyone notice?
I am not sure how many other campuses are like this, but our campus (Southern Illinois University - Carbondale) makes use of Juniper VPN in order to allow students, faculty, and staff to log onto wireless. Basically the access points are open to all, but you need to use VPN software in order to be able to access the rest of the campus network, and ultimately the internet. For Linux users like me, it was a little bit of a pain to set up, since it makes use of a Java client to automagically set everything up. Luckily I use 32-bit Linux. 64-bit users from what I hear are generally out of luck. Also out of luck are students who want to use their Android device on our network, since a Juniper client hasn't been set up/made available/customized? specifically for our campus yet.
This is funny, because I've had no issues with campus-wide printing service for Linux.
Yeah, I'm mean, seriously, at this point it's a GIVEN that some University students and faculty will be using other operating systems - Mac especially, and pretty much any University that has a Computer Science, Software Development, or IT program should have classes in which students are at least exposed to Unix/Linux and are taught how to do development and/or administration for Unix and Unix-like systems (as they are used a lot in Enterprise IT).
You shouldn't even have to ASK about Mac and Linux compatibility this late in the game - IT should KNOW that they need to provide compatibility with those OSes.
The good news is, that unless you are using some exotic extension to WiFi (like requiring some sort of Active Directory-based login before you can even get an IP address), Mac and Linux users WILL BE compatible with a WiFi network already, as it is an IEEE standard which both have supported for about 10 years.
Here, they don't actively support Linux (in the sense that there's a WSUS here, but no official mirrors of the Fedora or Ubuntu repos), however they do use Fedora for most computers in the lab, and the wifi seems OS agnostic. Ever since the IT administration decided to switch from WinXP to Fedora for the Computer Centre, people have been showing more interest in Linux.
Linux support at my university is on a "best effort" basis (which usually means you get to talk to me). To be honest, I've never had to address wireless issues, but I can't think of any reason why one couldn't connect--it's as straightforward as WPA2-Enterprise gets, I reckon. iPads and Apples have no problem. At a guess, I'd say the faculty are ~15-20% Mac users and growing all the time.
As a side note--when I got nominated the academic support Linux guy, I was terrified I'd get sneered at by rocket scientists trying to write device drivers for cyclotrons or something. I was--am--super relieved that problems usually turn out to involve things like firewalls and fstabs. :)
Search around for your prospective university's Linux User Group. They would have all the information about how easy it is to run Linux in their environment, whether it is officially supported or not.
As an alumnus of Carnegie Mellon, I'm going to assume this is no big deal, but possibly at least confirms what people think. CMU has several Unix clusters, as well as Mac clusters. All of the downloadable software is supported on as many platforms as the software is created with. In fact, several classes (especially the digital IC design with CADENCE) are operated only in *nix environments.
VPN access to on-campus resources are also provided in all operating environments, and having used both the PC and *nix ones, I can say documentation is quite complete. This is a relatively recent development, however, as the documentation and support has greatly improved since I started at CMU.
It greatly helps when the professors are experts in the software they're teaching and help debug problems with the IT department. (The Hadoop cluster was especially fun to debug, especially with the broken JAR file passing in 0.20.1).
They support it in the sense that they publish all the information that you should need to use things in an OS agnostic manner, but they're not going to help you with any of the specifics. It's unreasonable to expect them to. That said, if there were fundamental setup issues stopping a service working on linux and changing it to make it work wouldn't impact existing users, it's very likely that change would be made.
Supporting linux internally is very different to supporting it for student use. Where I work, we support and use linux internally, but don't support it for student use. But using mail / VPN / file stores from linux is all functional, and we publish the necessary information required to use them.
I wouldn't say you get ridiculed, but you'll inevitably come up against people who don't have a clue what you're talking about.
jh
We are. You're welcome to join the discussion!
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Over here at UWA, support is given for Windows, OSX and a few flavours (and plenty more, if you come across person at the helpdesk) without trouble.
Linux and OSX are only used by some faculties/schools across campus, but the systems provided by the central IT body are chosen and implemented with non-windows usecases in mind. Even Active Directory can be used without locking into windows, thanks to the wonderful (and at times torturous) samba and ldap, so it's laziness and plenty of ignorance on the part of whomever is running the ship over at your institution.
TBH, I thought RMIT was a bit more up-to-par than this annecdotal story suggests. Either way, you can't change things unless you've been working your way up the university IT ladder for more than a few years.
Weird.
Linux was an integral part of my Computer Science education.
The first few CSC courses were all run from a lab with tons of Alpha terminals. Later courses were conducted in labs where all the machines dual-booted Windows and Linux. Almost all of our programming assignments were done in a Linux environment.
Plus, half the university's servers were running on some sort of Unix-like OS.
And you're getting ridiculed for asking about Linux?
Seems a little weird to me... Is Linux really such a marginal part of a modern university environment?
"Work is the curse of the drinking classes." -Oscar Wilde
I don't understand your question - what does it mean that computer network doesn't support Linux and other OSs? I'm pretty sure that the operating system of the switches and routers facilitating the network itself don't run windows ;) Also if no *nix courses are taught in your school, it kinda questions the practicality of the instutucion, because about 70% of the worlds servers run on linux in opposed to below 20% windows share.
My uni in Czech Rep. taughts and runs on Linux almost entirely. Other OSs like Windows, Mac, Solaris etc. are used when they are needed to (like CG).
My campus "supports" Windows and Mac by forcing them to download programs that install something onto the computer to verify its a student account whenever they try to connect, however Linux and Unix are able to openly connect without any authentication. Only real reason I can see is they don't have any Unix programmers and were too cheap to buy something.
I have made it an imperative on my campus that we have as much cross os support ( and cross browser ) as possible. I can only think of one or two classes on campus (that are not windows it classes) that require windows (and soon each student will have a college supplied virtual desktop. ).
We also make sure all in house systems like webapps work on all major browser (ie7+, chrome, firefox, opera, safari, elinks, etc)
Oxford's campus-wide wireless LAN project, OWL, operates like a hotspot scheme with open access points and a redirection to a login page for temporary credentials when you open a web browser. If you're a student or faculty member, you can instead use Cisco Anyconnect to access the university VPN and bypass the login screen.
Not only does the university support Anyconnect on Linux clients, it also provides guidance for setting up an entirely Free Software alternative for those who would rather not download the official software. It's really quite good.
Further details at http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/network/wireless/
Any CS department that doesn't acknowledge Unix in general is just retarded. This includes MIS types from the business school.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
My Belgian university (at least the electronics department and the computer science department) used Linux only in the computer labs, ran Matlab etc... on it, supported spreading your calculations over multiple workstations in the lab, and had posters "Linux is Education" hanging around. An introduction to Linux commands was given to all students when just starting with this.
IMHO, the managers are not aware of the fact that GNU/Linux based operating systems do have a fairly mature collection of device drivers for most wifi devices though this area is still a work in progress. I feel the reaction from the managers were more due to a lack of awareness about the possibilities of FOSS based operating systems to do wifi that caused them to react to you the way they have. On your part you can point them to sites like http://linuxwireless.org/ or conduct a small awareness campaign the the University of Melbourne about the possibilities of using Free/open Source Operating Systems for wireless networking. Since you have identified a need, you can even make that a academic project if you want to.
The Computer Information Technology Program at Dixie State College of Utah is centered around Linux, Mac, and Windows operating systems. The Systems Administration classes teach Linux systems administration. Not only is it supported, its promoted.
I'm not doing Comp Sci at Adelaide Uni (South Australia) myself, but first year CS subjects are done on macs with good exposure to the UNIX base of them, and then they work with Linux (RHEL) before finally touching on Windows PCs.
Things changed this year with the new building, but I think there are ~50 iMacs, and then *every single computer* for the Engineering, Comp Sci & Maths faculty (ECMS) is dual boot between RHEL & Windows XP, and that's over 500 machines, most of which are accessible 24/7 for ECMS students
As far as wireless goes, they have guides for Win XP/Vista/7, OSX, Linux (Ubuntu), as well as WP7, iOS, Android & Symbian 3 -- fairly comprehensive!
I may have other complaints about my university's IT dept, but diversity of platforms is not one of them, most likely due to persistence from ECMS staff
When i worked at Johns Hopkins Peabody Institute back in 2001 every computer in the building ran Linux!
I was last on campus at George Mason University in Fairfax for a class in 2003 but they did support Linux. They are essentially os neutral - except that it wasn't all that long ago that Windows would have elicited that response there (okay, it *was* quite a while ago - I just remember it).
IU explicitly supports Fedora, SUSE, RHEL, and Ubuntu. A friend of mine running gentoo was having trouble, called them up, and they got him in touch with someone who helped him out the same day.
so, I know that my school provides very limited support for Linux....basically, if anyone working at their support center knows enough about it, or if the Sr. techs have free time, they will try and help out. Luckily though, our CS department hosted their own wireless service separate from the rest of the university, so most of the time we could just use that.
Officially we support Windows XP Pro and Win 7 64bit, since they are the core of the Student and Staff builds we support - everything else is on a best endeavours basis.
In reality, most people are OK, and we have guides available for Windows, OsX, iOS and Linux for common things (wifi [Cisco VPN], email client config etc). We also have a Windows terminal server with a full copy of our student build on it, so people can use a supported environment for Uni work, without having to compromise on their personal choice of device/OS.
Android is tricky atm, since to get working VPN you neet to root your device, and we're not comfortable telling people to do that.
To be honest tho, day to day support of Linux and Android relies heavily on me, since the rest of the support staff don't have an interest. And Apple support comes from a couple of fanbois in the office too.
I went to the 'Direction of IT' seminar at RMIT a month ago and no one I talked to looked down their nose at Linux. In fact they are planning to try to be platform neutral as much as reasonably possible. All critical systems work and only problems are when random people use funky .docx or .pptx files and expect you to submit the same but IT doesn't really enforce that.
Wireless works better with Network Manager than with Windows (which needs SecureW2) and I even got it working with WICD and strait up wpa_supplicant (I can give the config if you want). I am only worried if they decide to change the wireless system to something that is "simpler" for Win/Mac like WPS that isn't supported in Network Manager and scrapping the now legacy WPA Enterprise EAP/TTLS thingy. (Then again, XP doesn't do WPS so they won't scrap the current system before WPS is added to NM)
I spent most of my time there asking about the viability of a campus Minecraft server.
Unicode in Slashdot
I work in IT at a university, and Linux support is on a best-effort basis. Wireless isn't an issue, because we use WPA2 Enterprise. If your IT department isn't using open standards for something like wireless, I hate to think what else you have to deal with. The biggest Linux issue I have is VPN access. Unfortunately, the support/use of open standards kinda ends with the WiFi network. The VPN is Juniper, and requires a horrid Java-based client to access it. The web portal you have to use to get the client is an ASP abomination, and ineptly attempts OS detection, routinely failing on Linux. It's possible to actually get the client, but not without 1) Digging into the page's source to find out where the clients are, 2) using the JS console to trigger the function that actually retrieves the client, 3) writing a bash script to load the client and required Java libs, and (on a 64-bit machine) 4) installing 32-bit JRE and using that location in said bash script.
I had expected a university with a top-notch CS department would be better than average on basic IT stuff. But no, it's Windows cargo-cult bullshit everywhere you go. Don't get me wrong, there are always pockets of interesting stuff going on... But universities in general... brilliant faculty and students, but the place is actually run by retarded monkeys.
To understand recursion, you must first understand recursion.
I'm pretty sure networking hardware and the software they use are platform-neutral with respect to client connections, and they took your issue as an instance of "THAT dude who thinks he's leet for using linux yet doesn't know how networks operate."
your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
I guess it would depend on whether you needed access to certain resources which were only available from within the domain, and you couldn't VPN in, but could you and fellow students not build an alternative to the "official" network?
I remember at Uni (Southampton) there was an alternative wireless network, not run by the University, which had pretty good coverage across the campus ("SOWN" was the SSID, I believe) - this might or might not have been run by students (I cannot remember), but it was not an official university network.
For learning about working around problems, and solving things, uni can be great, whether as part of your course of study or not.
I've heard people on this site are big into it. Have you ever heard of it?
I work at a major University in the US (rhymes with Schmarvard).
I lead a team of 6 that offers Linux training, OS installs, desktop support, and a Debian-based HPC/Web/Database/Tomcat/Wiki/RT environment. We used to get lots of requests to install Linux on laptops or desktops, though those have mostly slowed due to the fact it's easy to install. The desktops are almost all Ubuntu.
Most everything else we do is OS-agnostic since there's a lot of OS X on campus. I think the only thing that's really specific to a Windows environment is Exchange and the Outlook client. I just fire up a VirtualBox VM and run Windows 7 in it.
I frequently find myself working for the IT department wherever I am, but not high enough up the food chain to know anything about policies or what is "officially" supported - not caring may also be a factor. I man a help desk, people approach me with a question/problem, I answer/fix it and then send them away. I, personally, support Windows, Linux, Mac stuff, and the occasional smart phone. Only one of us worked that desk at a time, so I have no idea what the others did.
Does your university/college provide support for Linux/BSD/etc users to connect to the on-campus wireless?
At my old university you were fine as long as you could handle WPA2 Enterprise. At my new university, Windows users are required to use the Cisco Clean Access Agent and everyone else just gets to connect (for both wired and wireless).
How does IT support Linux users generally?
At my old university the best route to Linux support was to go bug the guys in the Clemson Linux Users Group. At my new university they seem pretty clueless, but there are a lot of people I haven't met yet.
Have IT staff ever ridiculed you for asking questions about Linux?
I've never had a reason to ask the IT staff for help with anything, but it seems more practical to ridicule the Windows users who can't find where they saved an e-mail attachment than the Linux users who are having trouble with what always seems to be a more technical issue.
I'm a masters student at the university of utah and they do a great job of supporting all OS's.
When I went to University, I took my Amiga with me. That worked just fine connecting to the campus network. Only a few people had Windows systems, but they worked as well. Most of the course was based around working on SunOS. I don't think anyone had a Linux desktop, but I'm pretty sure they would have worked just fine.
All the universities I've experienced in the UK (including ones i've worked for in senior ICT roles) have been platform agnostic, to the point that it's a nightmare as an admin. Running messaging systems we weren't allowed to dictate to users at all what they chose to connect and dealing with things like the buggy IMAP implementation of the last release of Eudora caused no end of headaches!
There were some managers who tried to push their agendas either way and as a department we certainly encouraged people to work with standardised platforms and software, but ultimately as long as the end platform was secure with AV/etc you could connect with whatever you could get working.
On the other hand we did ridicule people who people who tried to push their own agenda (be it FOSS or Microsoft) when they didn't actually have the knowledge or ability to back up their demands...
Working for the (other) man
IT support is generally focused on Windows (IT Services support a managed desktop for general users), though Mac support is also now creeping in due to demand. Of course, anyone can connect to the wifi with anything. In individual departments focused on compute-intensive work (Maths, Physics, CompSci, Engineering etc) many people use Linux as their desktop of choice, and a specialised managed desktop is available for high-performance computing based on Linux. Most of the high-performance backends are Linux, with a couple of Mac clusters also, but the backend general purpose web and email servers probably are Windows (I don't know tbh). So to answer your question, support is mainly for Windows, because it's reasonably easy to provide and support a managed service that suits the needs of people who mainly do email, web browsing and word processing. The higher you go in terms of expected functionality, the more of your own system you are expected to support, except for the case of high-performance work, where Linux is system of choice and is provided for as a specialised service separate from regular IT services. Macs are big in biosciences though, and I expect support for Macs for general purpose use to increase alongside Windows.
Korma: Good
Which university is this? I attend the University of Melbourne and from what I understand linux related operating systems are pretty well respected and supported (at least for the staff, clubs and subjects). As to if individual students are supported, I can't think of a way that windows is especially supported so I can't really comment on linux. I suppose the only real support is by the IT staff who *are* qualified to give support on only windows and mac, but I imagine that if you're running some distribution of linux then you would be able to work it out for yourself...
They have for some years, and Unix before that.
Other faculties use various combinations of Windows and Macs.
--dace
davecb@spamcop.net
I'm using a college computing as I type this. This PC, as do all the PCs in the building, dual boots on Windows XP and Suse Linux. There's a dedicated administrator for the Linux part, and there are Linux servers too. Some of our subjects (specifically those relating to secure programming [buffer overflows] and network programming) were all thought on Linux. All relevant printer drivers are setup to work under Linux just fine.
Some of the lectures use Linux (Suse, Ubuntu, others), NetBSD, and Mac OSX on their own laptops, and these are all used on the college network.
I bring my own laptop in and I have no problem accessing the WiFi networks under either Windows7 or Linux. I can't access the servers directly - need to use SSH to access them. Nor can I print (I think - to be honest, I haven't tried printing from my laptop, but I would guess I can't as I need to be logged into the network so the printers can debit my printing account for each page).
So, yeah, no problems here. They expect us computing students (especially us older students) to come in with anything to use, so they allow everything. Even my Android phone has no problem connecting to the network, and since I started last September they changed the policy to allow the android phones to be able to connect to mail.google.com without going through a proxy - actually, I think they removed the requirement to using a proxy for anything, as I can access any website from android.
Kudos to them!
I recently took a position as general tech guy for one department of a university, liaising with central IT for stuff that they handle better. However, part of the deal is that, since I actually have Linux experience, I'm more or less the Linux support guy for the university now...
So far, not much has come of that, but it's been less than a year...
Dan Aris
Fun. Free. Online. RPG. BattleMaster.
The University of Ottawa had some Fedora virtual machines accessible from school computers, but the campus wireless is very irritating. There are instructions for connecting to the WPA2-Enterprise-encrypted network (which didn't have a proper certificate server), but the old VPN didn't have a Linux client. That did not mean that everything was fine and dandy. For some reason, my laptop running Ubuntu or Arch would often get kicked off the wireless network or refuse to connect altogether, with no proper error message. When the same laptop was running Windows 7 and another laptop running Windows XP tried to connect, they almost never got kicked off or had trouble connecting (maybe once in a month instead of once every 5 minutes on Linux.
The University of Prince Edward Island has zero support for Linux or Android on its wireless network. The encrypted wireless network is a relatively straightforward WPA2 Enterprise network with RADIUS server authentication, which requires a certificated on the device that is attempting to connect. The problem is that the only way to get the certificate is via a special program on Windows or via a *.mobileconfig file on iPhone or via some other means on Mac that doesn't actually work. There's no way to extract the certificates from any of the other methods to manually put onto a Linux or Android device, so they are stuck with the unencrypted wireless that uses a web sign-in.
Moral of the story: even if there is "support" for other operating systems in that the protocols used are completely standard and/or there are instructions on the website for connecting, don't expect anything to work the way it should, and don't expect any help from tech support either.
At my university, the computer science, software engineering, and computer engineering departments are dominated by computers running Linux. Linux and Unix have a strong presence in all the other engineering departments. The math department is running mostly Macs. The material science, computational chemistry, and physics departments all have clusters of computers acting as small supercomputers. None of the supercomputers are running windows. The business department runs at least one IBM z-series mainframe. The school of medicine has all kinds of strange stuff.
At one point, the computer engineering department was threatening to revolt and create their own campus network. At another, someone installed some Cisco wireless software that only supported Windows stations. Both those battles are now behind us. The campus computer department supports both Apple Macs and Linux, and support they support those stations well.
Linux is a first class operating system, to the point that the Electrical and Computer Engineering departments recommended Masters and PhD thesis style sheet is in LaTex.
Does anyone even know of a research institution with a hard-science presence, that does not have a large Linux user base? and at least one Linux cluster?
Whiny bitch.
I have seen in many case that while IT departments do not offer official support, they themselves provide link to either internal community based support or provide resources. So, you should look into that, and if none exists, I am sure you can work with a Linux user group at your University. They MUST know...
The University of Michigan has their own distro
http://www.managedlinux.org/
I studied Computer Science from IIIT Hyderabad" in India. Almost on the very first day of classes, we get a mail account and a programming account on locally hosted servers, to which we ssh through putty on Windows machines in the labs. Of course, it was just a matter of weeks before we installed Redhat on all the machines, considering this was 2003. Not that we were the first, we just inherited the prevalent culture. Also, the students were the admins of the labs and some senior students become the student Sys-Admins of the servers and infrastructure.
Also, being a university, only open technologies were part of the curriculum with some rare exceptions. So, Windows didn't make too much sense from a programming perspective. We only used Windows for multi-player gaming in the hostels (Quake, CS-CZ, UT, BF2, Warcraft etc..).. ah.. good ol days! :) Even our personal machines in our hostel rooms were dual boot config and the time apart from gaming was spent in Linux (SUSE and then Ubuntu). The only issue we had back then was that wired access wasn't available in all the rooms and wireless drivers were hard to find in Linux especially for a D-Link card, the only solution being Ndiswrapper.
The other premier institute in India, the IIT's use Solaris instead of Linux as the standard system.
I find it shocking to read about the response of the IT staff in your university. I think you need to start a campaign to modernize/enlighten your university. The first thing you learn after C programming being Computer Architecture, Compilers and OS Internals, it would be wise to use an OS which is open, not a closed source proprietary OS, which is now incidentally targeting your grandma as their new demographic with their latest release.
The last person to mod me down is a rotten egg..... there.. that should do it..
Our central IT staff is still hoping the the Macs will just "go away." We won't even talk about any for of UNIX or UNIX-like systems. I'm the PIA for them b/c my shop has been using System V and its spawn since 1986. They figure if you are not paying big money for the software, then it is useless - gotta' have a vendor to "stand behind" the products. Must be why they still like Lotus Notes so much.
As an IT professional in the business world, Linux for end users is not practical for configuring and installing, if you cant make your linux connect to a basic wi-fi connection then you shouldn't be running linux.
University of Massachusetts at Lowell has Intro to Linux and Linux System Administration courses. Many of the courses that fall within the CS and IT degree programs also allow for submission of papers in OpenOffice.org (well now LibreOffice I guess...) formats. There are still some, like an Intro to MS Office class that I had to take that I would have been hard pressed to complete without a copy of Windows; but then the same can be said in reverse of some of the other courses...
Things really just depend on the professors; I have taken a couple classes with one now who almost always says, "if you're on Linux|Solaris|Windows"
As far as wireless goes I guess my wife's university (Bridgewater State) has two wireless networks. They have to install some client to get on one and it may be Windows or Windows and Mac only, but there is a second that supports a wider range of devices and does not require the client. She mentioned why one was better than the other, but I honestly can't remember, so it's a fairly anecdotal statement, except to say that they have provisions for the 'other' operating systems.
I'm assuming the politics at RMIT haven't changed that much. Students are not clients of ITS, so good luck with getting them to do anything for you. About the only way you can get them to do anything useful is lobby your School's or Portfolio's Director of IT and get them to argue with ITS for you.
Don't ask the teachers - if they knew the answers they'd wouldn't be teaching ;-p
As the library staff or the student union, ask the support people. Or use Google.
I've never had any problems accessing any of the major East coast uni networks.
Monash
Melbourne will tell you they don't support Linux - but then they're barely capable of reading the side of a Windows box... if you find translating the instructions for Windows users too hard (you should probably give up Linux and uni) ask the local LUG (the members can be found huddled over laptops without guis in the bar).
Have phun
I go to Georgia Tech (formally the Georgia Institute of Technology), in the college of computing, and I'm proud to report that they support non-windows OS'es fully.
I have a Debian Linux laptop, which I use on the institute-wide WPA wireless network. I also have an Ubuntu workstation, where I log on to a college-wide network, and my home directory is actually an NFS mount to a remote server (so my home directory follows me between workstations, and is backed up). Additionally, the college printers are already set up on my workstation, so everything 'just works'.
For some services such as wifi there are instructions for various flavours of OS - Windows, Mac, Linux, Android. We have Enterprise WPA2 and the university requires you to install their certificate, but they've done a pretty decent job of documenting it for these OSes. Unfortunately some of the software they advocate is very Microsoft or Windows centric. The Computer Science department goes quite a bit further - its lab machines run CentOS. Up until a couple of years ago there were some old Sun machines knocking about somewhere in the Engineering Faculty.
If you need supported to use Linux then you shouldn't use it in the first place. I installed Linux from floppy disks in the mid 90s when I attended college and I didn't feel like I needed to ask anyone for support or permission for which operating system I used on my computer. Seriously... just do it and when you run into problems search out solutions and support yourself. That is the whole point of using Linux.
Yep, wanted to buy computer. I was looking for a specific model and asked them if I could get the rebate by having windows uninstalled. Can you believe, the guy says, "Why would you want to ruin your computer by doing that?" I told him that I would rather have some distro of a linux os on it. Like Debian. He responded by 'educating' on why windows is so much better. And since apparently he had 'personal knowledge' of Debian he said that the performance of a linux distro would never match the performance of a venerable OS like... gasp.... VISTA! The truth is the same now as it always has been. People who don't understand something always think its worthless by default.
At Concordia University in Montreal, all public computers in labs dual-boot Windows and Linux. When I graduated, this was Windows XP and Fedora, but I suspect they've changed since.
IITS, our IT department, normally provided wireless connection instructions for Windows, MacOS X, and Linux (GNOME, if memory serves).
Here we got support for Linux, even help on how to get the *grasp* Cisco VPN client to work (if that piece of fine software actually works). I can connect even using an N810 with the vpnclient... :), pretty nice.
In the last few years I have been at three universities, two in Australia, I have used Unix, and had support. However, I've never tried to use wireless, and in all cases I was using deparmental IT people rather than university central IT people.
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
My University had all Macs which dual booted between OSX and Windows XP (WinXP was default)
All the Windows XP machines had a Fedora 4 VM Ware environment installed for use.
It worked pretty well, but pissed me off that they didn't make the VM available except on their own machines.
Granted, I just used putty into our cluster (which was Solaris) most of the time anyway.
I didn't attend SUNY Purchase in NY, but when I visited a year or two ago I thought their network security was pretty heavy handed. I'm not sure if it's still like this today, but here is my experience.
Although the network was open and unencrypted, users were redirected to a splash page on their first web request. This splash page used a browser plugin or other fairly intrusive mechanism that searches your computer for the latest OS updates and a working copy of Anti Virus software. It only accepted a few approved AV vendors. If the definitions or OS are out of date, you can't connect to anything but your update site.
Even if you have a fully updated machine with all the required bells and whistles, it's still inconvenient because the splash page still had to scan your computer on every initial connection. So basically you're looking at a 1-3 minute delay between opening your laptop and actually doing anything on the net. The one-time setup took something like 1-2 hours.
Both Windows and Mac users were faced with the antivirus requirement and all the associated bloat. Oh, and if you run linux, you're just out of luck. No support or free pass for you, at all. (As a side note, the school newspaper ran an article about the virtues of Linux and open source just a few weeks before they installed this security system.)
I'm all for security but when you reach that level of inconvenience and exclusion, I start to question if it's actually worth it.
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Spaniard here. All my university runs on Linux, we dualboot Linux and Windows in every single lab, and both are fully supported by the corporate WPA2 wireless network (http://www.udc.es/udcwifi/ga/configuracion.htm)
10 years ago, I graduated from the University of London (QM Campus) - Maths and Computer Science. The basic systems (the library, general "computer" places, offices etc.) were all Windows (2000/NT4). The arty-departments all used Mac's. The Computing department had dual boot Windows/Linux with identical software on each (and cross-OS logins that actually worked, which is novel at the time). The Mathematics department didn't care what you used and had dual-OS-compatible software for the main part. All were officially supported, and you could literally use whatever you wanted so long as it complied with the standards and didn't break things. Hell, some of the old CNC etc. machines were DOS-based!
I don't know whether that's changed since but I would be surprised (and a bit disappointed) if you still couldn't use whatever you wanted in your particular area. Windows as a common base, a "known-good" if you like for those who aren't studying an IT-based course, but some *nix support should be a given in any sufficiently reputable university nowadays, and in the CS department? Just TRY and force them onto one OS - that's kinda the point of a lot of the projects and teaching you are given, platform independence, standardised code, interoperability, close-to-the-max performance, etc..
I'd be surprised if an open-source OS wasn't the norm for some of the more in-depth topics where you're literally playing with OS design and experimenting, etc. Hell, even the EE department used Linux for a hell of a lot of stuff, most of it custom-built. And if you're supporting that, supporting a desktop OS in a locked down config is infinitely easier.
I'd worry about the quality of a CS course in a university that didn't have support for that sort of tinkering and compatibility. To me, it would smack of rubber-stamped degree courses and a handful of years doing assignments exactly how you were told to do them and no deviation allowed. That doesn't bode well for their Masters, PhD, research side of things, which would make me worry where they get their money (although a corporate-sponsored educational establishment is far from unheard of nowadays).
I don't think I'd have touched my university at the time if I didn't already know they were running those kinds of hybrid systems.
My university not only supports Linux and OS X, but has tutorials complete with screenshots for many versions: Ubuntu, Redhat, and Suse for Linux and Leopard and Snow Leopard for OS X.
It does so for 3 different networks and 4 different ways to connect: eduroam, 80211.X, OpenVPN and SSL-VPN.
The problem is that all that documentation is horrendously organized. There is no single page that lists all the possibilities and certificate files you need and as you peruse the site to fix your connection problem, you find other ways to connect. Though, once you get it up and running everything works like a charm.
Free Manning, jail Obama.
I am working in a large international research institute. We mostly do bioinformatics, but there are some departments which is mostly applied math. Linux is pretty much at the core of what many people do. I think all of the computing cluster nodes are linux. Many of the Desktops are OS X, but there is a significant amount of linux desktops around. Frankly, the only people who rely on windows is the administrative staff.
At first I thought it would be a problem sending them OpenOffice exported DOC files, which often messes up the crazy MS forms. But they actually consider it their job to fix layout of grant applications, so they are fine with it.
f your University is educating CS people without at least teaching them some linux basics, it is time to find a better place.
I presently work at one of the largest public Uni's in Texas, and can say that the Linux and Mac support is almost on par with what is provided for with Windows. I'd also like to piont out that Linux and Mac support is fairly easier to provide than Windows, since the primary infrastructure for the University is ran on Linux, BSD, or other *nix variants. Better documentation for that IMO.
If I had to estimate, I'd garner that Windows being the primary OS for IT personnel on campus is 50%. The rest are Linux/Mac/*BSD folk. I personally support all 3 OS' w/ Linux as my primary. My departments infrastructure is all Linux. Last Windows server was AD which was replaced by a linux solution. I know of several Large Departments that are entirely Linux workshops. And the Supercomputing facilities? Linux, BSD, or some other *nix variant. I know of entire Mac OS labs, as well as entire Colleges and Departments using only Windows from Infrastructure on up.
As far as getting Linux support? If the documentation I require isn't available online, there are a handful of people I know to contact to get said information. And most of them are other College and Deparment IT personnel not running the main Uni. infrastucture. The teir 1 support line on campus is for people who can't remember there passwords. Get my drift? As for an entirely Windows only University? Honestly, I can't imagine such a thing.
As for the Managers and IT head laughing? Check back with them in 5 years and see if they're still laughing. Microsoft is getting left in the dust IMO. I can't remember the last thing they innovated. I'll give them Kinect, but that in and of itself wasn't a new idea. They just managed to package it first. The Internet and how we use computing resources are rapidly changing. I've been looking for Microsoft headlines and what they're working on to compete in the Enterprise arenas, and there just aren't any. Windows 8? From what I've seen of it, they're still playing catch up and that isn't aimed at the Enterprise.
Sorry for turning it into and MS rant. Have been expecting more from them for the past decade. With that much R&D money at your disposal, you'd think they would be pushing the envelope for us.
Monash University (also in Melbourne) had excellent Linux support when I was there. Windows and Linux were equally supported, about half of my labs were done on linux machines, the other half windows. home directories were shared between OS's so interoperability was simple. Personal devices were also equally supported. We also had ssh access (I used to do most of my work from home that way, saves forgetting to email yourself files, or put them on a thumb drive).
I have heard similar things about Deakin and Melbourne unis so I would be very surprised if RMIT was any different.
At least there is the "UQ VPN Client Install and use guide" for Linux.
I am no longer in university, but I see one possible reason for not supporting *nux on a wireless network. At my company, our firewall forces everyone trying to access the outside world have a certain antivirus installed. Unfortunately, that antivirus is only available for Windows and Mac OS X (not even iOS). Even more unfortunately, the firewall software won't let us force a different antivirus. This is to protect the non-tech-savvy workers from themselves. In order to let mobile devices and computers with a non-supported OS access the internet, we have to define IP ranges with the antivirus enforcement turned off, then get the MAC address of each device and assign it to that IP range in the DHCP server. Does a university want to keep track of hundreds (if not thousands) of MAC addresses?
BTW, the Computer Science department at my university had its own network which was OS-agnostic and bypassed the school's antivirus enforcement policy.
When I started law school, an IT manager told everyone at orientation that Windows XP Professional was "required." When some of the non-ignorant students pressed him as to why XP Home was insufficient, he said something about XP Professional having more sophisticated networking abilities. After looking unsuccessfully for a laptop in my price range that came with XP Professional, I realized that the IT manager who had said that was probably full of crap. I bought a laptop with XP Home and I never had a problem with anything. Eventually, I installed Linux and still had no problem (I even used OpenOffice for all of my writing assignments). I'll leave it to Slashdot to speculate as to why this Ivy League IT manager told every student to buy XP Professional when it was clearly unnecessary.
Doesn't Princeton lock-down their network tighter than a frogs asshole? If I'm not mistaken, recent news reports suggest that Princeton blocked all Android devices from their wireless network due to a bug that prevents Android devices from properly releasing assigned IPs after they expire. I believe Princeton also blocked iOS devices for a similar reason further back in history, before Apple fixed the bug. So, unless these news reports are mistaken, clearly some institutions DO block-out devices based on the OS they run. Maybe it's automatic, or maybe it's rather manual. Even if you have to call-in to the IT department and request they add your MAC address to a white-list and specify which OS you run at the same time, lying and connecting a Linux machine is a pretty stupid reason to get expelled from college.
That said, I'd have to imagine that if any IT department DID limit the wireless network to only Windows machines, this would be a clear indication that the head of the IT department was somehow getting kickbacks from a regional license vendor. The reason to allow Linux on your network is clear, it's Free. Except for private colleges (like Princeton), most colleges don't have the extra money to afford huge numbers of licenses for the thousands of computers they have sprawled around campus (even with site-license and educational institution discounts). At my alma mater, even most of the computers that did have Windows could also dual-boot to Linux (Redhat was the flavor of choice at the time). The only exceptions were department-run labs (like the Mac lab run by the C.S. department, and the engineering lab run by the E.E. department).
And no, I don't buy in to Microsoft's whole "Linux is more expensive than Windows" argument, especially at a college where most of the IT staff consists of students employed via work-study (assuming this isn't some arts-only institution).
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Here the AICTE has recently published a notice to use FOSS software wherever possible. 2 years back we used Turbo C++(can you believe that!) for compiling data structure programs but the other day I saw the new students using Geany in ubuntu to compile them! Also in our college we have common internet cafe for the students and all 200 of the pcs have fedora installed.
I'm actually in a place where the Ubuntu distribution is installed on the coffee machine and on all major hardware we have. Here, I don't believe MS-W is supported :)
Up here in Brisbane @ QUT, the WLAN uses WPA2 Enterprise exclusively after they scrapped all the Cisco VPN software. As long as your OS can use/authenticate WPA2 Enterprise, you are free to use any OS you like. (I personally use Arch Linux).
However the disturbing trend I've seen is that many of the old dual boot XP/Ubuntu boxes in the labs are all being changed to Win7 Enterprise. There are 2-3 labs of Macs, but those are restricted to students that need them for iPhone/iPad/Mac development.
All first year CS/IT classes are now all on MS technologies (with the exception of the intro to programming unit, which is Python based, but then a poll of all students in that class I was one of 3 that used Linux, the rest (approx 150+) where Win/Mac). The 2nd programming unit and Web programming are C# and ASP.NET respectively (but both are still considered 1st year subjects). It's not until you start on 2nd/3rd year subjects that you get Java, C/C++ and others involved. (Which I've yet to do yet, but highly suspect they'll all be on Windows).
Students and staff have an LDAP account. All mails go to your .maildir and you can upload your personal website to your public_html folder in your home directory. Wherever you go, chances are there's a number of headless PXE booting terminals that boot a Linux environment according to your status and privileges and also mount your central home directory.
Local WLAN offers 802.1x authentication, VPN and IPSec and unencrypted access with a web-based authentication gateway. To remotely access resources, you can either use VPN and mount your home directory via NFS or ssh to a public student server and do ssh forwarding from there or use X11 forwarding.
Pretty much all operating systems are supported. Detailed instructions and support are provided for Windows, Linux, OS X.
I am aware that this setup is not very common, but it does prove that it is indeed possible to run the IT of an entire university with thousands of students on Linux and support every major operating system.
I'm also sure that you university could easily support Linux if they only wanted to. Linux already supports nearly every protocol you could throw at it and most Linux users know what they are doing. Just enable some non-proprietary protocol, post an example configuration file and you should be good to go.
Some examples of how good Linux support looks like can be found here and here.
:/- spoon(_).
Georgia Institute of Technology (GaTech) provides Red Hat support along with other unix based OSes too. It's essential for GaTech to support all OSes to foster research and development, and overall growth, of GaTech. Macs are not outcasts on the campus but just another PC. GaTech is different from most other universites. I worked at Georgia Southern University prior to GaTech. Macs and Linux machines were unheard of and shunned from users; some servers ran SUSE, but that was it.
So working between two universites...I can see some growth at some universities in terms of supporting other OSes.
I think it'll depend on what you mean by "support. Linux should be able to connect to your university's wireless, unless they've done something really strange with the network. So in most cases you'll be able to use wireless whether it's officially supported or not.
The campus I went to supported Linux, in fact, using some form of UNIX or Linux was a requirement for some courses. The campus labs were a mix of Windows, Mac and UNIX/Linux boxes.
Given that the entirety of the Computer Science department of the university runs on Linux (every research lab seems to have its own favorite distro, even), you'd better believe the network's OS-agnostic. That said though, officially (on a campus-wide basis) we don't support the stuff because it's hard enough finding people who can support the PC/Mac crowd while we battle the dinosaurs in the basement, like the student records system, which I swear is probably still running on something fossilized. This is in addition to the fact that as a percentage of the total user base, people who personally use Linux out of the thirty-plus thousand that are on campus every day, Linux users are almost statistically insignificant when it comes to allocation of resources.
Does your university/college provide support for Linux/BSD/etc users to connect to the on-campus wireless?
Yes, on both solutions:
* no security, only a web page which works on all operating systems (Campusnet)
* WPA2 (part of eduroam)
How does IT support Linux users generally?
By providing information. Students are supposed to help each other, there is always someone who is able to fix some problem.
Have IT staff ever ridiculed you for asking questions about Linux?
The technical staff of certain departments ridicule Windows users...
I go to a Algonquin College in Ottawa Ontario Canada. I am currently studying Computer Science / Computer Engineering. The college teaches Linux, we learn how to build and compile the Linux Kernel. We have to install and learn how to support Linux as an Operating System, but if we use Linux as our main OS, we are not supported by the IT Department. We are left on our own to figure out how to manage all the services on the network.
So for one whole project, I went really really out of my way to create a whole walk-through on how to connect a Gnome 2 based computer to the campus wireless network and to the VPN from home. I worked on it for hours, taking screen shots and answering possible questions that could arise. I got an A+ on the project and I was about to submit it to the IT Department to include on their web site, and Gnome 3 came out! Now Ubuntu/Fedora/SUSE/Mint are all using different/various DEs and Gnome 2 is no longer even supported!
As much as I can't stand that people don't support Linux, I think Linux companies are worse at supporting themselves. I am really discouraged about this because I want to help with the adoption of Linux but the companies/distributions are continually dividing themselves making supporting Linux a complete nightmare.
Really I have no one to blame except the people behind Linux for its refusal to work together for a unified simple experience. I know that the colleges and universities are probably getting kickbacks from supporting Microsoft alone, but with what I have done, I don't blame them. I can't keep up to it myself and I use Linux all the time!
...my University has its own Linux distro. While I am not very familiar with Linux, at least half of the workstations are running that. And actually, as I hear from my fellow researchers, the support for Linux workstations is better than for the windows ones. I had to do some work on a Linux server (updating the webpages of the department) and support excellent. I mean, I was asking Root some basic questions by email, and got detailed answer in 30 mins.
OTOH, there are some Linux specific problems that I dont have in Win7, so I don't judge which OS is better. They are just different OSes for different people. What I want to say is that Linux support in the campus is great.
I'm a student in Germany from the Brandenburg University of Technology and our IT-Deparment supports Linux / Mac OS X very well.
There exist different illustrated manuals how to set up your wireless for different orperating systems. For example there are, Windows of course, but also Linux with Gnome Network Manager and even a guide how to set it up with the terminal only. Also Mac OS X and iOS manuals exists as well as for Symbian and Android.
Standard wireless here that works on every platform. 7-day limit "visitor" wireless, and then regular campus wifi access for university members by registering a MAC address and filling out a form that is far more technical than necessary or even feasible for the less adept. My previous university, 5x larger, only required one login with university credentials from a device followed by an IP renew for registration.
Actual campus support for personal computers, as far as I know, is limited to those machines they sell through IT, which are only Dell/Windows and Mac laptops. Apparently those are very full service support, with data recovery and all (though for some reason they don't default to having some kind of dropbox-esque data backup on these machines, so many less savvy folks lose data.)
There are instructions for most any IT type task for linux as well, such as how to connect to the university VPN (which is also available via website, which is nice for quickly grabbing papers from off campus.)
Most of all I'm confused on this question. Are there really places in this age of standard networking and smartphones that ever take into account what OS is being used?
Really? Bristol has always had an OS-agnostic approach to connection to their network (wired or wireless). The CS department has always pushed that a bit further by encouraging Linux use among staff and students. Which software were you thinking of that is Microsoft centric?
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Posting as AC on purpose
Rutgers -
Several departments use Linux exclusively, the wireless connection officially supports Windows (XP, Vista, 7) & OS X (10.2 +), but "users of alternate operating systems are welcome to configure and connect themselves, but such access is considered unsupported"
Enough info is given on the step by step instructions for Windows & OS X for "alternate os users" to dope out the connection, and most of the helpdesk jockeys know enough to talk "alternate os users" who can't figure out the connection on their own thru the config process.
From what I remember (last there in 1999 - 2006) CAEN, the engineering network, fully supports Linux. Meaning: All college of engineering CAEN boxes (must be several hundred at a minimum), at least the ones I encountered, were dual boot with Linux and just about every CS student either ran Linux or MacOS on their laptops/personal machine. For the most part I think actual support was best effort, in the sense that if you had something wrong with your install then it was up to you to fix it. However, if you had some issue connecting to the network CAEN was very helpful getting you up and running since Linux VPN clients were officially supported.
In addition, when I was an undergrad, all classwork had to compile on the Sun boxes we had, and by the time I was in grad school the Sun boxes were replaced with Linux boxes. The faculty in the CS department are very heavily invested in Linux and even have their own "IT" department, DCO. I don't think I ever ran across a professor that had a windows machine, doesn't mean they don't exist, just that they are rare.
The Microsoft Select agreement enables RMIT University to purchase Microsoft applications, operating systems, server software licenses and a range of associated documentation products at significant savings compared to other purchase arrangements.
IT is supposed to be taught, still you get ridiculed when asking on Linux? This does not sound like an academic environment at all. What ever happened to "there are no stupid questions" ?
Sure, infrastructure can be really important, but it is collaboration between people and people themselves that elevate academia- if that guy (as you describe him) was at my university, he would had been sacked long, long ago. In an academic environment you should also be smart, not just smart-ass. Plus you should be open-minded and ready to entertain new suggestions.
For the guy you are mentioning; if, in the year 2011, he cannot fathom why he should keep an eye on Linux, even more so because IT is supposed to be his domain, then he is a lost cause. Unless he is one of the management/marketing people of the institution, so he was probably a lost cause long before he laughed at you. You should just train yourself to not take him very seriously- he 'll be around offering his wisdom up until he wrecks the university and moves along to "manage" some other company.
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When I worked at a major US university, we would test new student-facing systems against Windows, Mac, Fedora and Ubuntu. There wasn't a ton of demand, but we never wanted to invest a ton of money in a solution only to find there was some percentage of users - likely the savviest of them - were guaranteed to be left out in the cold. My team made a genuine effort to engage the uber-geeks on the network - they could either be your staunchest ally or your loudest critic, and I never felt that their requests were unreasonable. In terms of "support", we all had a bit of knowledge and could help if need be, but we rarely got support requests from Linux users - if they had the skill to install and run a linux distro they probably didn't need much of our help.
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Used to be just terrible for Linux support; they restricted access by MAC address (not even WEP encryption), and you had to download a little piece of software when you first connected that would do the registration for you. Depending on whether you used Windows, Apple, or Linux, you would get a different executable...unfortunately, the Linux one was libc5. Installing the libc5 libraries didn't work, so every semester, I had to make a trip to IT (which closed at 4pm) to get them to manually enter my MAC address.
This past year, they changed to an entirely web-based MAC registering portal, which works fine on Linux. Unfotunately, it doesn't actually register the MAC address reliably...but at least it works...
Endnote would be my primary example, but I use Mendeley instead.
Hahahahha.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
I work for a small private University in the midwest called McKendree. I helped redesign our wireless infrastructure to use a pfSense setup, so you can say its BSD-based. However, of note is that the design itself centers around a captive portal, secured with SSL, and doing RADIUS lookups against Active Directory. While making your AP's "dumb" isn't the best solution ever, it is ridiculously affordable compared to most other solutions out there. The best benefit being that the setup is almost entirely OS-Agnostic - if it supports a browser, it'll usually work just fine.
As for our other functions, we actively support users with issues for Windows and OS X with a "best-effort" applied to any Linux questions. Since our shop is only 7 people and Windows-based, often times we aren't as up-to-date on the latest distros as some of our users would like. But we would sincerely sit down and try if there was something with which a user needed help.
For any IT Department to find the question of Linux support laughable is more showing of their quality as a department than it is of the quality of your OS selection.
We have exactly 0 support for Linux in our wireless system. I work for our IT dept. and have brought this up several times. I don't even get a real response to it. I have at least 30 students a year ask me how they can get on, and the only answer I can give them is "you can't", which royally sucks, because I am a people pleaser. If I can help someone, I'll bend over backwards to do it. We have a TON of Mac users on our network, and they are able to use it, but only with our help with advanced configuration. Windows 7 users have it the best by far...it just prompts for the credentials and off they go.
You study computer science and you want the IT department to support your hardware and your OS of choice?
Make it work yourself. Getting WIFI to work isn't that difficult.
Linux or Unix own 50% of the server market and the percentage is a lot higher in internet server usage world wide.
I read comments here on slashdot from employers who say dumb things like "haha. It doesn't even have a gui!! How primitive. We are a state of the art Microsoft Shop ... bla bla". Obvious one of the guys living in the 1990's thinking integrated platform saves money etc.
I do not give a shit. If you are that retarded to ignore not only a platform, but the whole market (apache) because it does not fit in with your narrow ideology or MCSE coursework then you are massively incompetent and need to be fired.
If I were a CIO and heard any IT manager laugh at Linux I would fire him. I would not fire him or her if they had objections to adopting it, but I surely would if they didn't consider it a real platform as part of the job is to look at all platforms and alternatives. If you are too stupid to see it runs 50% of the server market then you are not a real I.T. person. Nothing wrong with picking Windows Server for certain situations but no one in that kind of position deserves to be paid that much and have that kind of narrow niavenesse. I can hire a slashdotter working as a tech or LAN admin who would be more knowledgeable. You do not see mechanics that claim Ford doesn't exist or that only GM trucks are serious vehicles. That would be silly. ... {/rant]
http://saveie6.com/
Yes, UNT supports connecting any OS to Wi-Fi. The help desk staff is mostly familiar with Windows, Mac OS X, and mobile devices (iOS, Android, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile), but we can find someone to help you with other devices and operating systems.
Ouch! The truth hurts!
They support it internally of course -- they have a couple Linux labs, a few Unix labs, and WAY too many Macs on campus (all old and EXTREMELY slow, with weird quirks)
As for the wifi -- the old system used a Cisco VPN. They had a Linux version of the software, but it didn't work. But you could just use vpnc. Had to email the helpdesk once though to get the group secret for the special CSE VPN, because all they give you for that is a config file for their software, which has that encrypted or something. The new wifi is seemingly standard WPA2-enterprise, they've got Linux instructions, but I've never been able to connect to it on anything but Android devices. But they still have both systems up side-by-side for now, so I'm not too worried.
The student IT support services I believe claim to support Linux, but good luck getting someone who can actually help. We had a LUG for that (I was VP), but it seems to have dissolved in the last year...
On a related note -- they _laughed_ at the mention of Linux? In my CS classes, any programming that we do is REQUIRED to be done on (or at least work on) Solaris. Except the 100-level intro classes.
Officially bought by Microsoft, in practice the CS department only uses Linux and other Unix OS, but after the recent merger of IT-administrations, the physics, math and CS institutes had to make it clear they under no circumstances could or would use Windows, no matter how much rebate Microsoft has given for the university to be Windows only. So right now it both is supported, though the official websites will claim the university is Windows-only, and the practice in half of the faculty of science is unix-only.
Here the Linux support is pretty solid. WLAN is 802.1X based (but with web-portal-login also possible - the CISCO AP's set up multiple SSID's) and usually works very well. Support is also there - you will find instructions for setting up things on Linux on the webpages, and you can even get IT support to help you install Linux (Ubuntu) on your personal laptop.
In the Physics/Matemathics/Informatics part of the university, Linux is quite dominating. It is what you find on most computers in computer labs, on peoples desks etc. (RHEL5). Additionally, a wild guess is that linux laptops outnumber windows and mac by a factor of ~2, mac and windows being approximately the same. A very obvious observation is that the more dedicated students are much more likely to have a Linux machine (or mayby a Mac).
In humanities or social scienties, and to a certain degree biology, windows is more used.
I usually complain about my college's network access policies, but they're actually pretty good with Linux.
On my campus, Windows users have to install a bunch of antivirus and other (bloated) security software, and Mac users need to install a root certificate, just to get online. Linux users don't have to touch their system configurations -- they just authenticate via web browser, and that's it. (And the network policy page actually says this is because Linux boxes don't get viruses.)
My guess is that it's because the CS department here is just full of Linux users.
Having looked into the info tech post-grad courses at both RMIT and CSU, I noticed that while connectivity might not have been an issue, the RMIT course was heavily Windows oriented (ie, in order to complete the coursework, a student had to make extensive use of particular Windows only applications). On the other hand, at CSU (which is more geared towards distance education), using Linux has been much easier; there is an emphasis on using online applications (such as shared documents, wikis, etc) that are platform agnostic, and the only issue has been dealing with messy DRM on some materials from the library (which is not something I imagine that the university can do much about).
Contrary to a majority of posters in this discussion, in 'my' place we run a tight Windows-shop. Forefront with NTLMv2-authentication says it. No transparent proxy (except you log on as a Windows user; and even then it goes by application, not by IP, so that all applications without NTLMv2-proxy capabilities cannot connect). ... (you-name-it).
wget doesn't work, because Forefront downloads for you, and then offers you a click-me display when the download is finished. That means no Linux, no Debian, no Ubuntu, no
We are a 'College of IT', with CS-majors. We tried to discuss this with our chaps 'at the top', but got nowhere. It was reported the person-in-charge had said "Nobody needs anything more form the Internet than browsing it with Internet Explorer".
I don't tell you who 'we' are, because that might get me into trouble for badmouthing our place. But we exist. I agree, we should not exist in this form; I have been trying to promote FOSS throughout my time here, and still use it for the subjects that I teach, but it is a real bore if one has to make with this kind of mindset. I use Ubuntu-server (for reasons not discussed here) for my System Admin course; but we can't even 'apt-get update' according to official policy.
Okay, you laugh for me, I cry.
Seriously, IT is a support service.
To paraphrase someone else:
"No one has an 'IT' problem" The might not be able to get financial reports, projects etc. out in time. One of the tools that could help might be an IT asset, but its only a tool. The end goal is to deliver something.
Now if the IT person says "look, we don't have the skill set or bandwidth to actively support 3 completely separate OS's" O.K. then. That's an answer, pay more, go on your own, or adopt their supported system.
If your an English major, get the supported system. If your computer science or related engineering, go on your own. (Run one of each).
TODO: create/find/steal funny sig.
I was struck by the remark in the OP regarding attitude from an Australian university. I was under the impression that most of them have no problem with cross-platform support these days. Certainly my alma mater has done so for many years, although I did have one cretinous lecturer who insisted on embedding much of his course content in Shockwave apps. But the IT department was perfectly happy to support any system that handled TCP/IP.
Wow. You'd think they'd be smart enough to code to open standards, not platforms. That "IT Expert" who made the "Linux!" comment probably doesn't get his hands dirty anymore. We find that it's only the windows systems that need regular social calls from IT. We're about 30% Linux on the desktop for students. In fact about the only time we have to deal with the Linux systems once they're deployed is if there's an actual hardware problem or to change a setting, which we script. We're K12, not a university so no support for personal devices.
My university didn't support Linux...nor Mac, nor Windows. I was one of very few people that actually had a PC. 1.77 MHz was the speed of the day. AT&T donated our university their version of Unix. Later, I switched to another university. PCs were becoming a little more mainstream. We actually had a PC lab or two around campus. Most of the non-PC computers were running Solaris, though most access points were just dumb terminals connected to a mainframe. There were some Macs, but they were not running MacOS, but some other variant of Unix whose name I forget. They were used for learning how to write assembly on 68000 series processors. At work, we used PrimeOS and most of us were on terminals, although we did have a few RISC based IBMs running AIX. I picked up Redhat Linux somewhere in that timeframe and installed it at home, but decided that Solaris was preferable, although at the time it was not free. I ended up eventually buying an UltraSPARC II which I still have, though I haven't started it up in years.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
Linux is supported here for most things, and there is pretty heavy staff usage as workstations, me included.
All of the Universities I have worked at support OS X and Windoww. Linux / BSD on the other hand its generally a if thats what your running figure it out. In general if it doesn't require a VPN client then you can figure out how to get Linux to connect to it.
And since the grant money pays for the university to support the researchers to do the research to win the grants to pay the university, they damn well better support the tools we need to do the research. And they do.
I'd configure Domino to use POP/IMAP, and the Outlook connector, so the PHBs are happy.
Long term, I'd probably be seeing about moving to Exchange... IBM really needs to throw some serious development effort at Notes to make it continue to even be in the same league as Exchange.
At GVSU, access to the campus wireless is granted through a web-based service that is platform independent. I've never heard of anyone having trouble connecting. GVSU has a pretty good track record with supporting Linux in my experience. In fact, the CS department has an almost exclusive focus on Linux; to a fault, in my opinion. There are no higher level CS courses focusing on Windows development at all. It's an issue I've been meaning to bring before the department, actually; I'd at least like to see a course that teaches C# or the Windows API or something.
When I worked for the BYU IT department a couple of years back, Linux was all that was running on everyones work machines. In fact, it was essentially required if you were a developer there. So that's a big yes for BYU and Linux support.
Klagenfurt, Austria
My University has it's own Ubuntu Repository. There is a wiki about how to connect to wifi, although it's not needed because they upgraded to eduroam (educational roaming, many universities are supporting it now). I'm writing this on a laptop, that i bought at the IT department that I bought from the University. They were offering a dual boot system image with win7 and ubuntu lts, so I'm writing this in linux.
Things are great here. Also a linux day is held, once a year.
Went to Indiana Tech in Fort Wayne, IN. We definitely support Linux, Mac, and Windows. A lot of our professors are on Macs plus we have a HUGE student base that uses Linux. Just about every one of our Networking (that's computer networking, not business networking) majors runs some flavor of Linux. The primary student OS is obviously Windoze but that's because much of the software we run is only available on such.
I'm a math professor at the College of Charleston. Just so you know, the College of Charleston is a comprehensive liberal arts & sciences / professional / master's university with expectations that faculty do research, but we don't have an engineering school, so our IT group as a whole gets away with stuff that would never be accepted at a research university or any institution with an engineering school. Our students don't have any network drive space, for example. The computer science department has a Linux cluster that several departments share, but they maintain that themselves. I'm in mathematics, and we have one professor who serves as an admin of sorts for our Mac lab, but otherwise we have no department-level IT resources. Our college-wide IT system has a reputation for being underfunded, understaffed, underpaid, and overworked. It's not just Linux that we have problems with-- the support for Mac OS X was pretty bad until recently, and a lot of the problems I'm having affect Mac and Windows users, too. A lot of what I'm about to spout isn't entirely IT's fault, but they do contribute. Some of it is self-inflicted because I insist on doing things The Right Way and I'm impatient.
That said, this is my situation as a Linux user here:
Officially, the college uses Linux for web server stuff, research computing, and some of the IT staff use it, but there's no official support for other users. I run Fedora Linux for personal preference reasons and for research reasons, and when I have a question I can't answer on my own, someone in IT or the computer science department usually eventually answers.
The big problem is not so much lack of official support, but rather that various parts of our IT infrastructure are constantly in my way, which means I have had to spend a tremendous amount of time and energy building solutions to what should be simple problems:
* I had rig my own backup system. The college provides a backed-up faculty network drive, but it's on a Windows server and there are files that I can't just copy over because of file name restrictions, and it doesn't keep up with file permissions and ownership, etc. So my little experiments with rsync escalated into me making a Linux file system inside my Windows storage space, which involved learning all about LVM, /dev/loop, mounting file systems with barriers, all kinds of neat stuff that isn't my job...
* We have a few applications (the VPN, the course management software) that are supposedly platform neutral, but require applets that don't work with Fedora's distribution of java. Getting the Sun / Oracle java plugin installed and working was way too much work for me: the poorly documented non-installation of libnpjp2.so, having to disable the stack-is-not-executable SELinux feature...
* The now-replaced horribly obsolete course management software didn't recognize web browsers with "Linux" in the user agent information, and would pop up a window and demand that I click OK for *every* *single* *click*. And it was a Web 1.0 type of system, so you had to click a link to do anything. It drove me nuts. I had to figure out how to make Firefox sent fake user agent information.
* The entire campus is behind an ultra-paranoid firewall. You can't just SSH to a research machine from the outside, you have to go through the VPN. We're on our third VPN solution, each of which claims to support Linux. The first one worked very well but for some reason they couldn't continue to use it, so we've been through two others, and for both the configuration and fixing I've had to figure out and do has been monstrous: installing java, compiling obsolete versions of openssl, setting up VNC to compensate for absurdly short time-outs, enabling third party cookies, and on and on...
* Faculty e-mail is on Exchange, and IMAP is available, but they won't tell us how to configure an IMAP client like Thunderbird. (Evolution can read from Exchange directly, but I had some problems with it.)
* Wireless ha
I would leave.
Seriously, you aren't going to learn anything about computers, if you don't have the source code to work with.
That excludes Mac's and Windows.
That is a fact of life in your computer science education which, won't change regardless of what your professors or the idiots in the I.T. department would have you believe.
You are wasting your money.
-Hack
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
I'm an undergrad mechanical engineer / CS minor at UMD College Park, and we've got pretty darn good support for Linux/Unix/BSD OSes. In particular, almost the entire CS department is built around Linux (students use Macs to ssh into the programming environment). Since this system HAS to work for all students, our IT staff generally knows what's up. On the end-user side, there isn't official support for any computers at all that you didn't buy through the University, but there's lots of documentation on how to get your machine up and running. In fact, I was pretty easily able to get my Ubuntu server up and going on the Maryland network (they don't have any funky proprietary software needed, etc.)
On top of that, a lot of the virtualization software that the engineers need is cross-platform. The Engineering IT department has instructions for getting the remote MATLAB/Pro-E/PSPICE etc environment up on Linux based machines. Overall, I've been very lucky, and treasure the experience.
Sounds like Best Buy.. we asked them if a card supported Linux (the box said it did ;) ) and they told us that no hardware supported Linux and nobody in their right mind would use it and we should just stick with Windows since the rest of the world uses it...
=)
-Myke
Winthrop University in South Carolina of all places generally used Windows however they did have a couple of macs in the library, a mac lab for the art department, numerous windows labs, and a linux lab that was nominally reserved for the CSCI department but anyone could request accesses to it and receive an appropriate login (this lab was behind a card swipe door and was uber cooler).
My school uses 802.1x TTLS-PAP, with the SSO username/password, for authentication and encryption. On wired, there's a (standard HTML) portal that registers your (or an entered, for consoles) MAC address when you enter your password. I do IT support in the dorms; we don't officially support Linux, but it's usually even easier to configure than OSX (which is quite finicky with 802.1x) - on Linux, when you attempt to connect, it guessed the authentication method and just requires your user/pass. Windows needs a supplicant for TTLS - we use a configured SecureW2 installer.
The engineering school's big beefy server (appropriately named Eniac) runs a custom SuSE distro, as well as a few large labs (with home directories mounted over NFS). All my classes have either gone to great pains to be OS-agnostic, or require Linux - never Windows. For credit, all work must compile on the engineering school server (no "it worked at home!", you must check) but it's usually not an issue. For reference, my major coding classes have been a compilers class in OCaml (ugh), a graphics class in Qt/C++, a hardware class in C, and a number of classes with Java. For the most part, I did the work in OSX and tested on their machines before submission. I have an OS class next year that actually requires Linux, because we'll be using direct syscalls and they want to ensure consistency even across different Unixen.
The engineering school is really OSS-friendly, to the point where I think it'd be hard to graduate from it without Linux proficiency (though people sure try...). In fact, I can't think of a single class that's required proprietary software of any sort, even in the liberal-arts school.The networking folks are Linux-heavy as well, so the whole campus feels that. But the business school is a MS shop through and through (Exchange, domains, etc).
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
need not ask what your university can do for your linux,
need ask what your linux can do for the university.
please explain why a wireless network would work any differently from OS to OS.. this is completely OS independant.
Who is still talking about Linux ?
Nobody. We just use it.
A computer science program that doesn't support BSD is worthless. I know you were talking to IT, but the computer science department should have enough involvement with IT to force support of BSD. To me, support of BSD is a litmus test of whether you support openness or you are tied to a specific platform. Don't support BSD? I'll call you proprietary.
does not appreciate linux, nor will they, their rivers run blue...
they do have a linux class, with a command line version of redhat(or fedora)
HE is the guy with the experience on the Windows systems that they support. HE knows nearly nothing about Linux and is not interested in serving the campus environment and users with support for an OS he knows nothing or nearly nothing about. HE is stuck in a Windows world. Perhaps HE is a Windows ex-employee sent from Redmond to provide support (and direction) to the university. Perhaps HE is a Windows trained support "expert" with bought and paid-for Windows certification training.
You know Microsoft and said service reps make $$tons of money off the backs of poor college students all over the world. It is better for them that students are not introduced to technologies that are cheaper, more powerful, easier to install and use. It is better that they can fleece the the unwary students to the point of borrowing money by keeping them in the restricted vice grip of what is known generally as Windows. On top of that, the Windows servers that the university is most likely on are also paid for by the poor students. What a shame and pathetic waste of money when there are superior technologies available that scale far beyond what they are currently using.
Anyone I have ever met, and have introduced them to Linux and they have given it a go, have stuck with it and refused to go back to the crippled world from where were previously. It is a simple choice between something that is powerful, secure, scalable, easy, free, against something that is expensive, restricted/limited, buggy, and insecure. Windows is better for the vendor of computer goods and services because the unknowing users accept that they will have to keep forking out cash--read treadmill. ...HE needs to be tossed out on his behind.
University need to establish a Linux users group, build wider campus interest in Linux and gain some power in the university IS decision making process.
Students need to inquire up-front, before they decide to attend the university, and demand support for the more powerful and far less costly technologies available on FOSS platforms.
Teachers should not be able to demand use of proprietary technologies generally as the only means to complete coursework. There may be a few exceptions on this, but only under specific circumstances where said use of a proprietary application absolutely can not be avoided--then could be provided via VM or VPN to a windows server desktop. In this case, the license costs encountered should be a separate billable item for that particular course.
Standard operating procedure, in all cases, should mandate open formats and open sharing of information on non-specific platforms.
At Shippensburg University in Shippensburg, PA, USA, no Linux support is give although a very limited amount of OS X support is provided. However, the Computer Science department has liberated itself from the IT department, and is now running and managing its own servers/computer labs. All of their PCs run Linux (it was Ubuntu, possibly another flavor now) and all of their Macs dualboot OS X and Linux.
Support for linux is reasonably at my uni (Monash). They even have instructions for connecting to their wireless networks under linux. Unfortunately, Meego (which is what I run on the netbook I take to uni) doesn't seem to want to play nice with the TTLS system that they use. A few gripes though: 1) If I want to hand in essays they have to be in .doc or .docx format. Thankfully I don't have to write many (maths major), but it would be nice to see ODF formats added to the lists of acceptable file formats. There are plugins for word that would make this trivial to fix.
2) All the computer labs claim to have both Windows XP and Scientific Linux, but the few times I've booted into Scientific Linux it hasn't worked. Why even bother advertising it?
Do they mean support as in "provide helpdesk services" or as in "make sure the network is standards-compliant and usable on all platforms"? My university runs two wireless networks that work great in any wireless-capable OS: One is an unencrypted, open network where you need to authenticate through a captive portal. Most ports are blocked, and you're behind NAT. I guess it's useful for some people. The other is a WPA2 network where you authenticate with your university username and password. You then get a globally routable IP address, no NAT and no blocked ports (although I hear they'll come knocking if you run heavy P2P traffic). The wireless network covers almost all of campus, and in most places there are ethernet ports all around. They're completely open for usage, and you get a global IPv4 and IPv6 address and a blistering fast connection. Oh and of course every student is given SSH access to several Linux, BSD and Solaris machines. As for the first type of support: The help website has some rudimentary Windows-, Linux- and Mac-centric info on how to get on the different networks. You mean it isn't like this everywhere?!
I would expect Linux support would be more than basic connectivity. At this point, all lab computers should be dual boot and have Octave, pspice, dia, xemacs, ooffice, Sage, R, Python, rpy, numpy, C, Java, Ruby, schematic capture, circuit simulation packages and others installed. The professors should also be teaching what is available on Linux and encouraging the students to become familiar with Linux, Mac, and Windows. When you are considering colleges, you should ask about Linux and eliminate the colleges that don't support it in this way if it is important to you.
Our university uses MAC address filtering to allow people to connect to wireless, so Linux is supported by it (though not officially). I also work with IT here at the Help Desk, we take calls about Linux, go out to help users with it, and support it to the best of our ability. I'm an avid Linux user and most of my coworkers here at least have some experience. Needless to say we don't "laugh" in the faces of people who call with Linux issues.
I haven't been ridiculed by my IT department for running Linux...but I *may* have been the one ridiculing them for not knowing what it is. You think you can get a career in tech support without even knowing what it is, you are sorely mistaken.
I ridicule the staff for using winblows!!!
At UVA they don't support Linux with their secured wireless network. They have a hidden open network that Linux devices can connect to. I have not had problems with my Linux desktop, laptop, and phone no the open network. There is no IT Linux support. I have had a little ridicule for using Linux but only from my windows using computer science classmates.
The university has LAN based connectivity as well as 802.11 connectivity. 802.11 connectivity is free - as long as you can get on at the network level you're free to use it. LAN based connectivity is obviously only available in classrooms and in dorm rooms.
Now at the beginning of school year, each LAN port is "reset", in the sense that it becomes unregistered. When a user connects next (this means the new student to move into that dorm room), it will be served a special page upon any HTTP request. That special page will check the UserAgent of the browser and, if Windows is indicated, will be prompted to run a security scan of the PC (windows-only software). If any other OS (or a router) is indicated, then the user is let through un-scanned, for the rest of the year.
Seems to me, that while technically more support is provided to Windows users, anyone would prefer to connect as a non-Windows user.
The installation instructions for campus SW mention linux, macs, and windows. The consultants like linux.
Also, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute welcomes applications from slashdot readers. We have both Computer Engineering and Computer Science.
/W Randolph Franklin, Professor,
RPI,
http://wrfranklin.org/
At Towson University, which is located outside Baltimore, they have a "guest," unencrypted, open WiFi network that anyone can join, but which is out in a DMZ. After you connect to that you're brought to a landing page about the secure, authenticated, WiFi network, which is tied into AD. They have a java auto-configurator applet that works on any OS. Should that fail, or should you be running a linux box without a JVM, they have a shell script you can download right there to get you running. I believe that also have a dmg, but I don't remember. This is a university with a full lab of Linux boxes, exclusively Samba-based student storage, and automatic SSH access to a dev environment for every single student, though, so YMMV. There are definitely universities out there that support Linux, there's no reason they shouldn't aside from, well... the money it takes to hire people who know anything about Linux.
Does your university/college provide support for Linux/BSD/etc users to connect to the on-campus wireless?
We support Mac OS X, MS Windows and Linux. Our Technology Services Help Desk has instructions for how to connect to wireless using the example of Ubuntu, but there is nothing proprietary about the wireless access which would cause issues for Linux users specifically.
How does IT support Linux users generally?
Computer Science students are given accounts on a Linux server for use in developing code, but they are also encouraged to install either a dual boot or virtual system with Linux on their laptop (all students have laptops). Students in other studies can also use Linux on their laptop and get assistance with typical Help Desk issues like network access, email client, etc. Our campus has roughly 40% Mac OS users, so we've grown to be flexible in offering whatever support we can to make things work beyond systems running MS Windows.
On the services offered at Acadia, we use quite a bit of open source and Linux. We run Debian and Redhat on a few dozen servers. Email is cyrus, webmail is horde, mail MXes are postfix with amavis, and our main web site runs Contao CMS. Our LMS system is moodle. We like using open source whereever it fits well, and it saves us money.
Have IT staff ever ridiculed you for asking questions about Linux?
I've never heard of it. Help Desk staff might be confused about some specialized questions, and seek additional assistance, but it would be unprofessional to ridicule a student for any question they might have. In our view, the student is the customer, and we seek to provide them with the support they need to succeed in their studies.
Asking for support in linux is so generic.... If you ask for windows support you will provably get an answer like "xp, vista or 7?". But linux distros are very different, hardware support its not the same and there are a lot of them (distros). So if you are using linux you have to have something in mind "do it yourself and google is your friend". However Some linux distros are just excelent UBUNTU, SUSE and FEDORA, if you get last versions they are very GUI-friendly, hardware support is good and provably you wont ever use the terminal (what a shame).
For academic purposes it does not matter which OS you use. i like linux
Anyway i have laptop with dual boot ubuntu and win 7 (my university gives you like a student license or something). i study in politecnico university (Bogota-Colombia) signal its poor but i usually dont have any trouble when connecting with both OS. They have a proxy i think and when you open a browser they ask for your user and password. Frinds with mac have no problem.
... those who can't do, teach. Any idiot can support Windows 7-only wifi/vpn. Unfortunately, many people graduate college worse off than when they matriculated. At least they weren't so cocksure to begin with. And many of these people intern at the university itself first.
I8-D
I am an IT tech at a smaller university in BC, Canada of approx. 12,000 students and we openly support both Linux and OSX. We have documentation available on our website showing students how they can connect there devices to our wireless. We are constantly updating it to reflect OS changes, We have 2 techs who are Linux experts, 1 MAC expert and the rest of us play with one or the other of the non-Windows OS's so we don't fall behind. We feel it is our duty to the students to support them the best we can.
This phrase: "Several of the managers laughed at this question, and one exclaimed 'Linux!"
They don't realize that they rely on Linux inside so many appliances, they better don't laugh about it, actually, they can't live without it.
1) they laugh at you
2) they get angry at you
3) you win.
Isn't that what he said...
your university is stuck at step 1. be ready for step 2.
I teach Computer Science at a public university in the US. Support for students using Linux from university IT is virtually non-existent. However, IT does now provide a Linux VPN client (Juniper), which is required to make use of the university-wide wireless network. This is a big step up from when the wireless network was first deployed, when they had a Linux client that basically said: "here's some software we found on the web that may or may not work for you--good luck!" One reason for the change is that most of the university's computing infrastructure is now Linux based, and many of the IT personnel have Linux laptops that must function around the university. So IT here supports Linux for itself and to a lesser extent for faculty, but effectively not at all for students. From what I have seen looking at other universities in the US (since my daughter was applying to colleges this year), this is the norm.
The Institute for Digital Communications (http://www.see.ed.ac.uk/research/IDCOM/) at the School of Engineering at UoE certainly uses Linux. Each PhD student is assigned to a desk with a terminal. Remotely mounted home directories are mounted at login - so one could technically work from any machine. The flavor of Linux being used is Scientific Linux. Everything runs smoothly. The only time the IT guys will laugh at you is if you go and tell them that you want to use Winduhs!
I've never had a problem connecting to Wifi with Linux at my university. In fact, my university requires a username and password to connect to the internet through the proxy, and the page that prompts me for said information informs me that I am using Linux, which means that unlike Windows users I do not need to have anti-virus software installed in order to connect to the internet.
Also, the Astronomy department uses Linux extensively, mostly because the IRAF package isn't available on Windows, and I am pretty sure that Computer Science students have a lot of exposure to Linux.
It's been about 6 years since I graduated. But my University had a couple of Solaris labs for the CS students. They later switched to Linux, as it was cheaper to maintain x86 computers than Sun Workstations. Every CS student was required to submit programs that worked in Unix.
The greater campus Network was all Windows (save for the file shares and email servers), but you could connect to it via WiFi, if you registered your device's MAC address with IT. IT would require you to install a firewall and antivirus software before accepting your MAC. I showed up with my Linux laptop, and the requirements were waived, and they simply took my MAC address.
I thought it was a brilliant system. It's easily defeatable by anyone with a bit of tech skill, but people with tech skill aren't going to cause the problems they were trying to solve by MAC filtering the network.
So no, there was nothing of the sort on my University network. Linux was a first class citizen.
The only thing my school did was require Windows users to install a special client onto their machines to verify that their antivirus is adequate. Other than that, they have been good to people across the board, making no effort to discriminate against any operating system.
Keep it that way guys!
Boredom is bliss.
It used to be solaris, now the majority is linux. Engineering also has a large linux presence and OSX is elsewhere. This is the way it should be imo, anything less and I would question the quality of the education. They ran mostly Scientific Linux, when I graduated.
I'm transferring from a community college to a 4 year university this fall, and I just checked the IT page on the website.
Windows users have to jump through more hoops to get on the network than Mac and Linux users. Windows users need to use special software that verifies you have an approved antivirus program. Macs have a client program as well, but any other OS just needs to go through some sort of portal page and login with your college ID.
From information on the university website, they use Cisco NAC. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cisco_NAC_Appliance
Definitely check the website beforehand.
Seriously. Do you really think you are going to need skills writing kernel drivers or mucking about with filesystem data structures? No. Not unless you plan on working for, and retiring from, Google or IBM.
What your manager is trying to tell you is that the job you hoped to have when you get out of college was actually outsource/offshored 12 years ago and unless you plan on living in India, China or Korea you have no need for technical know how. We spend money to buy software to do that, and then purchase a maintenance agreement with said software company in order to get email support. It's not great, but we save a lot of money that the CEOs use to pay for their condos in Tahiti and Bermuda.
You'd best be spending your time learning how to create a dialog box in .NET.
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I felt suprised after i read the comments and the lack of Linux support in many universities around the world and especially in developed countries such as the usa and australia. In my university, in every computer in the university's computer lab, windows and fedora linux are available to use. But, the default option is windows :( and very few students are aware of the linux in the computer. Needless to say,(for department of computer engineering) the projects for the programming or operating systems class are required to compile and run on a linux distribution. There are documents supplied by the computer center for linux and windows users. University has mirrors (http://ftp.itu.edu.tr) for fedora and pardus(a turkey oriented distro) .aspx extension)
But ITU is another windows dominated university. Windows is the only option and IE is the default browser in the library. Also, the softwares developed by the computer center are written with probably asp.net (websites have
I'm a student worker in the IT department and UIC and we have an 802.1x wireless network for students and faculty to use, as well as a WPA2-Enterprise network we are supposedly "phasing in" that you can use if you know how to get on it, and we only officially support Windows XP/Vista/7, OSX 10.3-10.6, iPhone/iTouch, Windows Moble (not sure about 7), and recently Android 2.1 or higher, but not Linux. We do have people at the Helpdesk that know how to do it, but if not then you're SOL. That's not to say you can't get on the network, you just need to know the info, CA cert, inner auth, etc. UIC LUG/ACM hosts a webpage with a basic guide (I should know since I wrote it), and most of the Linux users don't have any problems with going this route, but usually when there is a problem it's because of the network manager app they are using. The nm-applet in gnome/lxde/xfde works but I've seem it fail terribly in KDE and there are some others that are just overly complicated, because of this I can see why offering support is complicated, but the IT guys in the OP are fucking morons. We have a lot of RHEL servers on campus and a large amount of IT people use linux. Trying to pass it off as a joke probably means they are either incompetent or 100% MS jockeys that wouldn't know anything about inter-polarity if you shoved it up their ass.
I use to have problems connecting to my universities wifi on my macbook with their cisco setup, but they fixed it once macbooks started getting popular on campus. They provide a FAQ page for how to manually connect for windows, mac, and linux (ubuntu) with screenshots. And they also provide XpressConnect as a method to connect with the three OS'. My university is also dominated by engineering, so I guess I'm not surprised since also most of the computers in our ECE computer labs are RH linux.
I work at a University in the United States. I am the lone IT guy for the School of Engineering and Technology here. We have campus-wide IT that does things like wireless infrastructure, etc. I manage about 500 seats, in addition to our servers. I'm lucky in a lot of ways because I work closely with the Faculty in the various departments, Computer Science and Electrical Engineering are where most of my time is spent. I create and deploy dual-boot (Linux and windows) images on a regular basis.
I was recently asked to handle a summer program teaching high school students how to put together machines and install operating systems on them. Being a public university in this economic climate we don't have a lot of money to spend, but we wanted to provide (primarily poor) students with an experience that would hopefully get them hooked on computers, technology and engineering, and give them computers they might not otherwise be able to afford. When pricing parts for these systems, we had a limited budget. If we purchased Windows to install on these systems, it would have dramatically increased the cost per unit. So to give these kids better machines, I suggested we teach them to install Ubuntu. I was met first by ridicule from this summer's director. "These kids cannot figure out Linux. There's no way, it's too complicated."
I think that opinion, one that is held by many who don't know as much as they think they do, is an archaic one. When these people think of Linux, they're thinking of a blinking cursor on a blank screen. They simply aren't aware of these projects to make Linux more accessible to everyday users or the huge advancements in user friendly design and interface. My primary example of this is Ubuntu. Ubuntu is democratizing Linux in a way that it never has been before.
So, for a point by point answer:
1: Not really, but they use an open standard for security, so it's simply a matter of punching in the key.
2: They don't. But with the wide variety of distributions and differences between them, can you blame them? It's a mess trying to troubleshoot students personal machines. You have no idea what they've done to them and often budgets are stretched so thin that you're operating with as few resources and personnel as possible. On-Campus IT departments are not computer repair shops, often, any help they provide is out of the kindness of their hearts, so do try to be nice when they do.
3: I don't look to our IT department for help with Linux problems here. However, when students come to me for help and/or advice I give them the best possible support that I can, given the circumstances. To me, when a student asks me about a problem with their laptop, I'll try to help them figure out how to fix it but I don't have the time or resources to fix every student's laptop. I'll take a few minutes to check the basics, if I have time, but I'm usually supporting the labs here or working on a special project for a staff or faculty member. An exception to this is when students come to me with questions about Linux. I will (almost) *always* take time to sit down and help this student as much as possible. I have two reasons for this: firstly, they are not likely to get much help from campus-wide IT, they're not big Linux users; secondly, the fact that the student is using Linux *and* reaching out for help indicates to me that this student has a genuine interest in learning something new. If there's something the world can never get enough of, it's curiosity.
If you take nothing else away from this, take away the idea that the only way to change these people's mind is to increase the user-base. Tell your friends to try out Linux, tell your family. When you learn something, pass it on. Don't be afraid to learn and teach. Expand your mind and help others do the same.
tl;dr
No.
They don't.
Yes.
Their wireless should be a standard accessible from any certified device.
The only way for them (or any other IT department) to take support of any distro of Linux seriously is for the user-base to increase enough to require that it's supported. They'll have to respond to demand.
they have universities down-under? i thought it was just a glorified shop ...
for wealthy asian kids to get a piece of paper
I attended OSU in EE from 2002 to 2008. They were always very Linux friendly in my experience. The LUG (Linux Users Group) had a room in a building set up to help people configure Linux on their laptops. I managed to stump them once with Cygwin on my HP TC1100 Tablet. Nevertheless, Linux was welcomed at least by the user community. I never needed official IT support but their website did have things like setup instructions for SSH on Linux as well as Windows and Mac. I think a lot of work-study students from the CS school were working for IT so the Linux support probably infiltrated that way. Another Linux related shift OSU made on an official level while I was there was to migrate all of the college of engineering UNIX labs from HPUX workstations and servers to Redhat Enterprise. This was obviously an officially sanctioned move as it required new hardware and a different support model but it seemed to go off without a hitch. So, it probably depends on the school and the particular college within the school. The EECS department at OSU was pretty proactive in my opinion. If you want to get support, I'd recommend looking for or starting a users group and see what kind of response you get. If nothing else, taking the initiative would look good on a resume.
I work for a university and the way it works is we support, as in you can use, anything that is capable of doing WPA2 enterprise mode and getting the certificate from the provider we use (for older OSes like XP, you need to add it). So any OS, device, phone, etc that can handle that can use WiFi. There is no artificial restriction on it. If it can't, tough shit (well not entirely, we do have a very restricted unencrypted WiFi, but it only does port 80 and is rate limited).
However "supported" stuff, as in central IT will actually help you, is a lot more narrow. New versions of Windows and MacOS only, as well as a few smartphone OSes. You want to do it on Linux? Figure it out yourself. They are not interested in wading in to the clusterfuck that is Linux wireless drivers never mind the million and one distros.
So there is no artificial barrier, but no special help.
Really that is how it has to be. IT does not have the people or the time to help every person with their own special configuration. Frankly, you wouldn't want to pay for an IT department that does because it would be massive. As such they have to define what they do and don't help with.
Same shit in the college I work for. We DO support Linux, but only with very specific provisos:
1) It has to be RedHat Enterprise Linux, CentOS, or Fedora. No other distros are supported. No we don't care if you think your special flavour is better, that is what we support.
2) It has to be connected to our central system, meaning our LDAP authentication, puppet, and so on. No one-offs.
3) We have root, you do not. You can have sudo if there's a very good reason, but you don't have root.
4) It has to be owned by the department/college. We do not support personal systems for both time and liability reasons. We are hired to support departmental activities, not your personal activities.
The reason is again, time and resources. With a system like that, we can reasonably support a good number of systems with few staff. If we start trying to deal with every hacked together special configuration, we'll spend tons of time and not get our job done. As such we set standards for what can be supported. You want to do your own thing, that is fine and we won't stop you unless it is illegal or interferes with the network, but we won't help either.
Linux is supported. They even have Linux versions of MAPLE and other software on the school FTP for the students to download.
I can't comment on their systems because I honestly don't remember. I just recall having access to the software and the availability of support if needed.
At my university, we have two options: Encrypted network or unencrypted network.
Logging into the unencrypted network is easy.
Step 1. Connect to the access point
Step 2. You are redirected to a login screen
Step 3. Enter your username and password
Step 4. You're in
Logging into the encrypted network is a bit different, since it logs you in automatically with your keychain.
In Gnome, you have to setup all this information that isn't posted anywhere. While windows users just get this weird one-time prompt for a username and password. It's not that hard to set Linux up to do it, the support just isn't there. We have step by step tutorials for windows, but not Linux. I had to contact the IT dept to ask them for the relevant information to set it up.
Obviously, the difference in networks is unecrypted you have to sign in everytime by hand via website to an unsecure connection and the encrypted connect uses the keychain and provides an encrypted connection.
http://www-uxsup.csx.cam.ac.uk/
Most university computer lab machines dual-boot Windows XP and customised openSUSE. All students get ssh shell access to multiple Linux servers in various departments and public webspace. For Maths, Physics, and CompSci courses most of the programming is strongly recommended to be done on Linux machines, and the university gives free classes to staff and students on everything from basic Python to LaTeX.
I'd tell a UDP joke, but you may not get it. I'd tell a TCP joke, but I'd have to keep repeating it until you got it.
Linux is allowed on the network, no problem at all. But our LUG provides connection instructions and support, not central IT.
When I decided to go back to school, I started with a community college. Their wireless network was pretty much open, but for some perverse reason, it worked with the Windows DHCP client, and with udhcpc, but not with dhcpcd (used to be the default on Gentoo) or dhclient (default on Ubuntu/Debian). It seems fairly likely that this was a bug in their server software, and while I wasn't ridiculed, I never did get any help from the university -- I had to figure this out on my own. As much of a Linux geek as I am, I'm really not sure where I got the idea to just try other DHCP clients.
The university didn't really seem to care that I solved it, or how I solved it, and I don't think they ever put it into a FAQ or anything. The networking club did appreciate it, since a few of them were at least playing with Linux. I never tried it with a Mac, and never saw a single Mac while I was there, so I have no idea if that would work.
But it was because of this, and because the next two courses in their "computer programmer" degree (after Mainframe Assembly) were COBOL and Visual Basic, that I got out as soon as I could. After one term, I left for a real university. (Incidentally, one more factor validating my choice is the fact that the community college kicked me off their cyber defense competition team as soon as they realized I wouldn't be there next term, because "that's how it works in the real world" -- the guy running it is of the opinion that as soon as there's a hint you might leave, you get escorted out the door by security.)
So, that brings me to today. The university I'm at now does provide some amount of support for Linux, to the point where some of their FAQ pages include stuff about Linux, and if I ask a question, it's very possible I'll get an actual answer. The wireless uses MAC filtering, but there's no actual requirement that I use any particular software -- and, bonus, if I make sure to uncheck the "use NAT" box when registering my system, I get a real, Internet-routable IP address and dynamic DNS (with a little firewalling; obviously outbound SMTP and inbound Samba are blocked). I could, theoretically, run a webserver on my laptop that'd be accessible from http://serenity-xps.student.iastate.edu/.
The facilities provided are a genuinely heterogeneous mix of Windows, Mac, and Linux everywhere -- that's labs, remote access machines, etc, and they do point out things like rdesktop for the Windows machine. I've avoided getting a copy of MS Office by using rdesktop to connect to the comp sci Windows terminal server (which has a recent MS Office installed) whenever Open/LibreOffice won't work, I've had no issues printing with lpr on the commandline on the Linux remote machine (though sometimes it's easier to convert to a PDF and print from that Windows terminal server).
Individual courses are hit-and-miss, but mostly hit. I've had English classes which met in Mac-powered computer labs (one started on Windows and then switched to checking out Macbooks), an entirely-Java/Eclipse programming course which was just transparently cross-platform, and a programming course which required people to use gcc and graded you based on whether your code ran on a particular Linux machine you had ssh access to, and a Digital Logic course which was just switching to Linux machines in its labs. That last one was a little bumpy -- all the lab instructions were in .docx and not all opened in OpenOffice -- so I got the professor to give us PDFs, so hell yes, Linux was both required and supported.
The most common per-course issue is people still sending doc and docx around (though most accept odf and all accept pdf for anything I write). There was a course which required people to produce a PowerPoint presentation with an audio recording of our narraiton included, which is a PITA even if you have Windows and PowerPoint -- here, I did something ridiculous and built an HTML5 presentation inst
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
National University of Costa Rica promotes OpenSource OS, and Macs and others, this is done through severlal inductions donde each year, and also half of the laboratories use edUbuntu, I think it is very unproffessional from their end to make your question as a joke, since the IT communty grows more and more within linux. As an HP employee most servers use Unix and also some linux kernel server OS
When I was in university, Linux was treated quite seriously (as one would expect from a real university). A techie college might give you the laugh, but not a real 4 year degree granting university. Truly, most scientific computing is done on Linux, (well not just most, about 99.95%). I remember taking a programming languages course in university. I had chosen to do one assignment in a language that seemed to only be available on the university mainframe. I told the prof. I already had a copy. He was suddenly very interested in where I got a copy of the language (I think he thought I pilfered it from the university computer). I explained that my copy came from the Linux install disk. "The Linux install disk?" he asked, and I said yes, it comes on the disk I got my Linux install from, but I might also get a newer version from the German University which has been maintaining the language (and the language is GPL in any event, there *BETTER NOT* be any complaints about sharing *IN ANY EVENT*). I told him that I could bring in the Linux install disks if he wanted to see the version, but that I would probably get the latest version (very much newer than the version the University mainframe had). Linux is *the best* system to teach at university. What the hell are you going to do with that garbage microsoft crap for example? Point to it like someone were studying the inner workings of any device by studying the case that surrounds it? Bloody useless! Worse, microsoft is badly written, performs badly, is full of hacks and holes, crashes very often. Its not 'gee, we can't get in' its, 'why in the hell would we want to use that as an example of anything?' Perhaps an example of what *not* to do?
No, I'm not kidding. Our college recently switched to EAP-TTLS with the authentication done with LDAP. It works natively in every modern linux distro and Mac OS X, but not Windows. It was great fun to see windows users running frantically to linux machines for downloading the necessary software. Then again, in my college (IISER-Kolkata, India), 'IT guys' are mostly physicist-cum-linux-geeks. So they are not at all apologetic about this kind of stunts.
Simple is better than complex, complex is better than complicated -The Zen of Python
Our college has a wireless network with 802.1x authentication and an HTTP proxy that requires NTLM authentication. The NTLM can be a pain in the ass but most basic software seems to handle it ok (I use a tool called CNTLM for software that dosen't). They provide setup instructions for Windows, iOS and, recently, Mac. To be fair, I would have thought that anyone using Linux could figure out how the setup instructions for other OSes translate.
Bath University, UK. We have documentation for using Linux to connect to the network, setting up a VPN to access network shares, SSH access, etc. When we're on the shared computers (a lot are Sun thin clients), we have the option to use Windows or Linux (CentOS). We're also told that if we connect to the residential network using Linux we don't have to use anti-virus software, which is compulsory for Windows machines - though the uni does provide links to Sophos' Linux anti-virus packages for the paranoid.
At my grad school orientation the question of linux support came up a few times. The basic deal was that they do support it, though they don't necessarily offer help with stuff like setting up wifi. There are, however, instructions on the web site for connecting, using the vpn, etc, for linux, mac, and windows. That having been said we have two help desks, one for general students and one specifically for the EE/CS people, and the EETech department does have some linux gurus that are willing to help with pretty much anything.
WPA-enterprise, with radius, works well enough architecturally; but configuration is kind of a pain in the ass for university-type situations where most devices aren't configured by the IT overlords.
almost all european universities (yep, almost the whole continent) are members of a stuff called Eduroam.
On the access point side : there's an internationnal multi level infrastructure of credential servers. You "just point" your AP to your local server, and the server will take care to authenticate the users it knows about or relay th requesssst to other servers for users comming from abroad.
on the wireless device side : its plain simple WPA-Enterprise. It's supported by every recent OS. Not only desktop OSes, but even embed OSes (HP/Palm webOs for example) - just enter your university's credentials (like when loging on your uni's webmail). Some OSes even auto detect the encryption parameters.
taking part in eduroam requires a lot of colaborations between big players, but it really pays of in terms of end-user simplicity.
BTW: it's funny because both of the univestities I've been in tend to look at *windows* as being a joke.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
how about linux?
NOOOO! they're all gonna laugh at you!!!
how bout BSD?
NOOOO! they're all gonna laugh at you!!!
how about windoze?
NOOOO! they're all gonna laugh at you!!!
They support standards. A C64 with a standard form of WLAN would be just as great as a more normal OpenBSD laptop.
They will not give any software support, but the standardized technical information will be available for anyone who would like to develop their own operating system.
I do not think anyone would complain if a student implemented RFC2549 for connection with their home office. They would have to sort out the logistics of the birds and keep the facilities clean, but that would be it.
"Have IT staff ever ridiculed you for asking questions about Linux?"
NOPE! Exactly the opposite... I ridicule for use of any NON LINUX OS and software! HEAVILY!
1311393600 - Back to Black
Our university (ok, Fachhochschule, for those of you in the know) runs a purely windows-based network. However, many students and a few faculty have Macs, and since most services are web-based this works fine. I am one of the very few Linux folks, and as faculty I need to access Windows shares, printers, VPN, etc. This all basically works - but it's thanks to Linux's compatibility, and lots of effort on my part, not because of any inherent Linux-friendliness in the network. However, it is worth it, because the default installation and Windows config is not a thing of beauty - booting to a usable desktop takes minutes; with Linux it's maybe 15 seconds.
The school also runs lots of virtual servers. These are handed over to individual departments for whatever applications those departments need internally (databases, SVN, wikis, or whatever), so that the department can manage their own software. These virtual servers are also all Windows-based; as far as I am aware, Linux is not an option.
The IT department puts up with me reasonably gracefully, though they clearly think it a bit odd. For example, I just received a replacement laptop, which comes with Windows-7. They kindly restricted the Windows partition to 1/3 of the disk, leaving the rest for me to use as I wanted - which saved me the hassle of resizing a live Windows partition...
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
... universities won't support linux - but they also don't actively hinder it. Support implies that you can call the help desk and they'll be able to help you with your issue. Which (imo) is still not cost effective in the case of desktop linux support - and I say that as somebody who's used linux exclusively for 6 years at a university.
New Offer http://goo.gl/iTmFR
I believe the question you wanted to ask was more along the lines of compatibility or openness. Leave that nasty S-word out of it, and you'd likely have gotten much less laughter.
My experience at a couple different US campuses: IT support is very MS centered, their tips are on the level of reboot and reinstall. Some faculty insist on using Macs, so they are somehow supported, but linux? "We don't support that".
The MS-fandom goes so far, that even OS neutral technology is supported as MS specific. If I want to set up my email client, all I need is a server name and port number. None of their web pages have the information I need. But clicking through their screencasts for Windows XP I can find it. Then they change the authentication on the Outlook server, and email doesn't work anymore. I claim to have a Mac and with some luck it gives me a screencast that shows what authentication they use now. Same with vpn. It stops working and I'm supposed to run some program on my home computer that will set up my browser or my computer or whatever. Right. Using the old server name, I find they just switched from pptp to cisco anyconnect. Instead of using their java client it now works with network manager. I now can access the shared drives again. Thanks to the Mac-fanboys for that: the shared drives are called "Y:" and "Z:" or whatever, but if you look through mac support, you find the actual smb share name. Were it not for some Mac using faculty, I would have no chance of getting any of that information.
That's IT, CS is a different story. They run linux in the labs, do some student projects, and quite a few people are using it. And of course IT has someone who knows about linux, so they can support the CS department. But normally, that person is not within the reach of a normal computer user and has no say in what their PC division does or offers.
IT used to keep a bearded Unix guy locked up somewhere in the basement to run the servers. If you made it past the windows people and somehow got hold of him, you were in luck. Not only did he know all ports, protocols, authentication mechanisms, and addresses of relevant servers, he was also quite happy to see that someone on campus was interested in more than point-and-click. As it turns out, yes you can connect to ldap, and we are running a ftp server. There is even a local news server. Unfortunately, that guy has also no say within IT, which is driven by user-experience and other buzzwords. And as the whole campus software becomes more "integrated", more and more servers are replaced with MS-servers. I overheard a couple newer IT guys talking about how much they can do as administrators and how cool the tools are that they are using for it: Fill in the right boxes, click on it, and it pushes the updates to all the lab computers. Wow. I at least know now, why non MS codecs or standards don't work on campus.
The University of Leeds provides guidance/support for Linux users for connecting to their network and several other things, I don't know the extent of their support if I had a problem though.
You can't just support Linux in one go, you need to support several desktop environments and several distros. You can't just say OPEN A TERMINAL and TYPE "yum install..." because the people that use Debian or Ubuntu require a different set of commands. People using XFCE, LXDE, Unity, Gnome 2 or Gnome 3 all require a different walk through.
I think Linux diversity is awesome, but it makes supporting it a nightmare for anyone. There is no standardization for anything. Linux's virtues are also the nails in its coffin.
If we ever did make a support system in our colleges and universities, they would be outdated by next week.
Of earning a degree in Comp Sci at a school where the technical staff laughs at the idea of Linux support for any reason. Any school worthy earning a Comp Sci degree not only supports Linux, but supports it at the Help Desk as well as encourages its use and offers a commercial version to students along with Windows and Mac OS.
Did you ever wake up in the morning, with a Zombie Woof behind your eyes? -- FZ
They didn't have wireless networks when I was in school you insensitive clod.
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At the University of Melbourne FAQ on how to connect to UniWireless - it's wireless network:
Can I use my Linux laptop to access the UniWireless Network:
"Yes you can, as long as it is wireless enabled, supports 802.11x, and has a PEAP supplicant. You will have to configure it before using it. Linux is not currently supported by the University."
Other universities in Australia (and in Melbourne) do it better:
http://goanna.cs.rmit.edu.au/~ssardina/linuxrm
http://www.its.swinburne.edu.au/students/guides/network/wireless/linux.htm
http://www.its.monash.edu.au/staff/networks/vpn/faq.html#l1it.html#6
http://www.its.murdoch.edu.au/eduroam/linux.html
I have never had any problem getting connected at any of many US universities I visit - including Princeton where their visitor network appears to be open to anyone at least for a few days.
Weird. Didn't know they had any recommendations for that at all. Does that come from the central IT guys or the CS department?
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When I was at graduate school, the entire department ran on Solaris/SunOS, with few people using macs as their desktops. When I returned there several years ago, it seems that pretty much everybody was running Linux.
My first job was at a small private college that used Windows for everything. When I asked them about Linux, they gave me an old obsolete computer, and let me install Linux on it and connect it to the network. I still had to have my Windows computer on my desk, though. So I ended up having an expensive Windows computer that I never used, and an old Linux computer that I did all my work on.
At the college I work now, I asked the IT office for an advice. I wanted Linux, but I asked them if there will be any problem with it, and if there was, if they would recommend getting a Mac instead. They said they didn't see any reason whatsoever why Linux would be a problem, as long as I download and install it myself. Several of my colleagues have since installed Linux on their office computers without asking anybody, and none of them seems to have any problem with it.
AccountKiller
I think there is something off with the story, it sounds as if it's written by a female, and I know I know, that's doubly ridiculous, given the kind of the subject brought up in TFS. But to answer the question about the admins laughing there, I think an important missing bit of info.
So, anonymous poster, are you, or have you ever been accused of not being a male?
You can't handle the truth.
My university uses wpa2 with peap mschapv2 and addtrust external certificate or something, works like a charm with linux, mac, windows, iphone, android, some other smartphones. The settings are well documented on the website.
My school uses a proprietary program to connect to the school wifi but they have instructions and support for iPhone, android 2.1+, OS X, Windows, and Im trying to work with them to get a way for Chrome OS users to get on. Hell our whole cs section is required to ssh into our personal "penguin" server to compile their code... And my work desk at my intern job on campus is ubuntu. We are a pretty open standard school it's nice.
Here at UWA we have full Linux support. CS units regularly set projects requiring a *NIX OS, and all Lab machines boot at least Windows and Fedora (and there's a Mac lab with triple-boot).
Step-by-step networking instructions are also provided for Windows XP, Vista, 7, Ubuntu, OS X, iOS, Android and Symbian.
http://its.uwa.edu.au/wifi/unifi/setup_and_troubleshooting
I went to a Fine Arts School and so the computing was pretty poorly supported by the school administration overall IMO. But they did assume you might be on a Mac. They had Mac labs and windoze labs. In those days wifi would have been a luxury and I never looked into it, but I also don't see how your OS would really matter for the wifi unless there is some special windoze/mac software they require?
Anyway, my only experience was that I wanted to ssh connect to the school's servers to get my files rather than have to use the clunky ftp. They let me do this and helped me out a little the first few years I was there but in my last years they changed to not supporting ssh maybe because they didn't want to deal with the security and it was such a small number of people using it.
I was not ridiculed. They did say that it was up to me to figure out problems if I wasn't using Mac/Linux. However, in those first years when they were supporting ssh the IT people did give me some tips on connecting to ssh via terminal (I was still learning that stuff then) and seemed to be generally impressed and interested that I was using linux... I think it was a nice change from the daily grind of walking windoze users through the menu they can't find so they liked answering my more "esoteric" techy questions.
Actually come to think of it they were biased against windoze because they didn't want to help me with PuTTY but they were happy to give Unix command line tips!
Stupidity is its own reward.
Binghamton University (SUNY) uses Broadview's Campus Manager software to verify that all computers connected to its network have all recent OS updates and antivirus updates. Checks are done once per semester. Linux computers get a free pass through the semesterly validation screen, so I would consider this a high level of Linux support as it doesn't require any extra work on the part of the Linux user. In terms of offering software support (as is offered to all students for free), I would imagine that Linux users can take care of most of their own issues. From my experience, the Help Desk will also give adequate support to knowledgeable students (using Linux) who have connectivity issues.
I'm not sure which IT-department provides the wireless (unencrypted with login and WPA-enterprise eduroam), but there are instructions available and being laughed at for using Linux seems unimaginable to me, the majority of desktops in the CS-department run Linux (used to be Solaris) and so do most teachers. This is a school where emacs is commonly cited as a course requirement for some arcane reason, and LaTeX seems to be the most common tool for both presentations, handouts and exams. ;)
The central email-servers were switched over to Exchange a couple of years ago under dubious circumstances, I've never really had to deal with the department responsible for email though.
How does IT support users generally?
They don't.
ONK?
Our CompSci department has very little involvement with campus IT. That's why I'm here -- the department didn't want to have to depend on campus IT, and campus IT didn't really want to deal with our servers, etc. Senior faculty didn't have the time to do all the IT stuff.
Most of our labs and all our servers are Unixish -- mostly Linux, but a few others as well. I have some labs that are Windows based. Faculty that use Windows on their own machines mostly get their support from the campus help desk. Aside from the odd printing problem, etc. Faculty that use Linux would get help from me -- except none ever have, since they tend to be self supporting.
All that said, I get along fine with campus IT. That doesn't mean I have a lot of influence with how they set up or manage the rest of campus. They *don't* support Linux, but they're not hostile to it either.
Ignorance killed the cat. Curiosity was framed.
I don't know of all the specs of what my university has, seeing as how I'm a rising freshman there, but the do offer IT support for Linux users. For that matter, in the supported operating systems it says something along the lines of, "Windows, Mac and ANY flavor of Linux/Ubuntu". Also the FAQ on the IT website where it asks and answers: "Q:What software is used on campus? A:Primarily Microsoft and LINUX software."... Sources: http://it.highpoint.edu/ www.highpoint.edu
I haven't had a problem and the staff generally don't mind what you connect. Mac is widely accepted over here and linux is seen as a bit of a geek's toy but by most technicians as 'technically superior but too hard to use'. The uni servers are linux based but the only support is for mac and windows. Linux users are generally left to get their support themselves....... XD
I study CS at the University of Helsinki, and for some reason the managers laugh when you mention windows support here... ;)
here at my university, they won't really help you out with linux, but they do provide linux instructions for authentication, as well as having a recommended linux distribution.
I am reporting from the University of Cologne in Germany. With about 45,000 students one of the largest universities in Germany.
Here, the Central IT services give excellent Linux support. They assist students having problems with university's WLAN and also with their Linux installations. With my questions, I have always found competent people there.
A large part of the infrastructure runs on Linux or Solaris. However, only in some classrooms, the desktop computers come preinstalled with RedHat Linux (dual bootable with Windows XP). Far more thin clients (e.g. in the library systems or computers for simple internet access) are running Linux. They use the thin clients from Igel systems (www.igel.com). They look like Windows, but they are Linux with a Windows theme.
To answer your question: IT staff has never ridiculed when talking about Linux.
Members of the IT staff actually scoffed at you for bringing up Linux? Maybe you should consider transferring schools...
DSU.edu - You cannot get a BS in CompSci without mastering Linux. The entire campus is networked, all education is done via issued laptops. One of the most advanced and top-notch small universities in the country.
I can't imagine why anyone would use anything but Linux for their servers. For a while we wouldn't allow any windows machines to access our network at all, and required students to use a hacked version of XP if they wanted to. Just can't afford the viruses and issues that such a pos operating system comes with.
I worked at SJSU up until 2008 and the policy was that access wasn't particularly restricted in any way but support for non Windows/MacOS was fairly limited.
Except in the College of Engineering--we tried our best to support basically anything the students would come up with, no matter how weird. Getting something bizarre working on our network was a point of pride :-). The school flirted with implementing Clean Access, but I don't know if that ever actually happened (and from the sound of it, the plan was that only Windoze users would have been affected).
"Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana." --Groucho Marx
i find it surprising that they didn't immediately support it considering that the main cs servers (yallara & numbat) wre running solaris on a 16 or 8 core sparc servers, the majority of labs were just terminals (option to fire up win2k via citrix after logging in), and the 3d games programming lab were all running redhat. of course that was early last decade. i suppose a lot can change in that time.
I study Computing at Imperial College.
Our uni-wide Information and Communication Technologies department (http://www3.imperial.ac.uk/ict) supports Linux, Windows and MacOS X. We can go there if we have problems with Wifi, VPN or generally to get help with all these officially supported platforms.
The Computing Department specifically runs about 200 Ubuntu 10.04 lab machines for undergraduate students and programming exams; at least a third are dual-bootable with Windows 7, the others are Linux only. The machines run Condor (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condor_High-Throughput_Computing_System) for distributed high performance computing available to all computing students. The linux installations allow for a wide choice of common and exotic desktop environments, shells, DVCSs and all desktops have CUDA Linux SDKs. There is a small lab with 6 OS X workstations. There is also a small data center with Linux batch machines, Sun computers and servers.
All lecture rooms at in the department dual-boot Ubuntu and Windows. Linux is used for the majority of programming courses.
The Computing Support Group (http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/csg/services/linux) employs at least four people to competently help with Linux problems on lab and private computers. Packages from Ubuntu's repositories can easily be requested by students to be installed on all machines.
Open source development by students and the use of open source software are encouraged by the department. All Haskell, Java, C, C++, Prolog exams are written on Linux machines, as are the "write your own assembler", "write your own virtual machine", "implement your own operating system" assessed courseworks.
The department itself releases teaching tools under free licenses, such as Kenya (a simplified Java language with a simple GUI comparable to Arduino's, http://chatley.com/kenya/) and Pandora (a Natural Deduction proof assistant, http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/pandora/newpandora/).
From time to time, there are course-related and optional tutorials on SVN, GIT, Perl, shell usage and other open source tools as well as talks about Linux related development.
The Imperial College Student Union has a Linux Users Group (http://union.ic.ac.uk/rcc/linux/).
Swinburne has (I assume it still does) laboratories of Linux (CentOS to be exact) workstations. No dramas there, no idea why RMIT would be so peculiar about it.
I think the main blame for the shittyness of RMITs Linux,Unix and etc. support could be blamed on a few things the craptactular novell system (and those staff members who grew up with it) in place, the culture of ignorance and resistance to change that the majority of staff in college relationship ITS (the people who actually interact with staff and students ) and (certainly not finally just all I can be arsed writing about in this post) a failure of middle managers throughout ITS
I think that RMIT will continue to have a "subscription of stupidness and incompetence" due to the hiring (and promotion) policies currently affecting ITS and the Zero training available just pushing anyone with skill or intelligence away from RMIT-ITS. In the words of someone overheard over the partitions in one of the large ITS offices "Would you really recommend someone else come work here"
But maybe stuff will change. the new ED of ITS seems decent (and some of the staff he has been dumping work on) and it's possible that he (and the rest) might be able to change stuff for the better but they have a very long uphill battle and a significant part of the resistance will be internal to the IT department.
P.S.
You can connect a nix box to the wireless it's actually less work (in some-ways) than windows machines (no additional shitty secure w2 required) though the proxy settings are completely retarded and hopefully they will put in a transparent proxy soon. The hell desk should be able to assist you with OS X and you can take the PDF for OS X off the stupid wireless website and apply to any decent Linux with ease
At my university you can connect to the WIFI with all computers. No difference between Windows or Linux or smartphones. And you can use all campus web-applications with every type of browser (except lynx and telnet). At my last university this was just the same. When I was lately on a conference the WIFI worked for everyone. Honestly it worked in the trains which have WIFI and at Starbucks. Honestly I do not know any location were it didn't work.
When they support widely used standards it works with Linux. And if they use some propriety stuff which only works with Windows then they are jerks and completely incompetent. How do they suppose to support all WIFI-aware tools which people use today?
Ah yes and by the way most of our servers run Linux or other Unix flavors.
No, I'm not kidding. Our college recently switched to EAP-TTLS with the authentication done with LDAP. It works natively in every modern linux distro and Mac OS X, but not Windows. It was great fun to see windows users running frantically to linux machines for downloading the necessary software.
Then again, in my college (IISER-Kolkata, India), 'IT guys' are mostly physicist-cum-linux-geeks. So they are not at all apologetic about this kind of stunts.
w00t!
RMIT has a really horribly done novell system.
and they seem to have a random method of situating home directories.
That stuff would need to be changed before they could do better
1. Of course it does 2. No problems so far 3. Never.
I study at the university of Lecce in Italy. In my faculty even the public computers run Linux (Scientific Linux, to be precise), although other faculties use windows. Wireless access is done by web login. Now if only there was less interference...
Here at Otago University the computer science department runs linux/mac machines almost everywhere, so yes we support linux
At Aarhus University, Denmark, most student-accessible machines run Linux anyway, and our tech staff prefer that we do as well, as most of us actually do :-)
"The number you have dialed is imaginary. Please rotate your phone 90 degrees and try again."
In my university, wifi is used without password. But when you go to a site, you get redirected to a perl script that asks your student code and password. As long as you don't disconnect from the network, you can surf.
In the software development labs, Ubuntu 10.10 is available as only OS, in the other computer rooms, Windows 7 is available and there is vmWare installed with a virtual Ubuntu on it.
So my university is quite friendly to Linux, and a big part of the professors (in the IT branch) use it as their main OS.
In my class (mathematics) 5 of the 30 students use Linux (Ubuntu is most popular, followed by Suse), while the half of my class are girls, there is no girl that uses Linux. I know only two mac users in my class.
the eduroam network (available at, as far as i can tell, all university campuses) definitely offers linux support. instructions for monash students are here: http://www.its.monash.edu.au/wireless/wireless-inst-linux.html
In the middle east, it doesn't matter whether you're running Linux, Mac OS X, or FreeBSD so we don't get that much of attention of what OS we're using. Personally, I think those IT departments you asked weren't worth the question because I wonder why would they just "LOL"? Bullshit.
I laugh at your ignorance of the ignorance of many IT organizations.
Our network group are Cisco whores. Our network authentication is Cisco Clean Access, which is configured to support windows. They say they support macs, but it doesn't work half the time. Linux users are SOL. some of our brighter linux hackers have figured out how to make the browser lie and get past it, but they are completely, totally on their own.
Our new CIO was asked about supporting linux desktops (e.g. open source alternatives to office, etc) and shot it down - we're a windows shop.
And it's a technical school, too. Engineering is the largest group on campus, with a good sized CS department in there as well.
-j
Last time I had a certification error when trying to connect to WiFi on HiB (Bergen University College) with Fedora, I sent an e-mail to support, 20 minutes later the head guy called me on my cellphone (which I didn't mention in the e-mail) to talk to me about it. Turns out he's a BLUG-member and usually used Ubuntu, but was going to try out the latest Fedora just to see if he could help me out. A couple of days later I got an e-mail about installing aMSN and use a certificate in that package to get on Wireless. Worded like a charm. Gotta love proper sysadmins who jump at the chance to help someone with Linux.
Also: All the machines on campus have dualboot: Windows XP + CentOS
I've found that schools out here such as Penn State, Bryn Mawr, and others have been far more receptive to teh Linux brand once students started using them more. On IT director said to me "Initially I was a bit apprehensive about the linux OS on the networks and in the class room, but frankly those are the systems we don't get calls to fix all the time. Makes my job much easier."
By exclaiming "Linux!" he meant "Linux needs no support, everything works fine there."
Well, my University actually wants you to run linux (or mac) in some lectures, in my case, basics of computer science and programming, where you write small programs each week and then explain to a tutor what you did. since they want you to write them with a texteditor (e.g. notepad++, kate, whatever), and not in a programming-environment, they don't want you to do it under windows, as the GCC-compiler only runs in the unix terminal. (ofcourse quite a number of people did it under windows anyways, and it was no problem, but still they suggested using linux).
In another lecture, they suggested using windows, as they use windows programs to program the microcontrollers we use, as well as to layout the boards, but i had no problem to install and use all 3 needed programs with wine under linux.
the wlan has no reason not to accept linux or mac computers, the only problem for me was the kubuntu network manager, it really sucks. I installed wicd network manager, and everything was fine. Some people couldn't connect from macbooks, but others couldn't connect from windows-laptops either, so it was just their personal setup-problems.
I went to UNE (Armidale, New South Wales) when I did Comp. Sc. They are very Linux based. We had to purchase Red hat 2 (Yes, that long ago) as well as one subject which required Windows 3.1 or 95 (Because it was prior to 98). I was annoyed though when after forking out money for Corel Works, because we were told we had to use that and weren't allowed to use MS Office for our assignments, they did a backflip and suddenly decided people could use Excel etc for assignments. But, other than that one subject all our assignments had to be written to run on Linux RedHat boxes (Later a Fedora box I believe ... yeah, yeah, same difference).
Sure enough, the cow costume was hanging up next to the superhero outfit and sailors uniform. (S,Spud)
Our IT support people do support Linux, for example the School of Maths has an official Linux distribution. There are instructions for using the VPN on Linux on the IT web site. As for Wifi Linux is no problem but other devices have been difficult, including Symbian, BlackBerry and iPhone devices owned by the university. Fortunately the University has rolled out Eduroam on campus recently and this solves pretty much all wifi problems in one go.
I think on the whole at a university with a reasonable amount of science and engineering research you can expect Linux support as Linux is so prevalent in scientific computing.
That said I did ring the central IT support number as I needed the address of a CUPS server in a hurry, and the support guy had never heard of CUPS!
My 'university' (www.au.edu) supports only M$ Windows, but tolerates macs and linux. The backend infrastructure is based on an air of paranoia, unfortunately. Only common ports are open for outgoing connections at the new campus. That screws anyone who uses rsync, jabber, and various vpn systems.
At the old 'inner city ghetto' campus, things are a bit better. This is mostly because the engineering and CS faculties are there. The wifi is open but uses a browser-based login prompt. It used to be an actual page.
None of the computer labs have *nix machines. The arts studio uses macs for media and graphics work (the only exception), but even in engineering all of the machines run windows, even if some the coursework is *nix-based. There is an M$ site license, so i guess this is what happens when the bean counters do the planning. The IT guys are even proud of the fact that most of the school's website is coded to "IE6 Standard".
Going back to security, there's also a nasty problem of pervasive deep packet inspection and 90 day traffic logging. The infrastructure is there for forced MITMing of ssl and forced dns redirection, but that isnt actually happening, yet...
I also attend a uni in Melbourne, albeit a somewhat larger one. Windows, Mac and Linux are supported. For example, the wifi requires authentication to connect, which requires a certificate. Instructions are provided for Windows, Mac, Linux, Android and iOS X. (There's a web form to use as an alternate, but it gets annoying very quickly.)
I'm fairly certain this is due to the diverse use of OSs on campus. We have an Apple store on campus, so about 10% of students (and most engineering lecturers) have Macs. All the engineering computers dual boot WinXP and Scientific Linux (although only the postgrads have login rights under Linux).
In short, they have to support them because that's what people use.
Most human behaviour can be explained in terms of identity.
> Does your university/college provide support for Linux/BSD/etc users to connect to the on-campus wireless?
The online guides don't say how to do it, however there is a note in the knowledgebase directing users to the campus LUG's (VTLUUG) wiki article on how to connect. So I would say that there is partial support in that regard.
>How does IT support Linux users generally?
Honestly I've never ran into any problem, there is even UNIX software on the network software repository. As far as using technology in the classroom, the first year of the engineering program (before going into Computer Science, you are with the rest of the Engineering college for some general classes) you have to use some software which is poorly supported under Linux (i.e. it doesn't have a native version, it doesn't have a protocol compliant alternative, and it doesn't work at all under wine) but on the other hand it is still astoundingly shitty software under Windows. After that first year, once you enter into the actual Computer Science curriculum pretty much everything is extremely well supported.
>Have IT staff ever ridiculed you for asking questions about Linux?
No. A resounding No. I've walked into the offices of the people who do IT, CS, and CpE and had great conversations about Linux and open source software. That said there isn't official support for Linux so if you had a problem (with software, if it were a hardware problem you would probably get help (having a friend who works for the help team and is a Linux user, she would probably stand up for the user if it weren't a software issue) you would probably be told that there is nothing that they can do. As far as unofficial support goes, the LUG has always publicized that we are here to help anyone in the community (student, faculty, staff, etc) and it looks like the administration might give us an office in return for formalizing our commitment to helping people who ask for it.
Well, they would have; they never found out. About 5 years ago, in high school, we installed Red Hat on one of the school computers which people rarely used for some reason(surely not because it was the only computer that banned newground *whistles*). It took them months to find out. We did have Linux on another school computer, but it was not in the main computer room; we had our own space for various activities and once Ubuntu came out and became all user friendly the teacher decided to use it.
My college does NOT support Linux. They go out of there way to not support Linux, all college wide software is Windows or Mac only. All lab computers are Windows / Mac only. If you ever have IT Problems and you say your running Linux they wont offer support and the email system at the college completely fails when you run it on Linux. in short Conestoga College has gone to great lengths to not support Linux and make sure they ever Linux user will have a near impossible time using there system.
The only thing that lack of support for Linux shows about an IT department is lack of knowledge.
I am a final year Bsc Mobile and Wireless Computing Student at the University of Westminster (London, UK) and despite almost every printer having a Red Hat based print server (yes each printer has its own server) there is little or no knowledge of linux let alone support of it. All of our servers are windows based and despite having meetings with the student union and ISLS (the people responsible for IT at the university of westminster) discussing the unreliability of Virtual Learning environments such as blackboard, they refuse to even look into other server environments (such as linux) beacuse 'they dont know about it'.
To my knowledge there is only one computer lab with about 10-15 computers dual booting Window 7 and Debian. We do however have about 50-60 sunray 2 thin clients running solaris which are quite good for programming, but they are hated by most students beacuse they cant to anything graphic related (watching a youtube video is like a power point presentation). These sunrays and linux boxes can only be used by computing students and ISLS refused to acknowledge their existence.
They cant even get the wifi working with encryption so I'm not going to hope for linux support....
Missouri State has terrific support for Linux check out the help section: https://experts.missouristate.edu/display/csvhelpdesk/Cisco+VPN+Client+on+Linux They list various things they'll help you with, though most are basic, of course, like connecting to the vpn, and to wifi,
I go to university in Brisbane Australia, and QUT supports Linux, Mac, and Windows machines with their networks. I'm surprised that your university employs a system that needs specific client software to connect (or at least that is what I presume by not supporting Linux).
My university (California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo) had Linux as the main OS for our Computer lab machines. They also supported the main three OS for wireless and on-campus apartment support. I feel like they treated Linux users very well. Actually Linux users don't have to install anti-virus where as windows users had to to gain internet access so using Linux was easier in that sense.