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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.
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.
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
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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 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.
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
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).
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 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.
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
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!
That explains technology support around here!
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.
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...
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.
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
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.
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).
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.
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.
Dangerous, sexy, turing complete: Femme Bots
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.
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).
Eggs
Milk
Bread
Cat Litter
Soda
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.
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(_).
RMIT is fairly good with Linux. TFS was worried about the proposed new system that I believe uses WPS (unsupported in Network Manager). The current system works fine with Linux, I even got my N900 working with it.
The only major problem with an IT service was a few years back when they used an old version of Blackboard. When uploading files it used the useragent string to determine if it should parse the file string as a Unix or Windows path. It complained that Linux had an invalid path/file name as it was trying to interpret it as a Windows style path. The solution was to add the three letters "mac" to the useragent. It didn't matter where because the checker was really stupid. That bug only lasted about a year before it was finally fixed.
Unicode in Slashdot
...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.
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?
Slashdot: where don knuth is an idiot because he cant grasp the awesome power of php
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.
The three laws of thermodynamics:(1) You can't win. (2) You can't break even. (3) You can't even quit.
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.
Gentlemen, you can't fight in here! This is the War Room!
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
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.
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.
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).
As a long time WebCT and Angel admin I find it suprising that BB actually fixed a bug ...
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
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.
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.
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.
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 currently working towards a Masters degree in Computer Science at the University of Michigan. On the engineering campus, lab computers dual-boot into Windows 7 and RHEL 5. If they're using their own Linux distro, I didn't notice. I connect to the services using Fedora. Although my distribution isn't officially supported, I haven't had any problems using Fedora. The only problem I've had as a Linux user is that when I contacted support because my laptop kept disconnecting from the WiFi network, they suggested I install a new driver for my wireless card, and pointed me to Windows drivers. They subsequently discovered that the problem is interference from unauthorized access points.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
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
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.
Who is still talking about Linux ?
Nobody. We just use it.
On the other hand, it is nice to get new Linux users and give them a hand. Times have changed since the mid 90s, and there is a lot of fear in colleges about doing something "illegal" and being expelled or arrested. I have ended up reassuring people during my time at a university that no, installing Linux or BSD on a dorm computer won't mean some goons will be kicking in the door.
Everyone was a beginner once, and if I can help someone get at least on the Internet so they can hit Google, I am doing something right.
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.
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?
I'm currently in the Masters program in Computer Science at the University of Michigan. It seems like most professors and GSIs run Windows these days, from seeing their desktop on the projection screen as they start their presentations. Some have Macs. I can't say that I've seen anyone besides me using Linux on their personal computer. Only a few CAEN lab computers are booted into Linux at any given time, and the reason students boot into Linux seems to be mainly that they need to use Linux for a class they're taking.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
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.
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.
funny you would think LaTeX requirement a Linux thing, was around long before Linux. You can run it on most any desktop, server or mainframe OS. From MS-DOS and OS/2 to OpenVMS to IBM's z/os
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.
... 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 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!
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.
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
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 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.
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!
Mac = Unix.
-- Linux user #369862
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
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 ]
"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
Trying to use braindead legacy applications on newer systems (UAC, registry/file system shadowing,
And don't get me started on laughable localization support shortcomings in Windows... (admittedly off-topic)
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.
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.
I do criticize WikiMedia publications, but Wikiquote taught me an interesting thing. The oft-quoted statement is:
"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win."
However, its authenticity is disputed. A similar statement was made in a 1914 address at the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America biennial convention.
sigfault (core dumped)
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.
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
Weird. Didn't know they had any recommendations for that at all. Does that come from the central IT guys or the CS department?
Slashdot: where don knuth is an idiot because he cant grasp the awesome power of php
I can only assume you are either trolling for laughs or are a dyed-in-the-wool kool-aid-chugging Microsoft True Believer.
The "is GNU/Linux supported" question is a red herring. Google runs on GNU/Linux. Akamai runs on GNU/Linux. Big companies with vast empires of CPUs crunching data and hosting clouds run on GNU/Linux or some other Unix variant. Most websites on the planet run on either GNU/Linux or BSD. Windows is the commercial OS that comes with consumer PCs. Sure, that market share is huge, but it is heavily skewed towards the naive "I just want it to be easy regardless of whether it's crappy or expensive" crowd. This makes them extremely visible to people, but Microsoft does not supply the world's heavy duty industrial quality software. They never have and most likely never will. They provide everyday software for consumers, and take as much money from them as they can.
You want to get some serious computing done, you get GNU/Linux.
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.
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.
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.
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 did too. In 2003.
Members of the IT staff actually scoffed at you for bringing up Linux? Maybe you should consider transferring schools...
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
We supported Fedora in the labs and a mix of rhel centos fed and unfortunately opensuse on staff workstations.
Former IT worker at RMIT
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
CSIT are a special case they kept a lot of their own infrastructure during the centralisation and a lot of it is still there a lot of the big iron in the ITS dept does run on nix but there is a big culture especially in desktop support areas of CBF and we've always done it this way
getting over that is going to be a challange
RMIT is hopeless with Linux. Trying to get changes made to make a workable environment for labs or workstations is a never ending battle.
The majority of desktop support staff (in SEH) are incompetent with OS X (let alone something as exotic or magical as Linux (yeah I'm bitter)) and any question you need to ask will have to get escalated to someone with a clue (bit different in DSC and Business I believe) .
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
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 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 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)
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.
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.
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,
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.