I might get mod down for this... but here it goes.
My company recently made the switch to Linux, replacing most of our Windows desktops with Linux (servers are all already *NIX).
I was invovled with the project since the planning stage, and everyone seemed to agree that GNOME was the best choice because at the time (and it might still is), GNOME was the default desktop for most commercial distros. We thought to ourselves: "Oh well, these guys must know something that we don't." Most of us ran KDE, we gave GNOME a small test drive, decided that it looked easy enough and voted for it.
Big mistake.
First of all, GNOME lacked documentation on how to customize it. For gconfd, the GNOME web site only provided 2 links, one of which is dead, and the other was last updated in the year 2000. I asked around on IRC, posted on forums and newsgroups, emailed the GNOME developers, but I did not get any responses. I ended up taking apart all the %gconf.xml files myself, and saving a profile and writing an ugly script to convert it for every user. I am sure there is a better way, but either no one has done it, or nobody cared to share.
What's worse, are the bugs. There are minor bugs that really put a dent on the overall Linux experience, especially for those users that we just switched over. Some of them have already heard about how great Linux is, and how "stable" it is. This only makes them angrier when their Nautilus window craps out and leaves them a core dump (shows up as a little bomb). I looked up some of the bugs, most were already filed, but none fixed. Just a little while ago, there was an email on the nautilus list asking people to help fix bugs, so I think some of the developers agree with me that there are way too many outstanding bugs. When I asked some of the GNOME developers, the response I got then was to "upgrade to 2.6, it is much better than 2.4!". Sounds familiar? Yup, Microsoft told me the same thing.
The similarity doesn't end there. I installed 2.6 and tested it. In my opinion, it was worse. Yes, the spatial view is kind of cool, but you know what it reminded me of? Windows 95. And there is no easy way to turn it off (I would have expected to have it as an option in the drop-down menus). It was not more stable either, but I WAS running an early build of it. I, again, complained to some people about how 2.6 did not quite live up to my expectations, and the answer? "Wait for 2.8, it's GREAT!"
All of this is not helping the Linux desktop movement, especially in my company, where the management was already not really happy about switching over to an "inferior" OS. This just gives them more "evidence" to talk about: "We were right. My WindowsXP box crashed much less often. Linux IS a piece of crap!" But in reality, it was only Nautilus that was crapping out when connecting to a WebDAV mounted drive, not the underlying OS... but they won't understand that, would they?
It definitely has a lot of people looking, simply because the VoIP solution is *considerably* cheaper than the traditional telecom support contract. VoIP also has the promise that it will be easier to expand/upgrade. IMHO, VoIP just needs solid QoS, then it will become a no-brainer for most to switch over.
I have not been able to find CF cards with a physical write-protect switch. The best I can find is one that connects via USB, but I'd like to have one that plugs into a regular CF-reader, preferrably internally.
Care to share where you found the write-protect CF cards?
mod parent up. I agree completely. You are trying to solve a social problem with technical solutions. Social problems are best solved with social solutions.
I run several machines at home, one of them is a gentoo machine. I like Gentoo, but it will *not* teach you much about being a system administrator. It will teach you about some basics about linux (installing one, to be specific), which I don't believe have much to do with sys admin. For example, bootstrapping your kernel. During the gentoo installation, that's just one command, you run the bootstrap script (I believe it was bootstrap.sh), and off it goes (for the next few hours). You don't really learn anything from that except typing in that "bootstrap" command.
I recommend that you read about real TCP/IP networking, as most Windows sys admins I know don't have the correct knowledge about networking (they only know it in Microsoft terms). O'Reilly's TCP/IP Network Administration is a good book, so is Linux TCP/IP Network Administration by Scott Mann.
Get comfortable with command line. I know many Windows sys admins who fear the command line tools. Most linux programs now have GUI counter parts, but to really get the most out of a tool, command line is still your best friend. It also will make remote administration a lot easier for you.
Find out what distribution you will be using, and join the user mailing list(s). Also get familiar with package management of your choice (RPM, DEB, or source). As a sys admin, you will quickly find out that custom compiling everything will become a nightmare to maintain. For me, I build everything into RPMs, even if it's just a single file script. This makes administering multiple machines much easier.
Seriously, you don't. I went through my college as a computer science student without any fancy computer equipment. The school lab provides for pretty much everything you need.
One of the best things I did was to join one of the research labs, thus gaining 24/7 access to the lab's equipment (I scored a key!), and I suggest you try and do the same. This will not only get you involved in some really cool projects, it might also pay your bills (though likely minimun wage), and it will help you establish good relationship with professors who run the research lab/projects.
During my college years (only about 4 years ago), my friends around me were taking our loans to get laptop computers, and they believed that it will help them in their classes. However, I have to say, the best note-taking tools you will ever have in class is still your pen and paper. Even if you can type as fast as your professor can speak, it's still impossible to draw things as quickly as your professor can draw diagrams on the board.
(A bonus for taking your notes on paper: when it comes to midterm time, girls will have to spend more time studying with your or borrowing your notes, rather than just download your notes from your laptop)
Honestly, I did not see how having a laptop helped with any of my friend's grades. If anything, it put a big dent on their student loan, distracts you from your actual work (oh, let me see if I can get Quake3 to run on here...), and when it gets stolen, it's that much more trouble and money to replace it (shit! my term paper was on the laptop!).
I survived fine using school provided equipments. And when I got to a point where I needed access to a compiler at late hours (after the PC labs are closed), I go to my work place (the research lab) and use the computers there. PC (Windows) labs were always full, so I was forced to go to the old UNIX terminals that no one uses, and that's where I learned most of my UNIX skills.
It doesn't hurt to have a Knoppix CD in your pocket, either.
This is true, from a business point of view, building a working product quickly is much more profitable than building a maintainable, well designed product slowly.
This is fine until you start adding the cost of maintainability in. Say you need to ship a version 2.0 out of the door, under the same strict deadline, and that smart hacker guy who wrote a bulk of version 1.0 is no longer with your group. You may end up extending the deadline, and/or needing to hire more capable programmers. You may even have to throw out some old code and start from scratch.
All of these will cost you quite a bit of money.
On the other hand, if version 1.0 was well thought out, well documented and designed, you'll be able to crank out many many new versions quickly (profit!)
In the long run, it is probably better technologically and economically to design something good from the start.
...before someone figures out how to re-enable all the features.
I doubt MS developed an entirely new OS, what most likely happened is that they put some restrictions on top of the original WinXP to disable these features.
But it would probably help the sales of their WinXP Starter Edition, since then peoeple can spend less money to get the crippleware, and apply a patch to get a fully (dis)functional WinXP.
When I first read the/. post, I was excited, because this is exactly what I wanted to do with GNOME as well. But after reading the introduction, I am a bit taken back by some of the phrases the author used, such as:
It's totally regardless for them what the opinion of users are, what only matters is that they must be right because they say so.
and:
I on the otherhand think that some decisions have upset quite a lot of people including me and there was no possibility to bring these problems up on the GNOME Mailinglists or the IRC channel without getting yourself trapped into ugly discussions, slandering, defaming, mobbing or even stalking.
and this:
It would be nice if they could do their own little thing in their own world without convincing everyone else that they must change their stuff the way they like because they said so.
While I agree with the project goal in general, the use of such spiteful language may drive some developers away, especially if there are some GNOME developers who want to participate in both projects. Even for me, now I am afraid that I would be signing up for a war against the GNOME project.
I know the feeling you have, being ignored and even mistreated, but the introduction of your project home page is no place to amplify these complaints.
Be positive, I believe that will win you more community support.
people actually like it that way. there is absolutely no reason to run as root, and if you configure it that way it will not change usually.
I'd agree with you in general, but I am talking about the extreme case of a couple of morons who want to "play" with their desktop and really screw things up. It only takes one evil user to waste all the time for your entire IT department. I could only imagine it being worse if these morons has the root password.
I dealt with a couple of these people after we switched everyone to Linux. One of them customized the desktop to his liking to such extreme, that GNOME hanged (something with gtk). And when I went out to fix his computer, he refuses to tell me what he did to break it. I restored it to the default, only to go back the next day with the exact same issue. I told him to stop using the custom theme he downloaded, because I suspect it has something to do with it, and he absolutely refuses to.
Well, I guess that isn't so different from support stupid Windows users. A lot of the problems I am running into now are savvy Windows users feeling uncomfortable in the new environment, and they are making a big stink about it.
"When I had Windows, I could do this and this and that, but now that they gave me this piece of junk Linux, I can't do any of that! Free software my ass! Now I have less freedom!"(seriously, I oever heard this a few times from some of the users, they actually think they get more freedom from running Windows)
Also, the UI for various distros changes rapidly, on top of the fast growing KDE/GNOME projects, companies such as Mandrake and Red Hat throw in their own customization on top of each version. This is another issue that is easier to solve in a corporate enviroment, because if we decide to upgrad,e we will upgrade everyone to Mandrake 10.0 and leaves no one behind, but it's difficult to keep track of the users you have sold PCs to what versions they are running.
Linux is the OS that works against itself the most.
I love the choices I have with Linux, at least a few dozens flavors of kernel, hundreds of distros, and countless tarballs, RPMs, and DEBs for me to choose from. But when you want to support these countless and fast growing numbers, it becomes a nightmare.
My company just converted over to Linux recently (every desktop, servers were all already on Linux/BSD). One of the biggest challenge we had was how we are going to handle support. The best solution was to have a contractor company to support us so we don't waste our valuable resources. The idea is to have one of our own employees pick up the phone, and have someone walk him/her through the problems (or even have the support person control the desktop via VNC or krfb).
But do you know how hard it is to find good support for Linux? We had a rough time finding a company that would do what we want, and to add on top of that, the ones we find only support some generic dsitros. We are not running any special kernels or distros here, we are using a major distro, the only difference is we modified the GNOME desktop a little to fit the needs of each department. But this becomes insanely difficult to for someone else (a contractor) to support remotely.
In the end, we went ahead and did the support ourselves. People bitch and whine about how the desktop is different than their Windows XP desktop now, but we always through this question back at them: "Can you still do your job?" And that silenced most of the complaints. Users were complaining about not being able to play certain games online (especially from MSN), or not being able to run certain programs that they downloaded.
But with home users, you are not so lucky. Regular home users expect to have total freedom over their machine. To some, this means having root access. And we all know root access in the hands of the not-so-smart people is a dangerous thing. And it only takes a couple of these morons to suck up all of your time and resources.
I am not saying that Linux on the desktop doesn't work. It does, everyone from my company is using it. The problem is supporting the various flavors of Linux distributions. It's easier for Dell to train their support techs to know all flavors of Windows, but it would be impossible to train a staff of support techs to know lots of Linux distros + different windows managers. An user running GNOME and an user running Enlightenment think they are on very different machines, while they could both be running the same version fo the same distro.
Sure it's possible they haven't thought of this, but it's such a basic precaution I find it hard to believe.
You haven't worked for a convention ISP, have you?:P
Most convention networks are designed and built in days, with contstant changes occuring daily, if not hourly. Add to the fact that most people who are doing the designing may not place security on the top of their list. A lot of the network engineers dealing with building the network are too busy dealing with the constant changes, lighting up the temporary circuit(s), testing each connection before the grand opening... that building a secure network falls to the bottom of their list.
Some of them would even have the mentality that, this is only a temporary network, it's only up for a total of 72 hours, who's gonna break in in that short window of time?
Keep in mind, most of the convention ISPs are getting paid to just get the network up, and some of them don't see the need to build a secure network that will only be used for a few days.
It may be a bit too late for this guy who's already out of school, but one of the most effective ways I have found to get myself networked was to join a lab at school. Most professors are more than happy to take in cheap, if not free, student help. I started hanging out at a network lab, made friends there, and eventually, when a student-help position opened up, I was chosen. This position later led me to a lot more futher networking, and eventually I scored an internship with my current employer.
Do not waste the time when you are in school, it's probably the only time you can get away with no experience at a job interview. Once you are out of school, your interviewers won't be so kind to you.
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I might get mod down for this... but here it goes.
My company recently made the switch to Linux, replacing most of our Windows desktops with Linux (servers are all already *NIX).
I was invovled with the project since the planning stage, and everyone seemed to agree that GNOME was the best choice because at the time (and it might still is), GNOME was the default desktop for most commercial distros. We thought to ourselves: "Oh well, these guys must know something that we don't." Most of us ran KDE, we gave GNOME a small test drive, decided that it looked easy enough and voted for it.
Big mistake.
First of all, GNOME lacked documentation on how to customize it. For gconfd, the GNOME web site only provided 2 links, one of which is dead, and the other was last updated in the year 2000. I asked around on IRC, posted on forums and newsgroups, emailed the GNOME developers, but I did not get any responses. I ended up taking apart all the %gconf.xml files myself, and saving a profile and writing an ugly script to convert it for every user. I am sure there is a better way, but either no one has done it, or nobody cared to share.
What's worse, are the bugs. There are minor bugs that really put a dent on the overall Linux experience, especially for those users that we just switched over. Some of them have already heard about how great Linux is, and how "stable" it is. This only makes them angrier when their Nautilus window craps out and leaves them a core dump (shows up as a little bomb). I looked up some of the bugs, most were already filed, but none fixed. Just a little while ago, there was an email on the nautilus list asking people to help fix bugs, so I think some of the developers agree with me that there are way too many outstanding bugs. When I asked some of the GNOME developers, the response I got then was to "upgrade to 2.6, it is much better than 2.4!". Sounds familiar? Yup, Microsoft told me the same thing.
The similarity doesn't end there. I installed 2.6 and tested it. In my opinion, it was worse. Yes, the spatial view is kind of cool, but you know what it reminded me of? Windows 95. And there is no easy way to turn it off (I would have expected to have it as an option in the drop-down menus). It was not more stable either, but I WAS running an early build of it. I, again, complained to some people about how 2.6 did not quite live up to my expectations, and the answer? "Wait for 2.8, it's GREAT!"
All of this is not helping the Linux desktop movement, especially in my company, where the management was already not really happy about switching over to an "inferior" OS. This just gives them more "evidence" to talk about: "We were right. My WindowsXP box crashed much less often. Linux IS a piece of crap!" But in reality, it was only Nautilus that was crapping out when connecting to a WebDAV mounted drive, not the underlying OS... but they won't understand that, would they?
It definitely has a lot of people looking, simply because the VoIP solution is *considerably* cheaper than the traditional telecom support contract. VoIP also has the promise that it will be easier to expand/upgrade. IMHO, VoIP just needs solid QoS, then it will become a no-brainer for most to switch over.
I have not been able to find CF cards with a physical write-protect switch. The best I can find is one that connects via USB, but I'd like to have one that plugs into a regular CF-reader, preferrably internally.
Care to share where you found the write-protect CF cards?
mod parent up. I agree completely. You are trying to solve a social problem with technical solutions. Social problems are best solved with social solutions.
I run several machines at home, one of them is a gentoo machine. I like Gentoo, but it will *not* teach you much about being a system administrator. It will teach you about some basics about linux (installing one, to be specific), which I don't believe have much to do with sys admin. For example, bootstrapping your kernel. During the gentoo installation, that's just one command, you run the bootstrap script (I believe it was bootstrap.sh), and off it goes (for the next few hours). You don't really learn anything from that except typing in that "bootstrap" command.
I recommend that you read about real TCP/IP networking, as most Windows sys admins I know don't have the correct knowledge about networking (they only know it in Microsoft terms). O'Reilly's TCP/IP Network Administration is a good book, so is Linux TCP/IP Network Administration by Scott Mann.
Get comfortable with command line. I know many Windows sys admins who fear the command line tools. Most linux programs now have GUI counter parts, but to really get the most out of a tool, command line is still your best friend. It also will make remote administration a lot easier for you.
Find out what distribution you will be using, and join the user mailing list(s). Also get familiar with package management of your choice (RPM, DEB, or source). As a sys admin, you will quickly find out that custom compiling everything will become a nightmare to maintain. For me, I build everything into RPMs, even if it's just a single file script. This makes administering multiple machines much easier.
Seriously, you don't. I went through my college as a computer science student without any fancy computer equipment. The school lab provides for pretty much everything you need.
One of the best things I did was to join one of the research labs, thus gaining 24/7 access to the lab's equipment (I scored a key!), and I suggest you try and do the same. This will not only get you involved in some really cool projects, it might also pay your bills (though likely minimun wage), and it will help you establish good relationship with professors who run the research lab/projects.
During my college years (only about 4 years ago), my friends around me were taking our loans to get laptop computers, and they believed that it will help them in their classes. However, I have to say, the best note-taking tools you will ever have in class is still your pen and paper. Even if you can type as fast as your professor can speak, it's still impossible to draw things as quickly as your professor can draw diagrams on the board.
(A bonus for taking your notes on paper: when it comes to midterm time, girls will have to spend more time studying with your or borrowing your notes, rather than just download your notes from your laptop)
Honestly, I did not see how having a laptop helped with any of my friend's grades. If anything, it put a big dent on their student loan, distracts you from your actual work (oh, let me see if I can get Quake3 to run on here...), and when it gets stolen, it's that much more trouble and money to replace it (shit! my term paper was on the laptop!).
I survived fine using school provided equipments. And when I got to a point where I needed access to a compiler at late hours (after the PC labs are closed), I go to my work place (the research lab) and use the computers there. PC (Windows) labs were always full, so I was forced to go to the old UNIX terminals that no one uses, and that's where I learned most of my UNIX skills.
It doesn't hurt to have a Knoppix CD in your pocket, either.
This is true, from a business point of view, building a working product quickly is much more profitable than building a maintainable, well designed product slowly.
This is fine until you start adding the cost of maintainability in. Say you need to ship a version 2.0 out of the door, under the same strict deadline, and that smart hacker guy who wrote a bulk of version 1.0 is no longer with your group. You may end up extending the deadline, and/or needing to hire more capable programmers. You may even have to throw out some old code and start from scratch.
All of these will cost you quite a bit of money.
On the other hand, if version 1.0 was well thought out, well documented and designed, you'll be able to crank out many many new versions quickly (profit!)
In the long run, it is probably better technologically and economically to design something good from the start.
...before someone figures out how to re-enable all the features.
I doubt MS developed an entirely new OS, what most likely happened is that they put some restrictions on top of the original WinXP to disable these features.
But it would probably help the sales of their WinXP Starter Edition, since then peoeple can spend less money to get the crippleware, and apply a patch to get a fully (dis)functional WinXP.
When I first read the /. post, I was excited, because this is exactly what I wanted to do with GNOME as well. But after reading the introduction, I am a bit taken back by some of the phrases the author used, such as:
It's totally regardless for them what the opinion of users are, what only matters is that they must be right because they say so.
and:
I on the otherhand think that some decisions have upset quite a lot of people including me and there was no possibility to bring these problems up on the GNOME Mailinglists or the IRC channel without getting yourself trapped into ugly discussions, slandering, defaming, mobbing or even stalking.
and this:
It would be nice if they could do their own little thing in their own world without convincing everyone else that they must change their stuff the way they like because they said so.
While I agree with the project goal in general, the use of such spiteful language may drive some developers away, especially if there are some GNOME developers who want to participate in both projects. Even for me, now I am afraid that I would be signing up for a war against the GNOME project.
I know the feeling you have, being ignored and even mistreated, but the introduction of your project home page is no place to amplify these complaints.
Be positive, I believe that will win you more community support.
people actually like it that way. there is absolutely no reason to run as root, and if you configure it that way it will not change usually.
I'd agree with you in general, but I am talking about the extreme case of a couple of morons who want to "play" with their desktop and really screw things up. It only takes one evil user to waste all the time for your entire IT department. I could only imagine it being worse if these morons has the root password.
I dealt with a couple of these people after we switched everyone to Linux. One of them customized the desktop to his liking to such extreme, that GNOME hanged (something with gtk). And when I went out to fix his computer, he refuses to tell me what he did to break it. I restored it to the default, only to go back the next day with the exact same issue. I told him to stop using the custom theme he downloaded, because I suspect it has something to do with it, and he absolutely refuses to.
Well, I guess that isn't so different from support stupid Windows users. A lot of the problems I am running into now are savvy Windows users feeling uncomfortable in the new environment, and they are making a big stink about it.
"When I had Windows, I could do this and this and that, but now that they gave me this piece of junk Linux, I can't do any of that! Free software my ass! Now I have less freedom!"(seriously, I oever heard this a few times from some of the users, they actually think they get more freedom from running Windows)
Also, the UI for various distros changes rapidly, on top of the fast growing KDE/GNOME projects, companies such as Mandrake and Red Hat throw in their own customization on top of each version. This is another issue that is easier to solve in a corporate enviroment, because if we decide to upgrad,e we will upgrade everyone to Mandrake 10.0 and leaves no one behind, but it's difficult to keep track of the users you have sold PCs to what versions they are running.
Linux is the OS that works against itself the most.
I love the choices I have with Linux, at least a few dozens flavors of kernel, hundreds of distros, and countless tarballs, RPMs, and DEBs for me to choose from. But when you want to support these countless and fast growing numbers, it becomes a nightmare.
My company just converted over to Linux recently (every desktop, servers were all already on Linux/BSD). One of the biggest challenge we had was how we are going to handle support. The best solution was to have a contractor company to support us so we don't waste our valuable resources. The idea is to have one of our own employees pick up the phone, and have someone walk him/her through the problems (or even have the support person control the desktop via VNC or krfb).
But do you know how hard it is to find good support for Linux? We had a rough time finding a company that would do what we want, and to add on top of that, the ones we find only support some generic dsitros. We are not running any special kernels or distros here, we are using a major distro, the only difference is we modified the GNOME desktop a little to fit the needs of each department. But this becomes insanely difficult to for someone else (a contractor) to support remotely.
In the end, we went ahead and did the support ourselves. People bitch and whine about how the desktop is different than their Windows XP desktop now, but we always through this question back at them: "Can you still do your job?" And that silenced most of the complaints. Users were complaining about not being able to play certain games online (especially from MSN), or not being able to run certain programs that they downloaded.
But with home users, you are not so lucky. Regular home users expect to have total freedom over their machine. To some, this means having root access. And we all know root access in the hands of the not-so-smart people is a dangerous thing. And it only takes a couple of these morons to suck up all of your time and resources.
I am not saying that Linux on the desktop doesn't work. It does, everyone from my company is using it. The problem is supporting the various flavors of Linux distributions. It's easier for Dell to train their support techs to know all flavors of Windows, but it would be impossible to train a staff of support techs to know lots of Linux distros + different windows managers. An user running GNOME and an user running Enlightenment think they are on very different machines, while they could both be running the same version fo the same distro.
Sure it's possible they haven't thought of this, but it's such a basic precaution I find it hard to believe.
You haven't worked for a convention ISP, have you? :P
Most convention networks are designed and built in days, with contstant changes occuring daily, if not hourly. Add to the fact that most people who are doing the designing may not place security on the top of their list. A lot of the network engineers dealing with building the network are too busy dealing with the constant changes, lighting up the temporary circuit(s), testing each connection before the grand opening... that building a secure network falls to the bottom of their list.
Some of them would even have the mentality that, this is only a temporary network, it's only up for a total of 72 hours, who's gonna break in in that short window of time?
Keep in mind, most of the convention ISPs are getting paid to just get the network up, and some of them don't see the need to build a secure network that will only be used for a few days.
It may be a bit too late for this guy who's already out of school, but one of the most effective ways I have found to get myself networked was to join a lab at school. Most professors are more than happy to take in cheap, if not free, student help. I started hanging out at a network lab, made friends there, and eventually, when a student-help position opened up, I was chosen. This position later led me to a lot more futher networking, and eventually I scored an internship with my current employer.
Do not waste the time when you are in school, it's probably the only time you can get away with no experience at a job interview. Once you are out of school, your interviewers won't be so kind to you.