[seul-edu] Some Random Thoughts

[Ed Lawson <elawson@lawson-philpot.com>]

This list has been quite active and the proposed developments sound very exciting.  I just need to determine how I can contribute.  In the meantime, a few random thoughts:

1.  One post talked of winning the "war" between Mac and WinTel.  Was there a "war"?  If so, why and to what end?  Does choice always mean there is a "war" and the only outcome is a dominating if not exclusive "winner"?  And who "won"?  Upon reflection I doubt one would conclude it was either users or schools.  I find it less than appealing when Linux advocates constantly position advocacy as a fight or war and an essential element is disparaging comments of MS and Windows.  I don't believe this is all that effective as a tactic.  After all you are telling most people that what they use and find useable is junk and only idiots use it.  Don't make many friends or receptive listeners that way.

2.	This past week I gave a presentation about Squid and related topics to educators at a conference.  It went well, but small group as late in the day.  At the end someone asked the following questions:

		Does it work?  Does it really work and is it reliable?
		Can a reasonably trained sysadmin handle it?
		Isn't Unix/Linux hard and take a "rocket scientist" to support?

I said no and mentioned the config files were in plain english with many comment sections and logical.
I then showed a sample config file for squidGguard which is really quite sraightforward and explained the sections.  His eyes glazed over.  I realized there was an immediate disconect because the text file was a foreign object and it looked complex and mysterious.  A GUI admin screen, to which he was accustomed, was a very friendly place to him simply because that is what he knows.  The amount of knowledge and judgement is the same to competently admin anything regardles of the admin tools, but it seems much work needs to be done to explain that config files are not horrible, complex monsters.  When I picked up my first Liux book and looked at the config file examples I was fearful of what it would take to construct them all.  I did not know until I installed it that they are all made up and you only need to tweak them.  

My point is you need to take that perception into account.  There are many advantages to the Linux system of config files and they should be seen as advantages not the black art.

What surprised me was a woman came up later and said her district used Squid, etc. and they were very pleased with it. As expected, she said it just works and works and works.  A parent had originally set it up, but now they paid someone for support.  She said they preferred to pay for support rather than use voluteers because they wanted to know someone was contractually obligated to show up and fix things.

3.	Rather than a whole distro, perhaps a CD which contains a selection of important apps and detailed, practical instructions on configuring them for a school setting.  If setting up Samba, Apache, Squid and related apps could be well documented, then it would give some a greater sense of comfort in trying them out.

My .02

Ed Lawson