[Fwd: Re: [Fwd: Re: [seul-edu] RE: [why schools don't adopt OSS]]]

[Doug Loss <drloss@home.com>]

owner-seul-edu@seul.org wrote:

> From: Jim Thomas <jthomas@bittware.com>
> To: seul-edu@seul.org
> Subject: Re: [Fwd: Re: [seul-edu] RE: [why schools don't adopt OSS]]
>
> Roger Dingledine wrote:
> >
> > On Tue, Nov 27, 2001 at 10:45:13AM +0000, Jim Thomas wrote:
> > > I still think the community needs to come out with an Education
> > > Distribution to ease installation.  As I see it, there are three types
> > > of installations required in an edu environment: student machines, staff
> > > machines, and servers.  When you install RedHat, it prompts for the type
> > > of installation and suggests Workstation, Server, etc.  This doesn't
> > > make sense for an edu distro.
> >
> > There are a number of problems with doing a separate distribution, not
> > least of which is that we need to keep up with new versions of everything
> > plus security, ensure that QA is good, etc. With a separate distribution,
> > we need to duplicate all the work that Red Hat and other companies do,
> > *AND* do the work of maintaining good educational packages.
>
> Or ideally, RedHat would do this themselves.  The reason I haven't done
> it myself is because it's a LOT of work and I don't have that kind of
> time.  Probably no one does.
>
> >
> > I think steps 1 through 8 below don't need to be solved by having a
> > separate distribution. I think they can be solved wonderfully by having a
> > repository of packages which are well-built (eg have correct dependencies)
> > and come with all the packages they depend on.
>
> Perhaps you're right.
>
> > > I have installed Linux at a private school, and the effort has largely
> > > been successful.  Linux has still not achieved acceptance by the staff,
> > > but I'm still working on that.  I'd like to introduce linux to other
> > > schools too, but managing the one I'm involved with now still requires a
> > > huge committment on my part (and I'm just a volunteer).
> >
> > Does that mean that you did the above steps for your school?
>
> Yes, but I gave up on several of the apps since I felt I was entering an
> infinite loop at times.
> > Do you
> > still have the pile of educational packages that you found and used?
>
> Yes, but I didn't take adequate notes on which packages were required
> for what.  Also, most of my work is based on RH6.2 which is now
> ancient.  Over the summer we installed RH7.1 on a couple of boxes with
> plans to upgrade the whole lab (20 PC's), but KDE 2 had such dismal
> performance on our aging HW that we backed out.  I had intended to use
> KOffice so we could avoid the 2 minutes it takes to launch StarOffice
> (on our HW), but it took 3 minutes to log in with KDE2!  I also saw a
> few stability problems and decided it would be safer to stick with
> RH6.2.  Maybe this summer I'll give 7.2 a spin.
>
> > Can I have them, so we can start making them available to other people
> > and save them some time?
>
> I'll have to do a bit of research to sift through the chaf.  I keep all
> the rpms I downloaded in one place, and this includes the ones I
> downloaded which did not satisfy the dependency I was after.
>
> >
> > You can ftp them to ftp://ftp.seul.org/pub/seul/incoming/edu/ or let me
> > know if there's a more convenient way.
>
> I'll try to work on this soon.
>
> >
> > I think a major step in solving the problem is to have them all sitting
> > in one convenient place. Then down the road distributions might choose
> > to include them, thus saving us the work of needing to do that.
> >
> > --Roger
>
> --
> Jim Thomas      **    Principal Applications Engineer ** Bittware, Inc
> 703.779.7770    **    jthomas@bittware.com **  http://www.bittware.com
> The secret to enjoying your job is to have a hobby that is even worse.
>  - Calvin's dad

--
Doug Loss                 Always do right.  This
Data Network Coordinator  will gratify some people
Bloomsburg University     and astonish the rest.
dloss@bloomu.edu                Mark Twain