David P James wrote: > > http://www.kegel.com/linux/edu/ > > (1) I don't know how or if this fits, but for what it is worth the > department of economics here at Queen's runs on Debian servers, and has > some Debian-based workstations available for use by grad students and > faculty. However, the workstations used by undergrad students (and > many/most grad students) are all Windows-based. The difficulty, I guess, > is that to have the workstations of undergrads being linux-based would > entail some additional amount of support that the department really > can't provide, even though I am sure they would like to be able to.
Pity -- but that's the core point: I'm after evidence of universities that not only use Linux internally, but *support users who use Linux*. > Just > training students to mount and unmount a floppy for instance, as we use > floppies for data storage quite a bit. Not a big task, but nevertheless, > who is going to do it? Yep, that's real. I'm rather hoping that supermount and/or the common desktops make the floppy/cdrom mounting issue go away. Other similar training issues won't go away, and we really do need good free online training for Linux. FWIW, Element K offers a free Linux training thingy online (I haven't tried it): http://www.elementk.com/e-learning/htm/freecourses.asp Maybe more free online training will appear before too long. There's a fair bit of interest in free courseware out there; I'm running phptest myself. > and, particularly worth reading, > http://qed.econ.queensu.ca/pub/computer/advice.htm Not bad. > (2) In the second paragraph under the heading "Linux as an aid in the > fight against Software Piracy" we see the following line: > > "Universities could avoid that problem by requiring the use of free Open > Source software..." > > To me, the notion of "requiring" the use of "free" software is > practically a contradiction in terms, and most definitely a > contradiction in philosophy. A better way to go about it would be > requiring adherence to open standards as much as is practicable. Then > students would be free to choose between open source or commercial > software as they saw fit. I'll try to strike a better note. Thanks, Dan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
