Life sucks alltimes in high school when no one runs on linux

[windowsmac]

So yeah...

No one at my school runs on Linux and there are 76 people and only 15 people have tried it. So while my I.T. person sits around and is stuck in his head that Apple Mac OS X is the best and never considers that different OSes have their purposes for different things they are good at, the rest of the school is lazy and never tries anything different whether it is food, sports, people, classes, fashion, or even places. My I.T. will also soon ban Windows/PCs/any Linux distro after I leave.

I really am depressed at my school except my other 15 friends of mine that do try new things and they have tried Linux.

I am the ONLY person that runs on ANY version of linux but then again one of my teachers runs on FreeBSD. Everybody runs on either:

Apple MacBook/MacBook Pro/iBook/Powerbook running Mac OS X
Apple MacBook/MacBook Pro running Windows
PCs running Windows
PCs running Mac OS X (that was me for a while)

So it dissipoints me that not many people run Linux or have tried it. I am however starting a local L.U.G. to get people interested. Thank God

[SmSpillaz]

Half of our school runs SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop. They told me off for enabling Xgl .... ^_^

Yeah, I think we were bought out by novell. Meh. My laptop runs openSUSE 10.3 :D

[enigma_0Z]

Half of our school runs SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop. They told me off for enabling Xgl .... ^_^

hahahahahahaha. They should have too!

Seriously, even the people in my focused computer degree, I only know one (other than myself of course) that uses Linux on a regular basis as a desktop... It's pretty sad.

[Deciare]

Being bought out by a Linux-friendly company is more of a good thing than a bad thing, I think. ^_^

When I was in college, one of the only teachers who cared about Linux liked to show it off in his class. Unfortunately, the college was running an old version of SuSE--even for that time--and it showed off KDE 2's inadequacies in a time when KDE 3 was becoming mainstream. <.<

They also had fairly broken and way too restrictive Linux setups (5 MB disk quota?!) in their dual-boot machines, so I could hardly do anything sensible with them. It was such a shame... The college could have been such a better environment for fostering interest in Linux, especially since they had lots of Linux servers and workstations. But they had to make Linux seem like such a thoroughly hostile environment to work in...

[SmSpillaz]

They also had fairly broken and way too restrictive Linux setups (5 MB disk quota?!)


pffftt.... LOL. How old school was that *no pun intended....*

[windowsmac]

I found this on youtube it explains my school perfectly

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oc4oP_ITqMc

[Sephoroth]

The vast majority of students at my school are on PC's (though there is a significant portion who enjoy using OSX as well). All school owned computers (desktops and laptops) are Macs (if they are really old/crappy then OS9, but most on OSX) with the exception of a computer lab.

[Deciare]

I wish the schools I went to had good enough taste to get more than just Windows PCs. As far as the material that was being taught, there was little that couldn't have been demonstrated and done just as well on a Mac. And I'd have access to a familiar command line interface, too, as a bonus. ^_^

Having fewer Windows PCs would also have helped with the problem that games and other recreational software or malware were running rampant in the computer labs. It was so bad that the college has to invest in a security solution that automatically restores a clean install disk image (plus a wide assortment of software that is used or taught by the faculty) every time a computer boots up to ensure that it's usable and free from pointless distractions for people who log in to work.

My college totally downplayed the competence of non-Windows OSes by installing very old, very crippled versions of alternative OSes. :(

And there were some students running Windows-equipped laptops, too. I wish I had a laptop back then. I would've shown them how computing was done right.

[darkmagus]

At my old school there were just a person who runs Linux, me :)

Now, I have also 2 other friends running Linux (one of them runs just Linux now). Bul we all already leave school.

So I think that today nobody there runs Linux.. We are just working on that ^^

ps.: I'm from Brazil, and there is a lot of interesting projects about the use of Free and Open Source Software, but it still don't affect the schools at all.
Sorry for English too :)

[JonathanE]

I've never met anybody irl (in real life) that use Linux.

[Deciare]

I've never met anybody irl (in real life) that use Linux.
Same here. Whenever I meet anyone running Linux, I'm usually responsible. :D Sadly, even those people are people I met online.

Isn't it ironic that the image in your signature omits the apostrophe in "Don't" even though the rest of it speaks of good grammar?

[SmSpillaz]

I have very many friends who use linux. And me and them used linux before we even knew each other. I also didn't know their online contact details :D (I do now however :D)

[Deciare]

You're so lucky! Australia's sounding like a better country already. :p

Meeting a Linux user IRL who I've never seen or heard of before would be... Pretty awkward for both of us, I think, due to a possible sudden obligation to stay in touch. :p But it could be fun!

[delfick]

You're so lucky! Australia's sounding like a better country already. :p

of course it is :D

[JonathanE]

Isn't it ironic that the image in your signature omits the apostrophe in "Don't" even though the rest of it speaks of good grammar?

Haha! Yes it is. My grammar is terrible, but i really dislike "l33t sp33k". Anyway, i didn't make that signature. I found it on another forum.

[fldc]

I grew up in a small city of 8000 people, many of my friends and acquaintances also started using linux in the early 00, and this was not all your typical nerds, regular people. I don't know, maybe it's more common here in Sweden? :D The schools though, all Windows or DOS at that time.

[AdmiralTriggerHappy]

of course it is :D

Yeah it sure is, although your on the wrong side of the Country Delflick, the East coast is soo much better.

When I was in high school I was running Mandrake 8 (I started using Linux back in the days Red Hat 5.2 and Caldera 2.3 (before they became SCO and became evil))
I still ran windows most of the time because Linux was still pretty crap for a lot of Desktop apps, this was before OpenOffice was big.
However I did get the IT Teacher/Network Admin (who also happens to be my father) to setup a Linux firewall and begin to educate the students about Linux

After I finished grade 12 I went back and set them up a nice Linux Filtering system and firewall
Now the main computer lab is setup to dual boot with Ubuntu and Windows XP
Some of the students really like Ubuntu too and are using it at home.
They don't run Compiz however as they don't have 3D capabilities, they only Celeron 1.7s but are likely to be replaced with 20" iMacs before next year.
If that happens and I'm still around when they get them (I return to NSW and back to full time study next year so I'll have more time spend on forums like this and not at work) I'll have to setup Boot camp to dual boot them with Linux for them.

But this a private school who has an Open Minded IT teacher (I am biased as he is my father, but its still true) and not some school with teacher who got stuck with the job and hasn't really got any clue about anything IT

[delfick]

Yeah it sure is, although your on the wrong side of the Country Delflick, the East coast is soo much better.

lol

what a lie :D

(not that I've actually been there though :p)

When I was in high school I was running Mandrake 8 (I started using Linux back in the days Red Hat 5.2 and Caldera 2.3 (before they became SCO and became evil))
I still ran windows most of the time because Linux was still pretty crap for a lot of Desktop apps, this was before OpenOffice was big.
However I did get the IT Teacher/Network Admin (who also happens to be my father) to setup a Linux firewall and begin to educate the students about Linux

After I finished grade 12 I went back and set them up a nice Linux Filtering system and firewall
Now the main computer lab is setup to dual boot with Ubuntu and Windows XP
Some of the students really like Ubuntu too and are using it at home.
They don't run Compiz however as they don't have 3D capabilities, they only Celeron 1.7s but are likely to be replaced with 20" iMacs before next year.
If that happens and I'm still around when they get them (I return to NSW and back to full time study next year so I'll have more time spend on forums like this and not at work) I'll have to setup Boot camp to dual boot them with Linux for them.

But this a private school who has an Open Minded IT teacher (I am biased as he is my father, but its still true) and not some school with teacher who got stuck with the job and hasn't really got any clue about anything IT

cool :D

if only it was like that everywhere...

then we'd have an "education revolution" :D
(as far as IT goes anyways)

[Forlong]

Just be happy that you're in school and use Linux already. When I was in school I didn't even know Linux existed, LOL

And yeah... all the people in real life I know running Linux are from our local Ubuntu-LUG.

Since I got my Thinkpad I got some people interested in Linux, though.
The notebook came just in time, since I had to do lots of lectures lately where I used OOo impress and since I have Compiz' screensaver set to initiate after one minute of idle, I got many oohs and ahs when talking. :D

One of my (female) fellow student I had to do one lecture with, actually asked what I was running, when we did the presentation together. Guess what she responded... "what's Linux?" :rolleyes: LOL
But she soon bragged about how cool it is to her boyfriend. Guess what she like the most... snow. :D

Anyway... the thing that's bugging me most is that they are using Windows NT on our computers in university. But at least they have all Firefox installed. Anytime I use 'em I delete the IE desktop-shortcuts :D

[delfick]

The notebook came just in time, since I had to do lots of lectures lately where I used OOo impress and since I have Compiz' screensaver set to initiate after one minute of idle, I got many oohs and ahs when talking. :D

nice ! :D

Anyway... the thing that's bugging me most is that they are using Windows NT on our computers in university. But at least they have all Firefox installed. Anytime I use 'em I delete the IE desktop-shortcuts :D

lol

well done :D

[SmSpillaz]

Half of our school runs SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop. They told me off for enabling Xgl .... ^_^

Yeah, I think we were bought out by novell. Meh. My laptop runs openSUSE 10.3 :D

Oops scrap that. Our school just appointed the Microsoft MVP for Learning Services.

Wonder if those computers will go to vista....

I hope not....

[()va|_]

Sabotage them if they do :)

[Deciare]

Oops scrap that. Our school just appointed the Microsoft MVP for Learning Services.

Wonder if those computers will go to vista....

I hope not....
That doesn't sound good. For what responsibility did this Microsoft MVP become appointed?

[delfick]

Sabotage them if they do :)

hmmm, using your latest avatar ?? :D

http://forum.compiz-fusion.org/image.php?u=2402&dateline=1197080018 + http://www.nvouspc.com/adminsite/attach/windows_vista_002-igm.jpg = http://www.theshywriter.com/smiley.jpg

[SmSpillaz]

That doesn't sound good. For what responsibility did this Microsoft MVP become appointed?

... Head of IT ...

Dunno if much is going to happen though, maybe he is one of the 'good guys' at Microsoft. (Yes, gigantic non-democratic totalitarian evil companies do sport the occasionally angel ;-))

[()va|_]

Have u ever met a good ms guy ? :)

Good as in ''im not a blind net developer'' kinda of view ? :)

I didn't, maybe they are not here .. where i live.
Do they exist ?

[Deciare]

I've never met anyone from Microsoft. :p

It wouldn't surprise me if Microsoft's employees and MVPs are nice people at heart, but have to "just do their job" like most other people. :/

I hope this IT guy's job doesn't involve evangelising all things Microsoft.

[some-guy]

I've never met anyone from Microsoft. :p
I met a person who was about to become a M$ employee...

[Oasisgames]

Most of the computers at my school are Pentium Pros with Windows 95, but a few of those have 98. The remaining machines are low-end (as in, at time of purchase they still sucked) and run XP. We also have a few Macs, which I prefer because they're just sooo much faster.
The worst part of it is that not a single Windows machine in the school is running at the correct resolution. They are all set for 800x600 when the monitors support 1024x768 or higher. (LCDs in our "media center" support 1280x1024 but are set to 1024x768)
It hurts my eyes when I stare at an improperly sized LCD.

[Deciare]

The worst part of it is that not a single Windows machine in the school is running at the correct resolution. They are all set for 800x600 when the monitors support 1024x768 or higher. (LCDs in our "media center" support 1280x1024 but are set to 1024x768)
It hurts my eyes when I stare at an improperly sized LCD.
My college was like that. XRandR didn't exist back then, so there was no way to change resolution or refresh rates without superuser privileges, and of course students didn't have superuser privileges. So whereas the Windows half of the dual-boot machines got pretty 1280X1024 displays at 85 Hz, the Linux half of those same machines were stuck with an off-centre 1024x768 display at a painful 60 Hz. -_- You'd think they were putting Linux on those computers to make people appreciate what Windows had to offer, not the other way around.

[s0l1dsnak3123]

my head of IT actually thought that linux was a virus when I asked her if she used it. She quickly withdrew her statement, however, when I showed her the screenshot on the main page of the wiki lol.


She still hates me because I know more about computers than her :D

[some-guy]

LOL, that's hilarious :D

[Fyda]

While I wasn't a Linux user until after I started university, I can sympathise with the OP.

I am sadly familiar with how Windows is deployed in a school environment, having had to use out-of-date Windows 98 boxes to learn programming (only in QuickBasic, Pascal and Delphi 7 -- not even C or Java) in high school.

I am familiar with the omnipresent Deep Freeze icon sitting in the system tray. I am familiar with extremely asinine restrictions imposed via specific registry keys. In fact, because the programming assignments were so mindnumbingly dull and simple, I spent most of class time reading documentation online to learn how to do more interesting things... like modify registry key values. I eventually wrote a little app using the provided Delphi 7 to unset all of the security lockdown registry keys.

And that wasn't because I wanted to install games, or infect machines with viruses, or do anything malicious and stupid like that. That was because I was really sick of being unable to browse to arbitrary locations; trying to enter anything in a location field would bring up an error about the action being disabled by an administrator. This happened even when the specified path was a location to which I did have read and write access.

Oh, and I couldn't open new browser windows with Ctrl+N, either; that, too, was a disabled action.

Basically, achieving "security" on these Windows workstations was indistinguishable from making them extremely user-unfriendly and painful to work with. If I had come home one day and found my home computer restricted like this, I would have immediately seen it as an act of malware.

Looking back on all of that, I am pretty dead certain that the school's security issues would have been handled in a far superior way using Linux. With ext3, we'd have had real file permissions, not just sloppy 3rd-party crapware that only makes it more annoying to try and access certain directories/files. And, with the multi-user design of Linux, we could have had a whole room of workstations logged in on one master server, instead of 30 isolated PCs each running from a "rollback" disk image ghost re-written during bootup (which, by the way, more dedicated crackers were able to bypass and disable), each running (more or less) as an administrator, each requiring such complex and failure-prone measures to lock it down.

And we might actually have been able to learn something about how computers work, if we'd been using an OS that exposed more parts of the underlying components. Instead, we were forced to work in an OS that hid pretty much everything from us, and we were taught nothing but high-level languages, sheltered from actual computer science, aware only of variables and boolean expressions and strings and integers, and functions containing those things. Oh, and making graphical interfaces for these silly programs. In fact, not even our source code was checked, most of the time; the teacher only collected the compiled binaries, running them to see if the buttons worked. Imagine the sloppy coding practices that flourished under such conditions.

Anyway.

It kills me to see my university's public Web access terminals running Windows 98 as well, because they have the same aforementioned restrictions in place. They're actually even worse: the taskbars are completely blank, with no system tray, no window list, no Start button.

Consider the implications of not having a window list: people minimize a window, don't see it in the taskbar, and think it has been closed. And indeed, when I walked up to one of these machines and pressed Alt+Tab, I was able to restore at least 30 Internet Explorer windows, many of them still logged in to personal accounts on Hotmail, Facebook and the like. I can't be the only person who has discovered this. And I don't trust the others to all have the decency not to exploit it.

I don't see why Linux couldn't be used for these scenarios. Why is it that Linux remains something only known and accessible, conventionally speaking, to Computer Science students, or "geeks"/"nerds"? What stops the IT managers at places like libraries and universities from seeing Linux for its appropriateness to their given tasks, and applying it thusly?

I am not pushing for mass adoption of Linux on every single computer in existence. I just want to see it used in places where it would really be a better choice.

... I suppose I should wrap up this reply. I wasn't expecting it to become so lengthy.

It isn't that I pathologically hate Microsoft and Windows; I am sure they can serve some users well. But seeing them so grossly contorted to to fit into use cases for which they were not designed -- that is irksome, and truly disappointing.

[Deciare]

... I wish I'd thought of writing my own programs to work around the unreasonable security restrictions set by the schools I attended. It would certainly have been a learning experience beyond the introductory kind offered by the assignments I was supposed to complete. (Not that seeing programming teachers go OMG WOW every time they mark my work isn't nice, but learning how to do something actually useful and technical is nice too. :D)

As shown by my own experience with Linux workstations at college, though, Linux boxes secured by paranoid administrators who aren't sure what they're doing can be just as user-hostile as over-protected Windows boxes. Low display resolutions, painful CRT flicker, unreasonable memory and disk quotas, misconfigured mouse drivers, incomplete/minimal/obsolete versions of the software I need to test my work, and slow (because every Linux workstation in the whole college referred to a single master server). It's harder to circumvent those limitations than in Windows, to boot.

It's unfortunate to see that so many schools hold protecting themselves from the students in higher regard than teaching students what they came to learn.

[delfick]

In my high school, their version of an IT scholarship was teaching us microsoft word.....

the fun.......

fortunately in the last year of my scholarship they started to teach macromedia flash, which was quite an improvement....

still not that useful really, but better than microsoft word :D

[some-guy]

I was 10 when I started using linux, that was three years ago...
and it was by force too since I used windows too much ;)
the only place I've actually seen linux in (besides my house ;)) was in a really tiny library...

[Deciare]

In my high school, their version of an IT scholarship was teaching us microsoft word.....

the fun.......

fortunately in the last year of my scholarship they started to teach macromedia flash, which was quite an improvement....

still not that useful really, but better than microsoft word :D
I don't see how Microsoft Word even relates to the IT industry. Maybe they're preparing you for all the reports you'll be expected to write as a CTO? :p

Macromedia Flash is good, though. Just look at all the good your flashbsm icons did for the wiki. :D (Even though, technically, nothing about those icons had to do with Flash. :p)

[delfick]

lol

and I wasn't even the one who did those icons.

that was Franzrogar's work, wasn't it ?

As for microsoft word, who knows what that was about, worst program to have a syllabus centred around

:p

[s0l1dsnak3123]

In my high school, their version of an IT scholarship was teaching us microsoft word.....

the fun.......

fortunately in the last year of my scholarship they started to teach macromedia flash, which was quite an improvement....

still not that useful really, but better than microsoft word :D


that's what im doing right now... except i *lol* surpassed that and im now on advanced higher M$ Excel ( I'm so proud of myself :) )

[delfick]

lol

.......... :D

[Sephoroth]

Gasp! You've skipped MS power point? In any case, I know one person who runs Fedora Core and I've been trying to convert a few but that hasn't been very successful yet (Unfortunately the one who would/wanted to run it couldn't). I guess there are a few more people who are aware of it atleast XD.

[Deciare]

that's what im doing right now... except i *lol* surpassed that and im now on advanced higher M$ Excel ( I'm so proud of myself :) )
At my college, every student had to take a course covering MS Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, but they were too cheap to actually give us Word, Excel, and PowerPoint to work with, so they gave us mock-ups of the 3 programs from an interactive teach-yourself CD thing. Clicking on anything other than what you were supposed to didn't even work. XD

Easiest course ever. :D

[delfick]

At my college, every student had to take a course covering MS Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, but they were too cheap to actually give us Word, Excel, and PowerPoint to work with, so they gave us mock-ups of the 3 programs from an interactive teach-yourself CD thing. Clicking on anything other than what you were supposed to didn't even work. XD

Easiest course ever. :D

lol

did the teachers realise what a waste of time that is? :D

[maciekwpl]

rofl. And Poland has got Eu dotaions which cover most (if not all) the price of computer sets and XP with office 2003 (such a waste of money... they could use OO instead...)
But polish people don't mind, it's not their money, it's money of EU :D

[enigma_0Z]

At my college, every student had to take a course covering MS Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, but they were too cheap to actually give us Word, Excel, and PowerPoint to work with, so they gave us mock-ups of the 3 programs from an interactive teach-yourself CD thing. Clicking on anything other than what you were supposed to didn't even work. XD

Easiest course ever. :D

LOL. The tests for my (gasp) Access class were like that too.

Absolutely pointless.