[Discuss] UVic's new portal now available to students, unless they use Firefox

[pw]

stephen hawkes wrote:
> pw wrote:
> 
>> stephen hawkes wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> Good point. However it would be a step in the correct direction. I am 
>>> definitely not going to switch which distro I run so I can run UVic's 
>>> official distro (if that were to happen anyhow, huge if there). 
>>> Having an official linux distro would mean that sites would have to 
>>> run with something other than IE. I don't think I would need OS 
>>> specific support from a help desk anyhow, but it gives an option to 
>>> students that want to run an up-to-date OS that is free. It would 
>>> also mean that I wouldn't get ignored because of the OS I run when my 
>>> problems are not OS related.
>>
>>
>> The reason universities have thier own distro is to allow them to 
>> provide support to newbies. They just pick one distro as a standard
>> so that when people ask for assistance the tech can say, "go to
>> widget A and press button B...etc.".
>> They'd most likely select RedHat, although debian/ubuntu could
>> squeek in.
>>
>> Peter
>>
> 
> Redhat would have been my first guess to until I heard of all the 
> problems they had with licensing. Plus the ridiculous cost (yes you can 
> run fedora for free, but I'm assuming they wanted the support). To try 
> and describe it quick, the commercial licensing has three levels: 
> desktop, workstation and server. The computers in question would be 
> workstations (not desktops since people remote login). Uvic wanted 
> educational licensing, but that scheme only has two levels, desktop and 
> server. Anyhow, something happened along the lines iirc that they had 
> the workstation version installed an updating, and even with the 
> educational licenses, then updates stopped working and Red Hat said that 
> it wasn't updating because the computers weren't desktops, they should 
> be licensed as servers.. something along those lines. Don't take it 
> verbatim as I don't really remeber the conversation very well, what I do 
> remember is the tone, and they had a rough time with that one linux lab. 
> Things were much smoother as solaris.
> 
> It'll be interesting to see what happens in the new building (bring back 
> AIX!! j/k).


The only reason I mention RedHat is that many North American scientific
apps tend to refer to RedHat as thier linux operating base and provide
RPMs only for that platform. Aside from that universities should be
going ubuntu and not expecting desktop support from the vendor, but
support from the local user base. That's cheaper anyway.

For server stuff, obviously they want some contracted ongoing support.
But, again, expecting this from a vendor is a bit boozy. They'd be
better off with a local linux contractor(s) that can be called in.

Peter