On Thu, 2006-04-13 at 10:03 +0100, Darren Jones wrote:
Ian Lynch wrote:
On Thu, 2006-04-13 at 09:03 +0100, Andy Trevor wrote:
I had a long chat with the RM team about three weeks ago. It was still up and running then, however it will only run on Redhat.
Why specifically? It would be interesting to know what the specific dependencies are because if they are simply lack of sensible planning for open standards it needs highlighting. Or is it just its only guaranteed to run on RH?
The installer is generic - reading through it says : ##### not yet properly tested in SUSE or Debian ##### Though it would probably work with some tweaking. There are also other generic instructions in the readme for fedora etc. I don't see a problem with RM only supporting RHEL - There are so many distros around they couldn't support them all.
No, but they could document the likely bits that would be an ssue and QCA could invite third parties to support other distros on a competitive basis. That enhances choice and competition and I do not believe it would be expensive in the context of what this project has cost so far. Again back to whether it would be in RM's interest for that to happen. If they have been paid for the development, they should have no more rights to continued support contracts than anyone else. The main issue is that there is probably no-one at QCA with the experience to know there is a different way of doing it so once again we get a badly specified contract that hands a monopoly on a plate to a single supplier.
I was under the impression there were more general problems and a Windows server was required or a Citrix connection to a windows server. It would be useful to get accurate facts on this for dealings with BECTA.
Correct. A windows terminal server is required to run the KS3 software 'on' linux. The application so far only runs on windows. RM are selling it as cross-platform -it isn't.
Sounds like the worst possible combination of technologies. Maybe we need to start teaching technology in schools not all this ICT capability crap that means no-one actually understands anything. -- Ian Lynch www.theINGOTs.org www.opendocumentfellowship.org www.schoolforge.org.uk