Rodney and All, Having spent some twelve years with OSS in general and Linux in particular, your limitation due to tar.gz is well understood. Further, in a previous life I worked for a firm called WICAT in Utah. They started out as a think tank for educators to investigate how computers could help people learn (you might now realize how many years ago that was). They then blossomed into a for-profit company that sold computers, networks, and curriculum to schools. I started a Linux Users Group of Xerox (LUGX) ten years ago and this merry band has loaded and re-loaded countless versions of countless distros. It is not surprising that many users of Linux have found themselves in RPM hell and apt-get prison from time to time. There are several robust tools that would be a Godsend for Linux users all over the place. My opinion largely circles around using Linux as sadly, I am not a programmer (yet). I use SuSE at home and Ubuntu as well. I have a Fedora Core 6 box at work and a pure Debian server for some tools I need. So, I have had to update RPMs and .DEB files as well and I feel I am pretty conversant with each. There does not seem to be a free lunch in this arena either. But, I digress. Package Management is a challenge that has roots it the earliest programs. Yum and apt-get are phenomenally better now than in previous years but they are still not perfect. Here is what I have seen that might make Linux (any type) a lot easier to maintain. There seems to be an absolute lack of hardware discovery/rediscovery tools that are available after a Linux installation. There are a proliferation of tool used during install to find and configure all kinds of hardware, but little that one could use when they replaced a video card for example. The distros that strive to keep their disk set down to one CD are frequently guilty of "dropping things off the back of the cart" to keep it under 700MB. Some have mitigated this risk by making net install ISOs to allow the base to be loaded locally, and then point to the giant repository for the other gigabytes of code. The YUM or apt-get models may be just the thing for educational institutions as it might allow schools by state or district to have an "approved" image from which to install. Then, program upgrades can be done in a controlled and incremental manner at the pace the organization can handle. I have been preaching the OSS gospel here at Xerox for a long time now and we are making progress. The last bastion for proprietary software is in the Production Service Group where Solaris is still used. Believe it or not, the ./configure and make model is designed to let users build exactly the program they need for their application. Unfortunately, the application needs to be in a very specific state before the code can be made whole. It is chicken and egg all the way. Good Luck to all you that are trying to move schools and universities into the free zone of Open Source. School monies are better spent elsewhere when the operating systems and apps are free. Regards, Ralph Rodney Donovan wrote:
Hello Jason
I work at a university, while also trying to finish up my PhD. My
research for this summer is to do a thin client using openSuSE. It has been a real education just working with the GNU/Linux, SuSE, and the openSuSE communities, not to mention open source software (OSS). I too am waiting for the education software to debut with 10.3 cuz my dissertation for the fall is doing a virtual school district using only OSS. That is going to be a blast!
For Programmers!
One thing that limits OSS is the use of tar.gz. Many are made in general
and you have to use configure and make. This is when you find out that you also need to load other libraries, or your distro is not putting files where the downloaded software can find them. I think we need to migrate to distro RPM's. It would surely take the headache out of using this software.
Rod Donovan Systems Support Specialist II Texas A&M University Corpus Christi College of Education Early Childhood Development Center 361-825-3080 rodney.donovan@tamucc.edu
On Tuesday 26 June 2007 23:51, Jason Grizzle wrote:
Greetings,
My name is Jason Grizzle, and I'm an instructional technology specialist with Jackson County Schools in Georgia (USA). I'm excited about the educational focus for open suse. As a system, we're looking to migrate to SLED in (probably) 2-3 years for our Windows machines. My job function is tech. integration and teacher training, and I'm very interested in beta testing or developing documentation for you. I'm not a programmer, but I can develop web training, documents, and video tutorials.
Please let me know how I can help you in your endeavors. Jason
Jason Grizzle Instructional Technology West Jackson Middle School 400 Gumsprings Church Rd. Jefferson, GA 30549 (mobile) 706-410-5950 (fax) 706-824-1969
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