[huskerlug] Re: Budget Cuts again
- From: "Alex Strasheim" <alex@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <huskerlug@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 22 Jan 2003 13:03:36 -0600
> And the next few years till 2005? What I'm concerned about is support...
> and I'm fairly sure HLUG is not in a position to provide it. Call me a
> pessimist, but that's what I see from this end.
I'm a returning student, just back on campus, and I don't know much about
how the university provides computing resources and support, so this may be
totally unrealistic, but...
You can check out laptops in the union and (I think) the library. The
laptops connect to the campus's wireless network -- it's a great service.
But there are problems with it -- problems, for the most part, that come
from limitations in windows.
What if we could set up a single machine -- it woulnd't have to be big,
because I doubt many people would use this at first -- and produced a cd
image that would allow people to boot linux on those laptops, and log in to
their own desktop. Something that would let students save bookmarks and
files, and use a decent mail client instead of a web based client. It could
use open office, and provide access to both KDE and Gnome apps.
The idea is to try to provide a better service instead of trying to win
politically by convincing people in a back office to make a change. If we
can't come up with something useful, then support or resources aren't a big
problem -- no one will use it, as we're not taking windows away from anyone.
And if people do like it, then the university would have an incentive to
pick up the project and run with it -- both to provide better service for
the users, and to open up the possibility of climbing out from under the
license fees down the road.
A first attempt at the service would probably be kind of crummy, but that
would be ok -- we wouldn't exaggerate what we're trying to do. But I think
a pretty slick desktop could be created in a relatively short period of
time, built on top of, say, debian, which has a nice package management
system.
Maybe if we run a pilot program in a year or two we'd have our ducks lined
up well enough to be able to offer a real alternative.
It seems to me, though -- I'm sitting in the union now, using my own
laptop -- that the school has done a pretty good job of rolling out
computing services. There's an enormous difference from the way things were
8 years ago, when I was last here, and they do a great job of providing
computing resources to students who don't have their own laptops.
Windows is just a part of that -- they're also supporting OS X, and I'm sure
they have put a lot of thought into the way they admin individual machines,
how they run the infrastructure and networks, and how they provide support.
Changing major pieces of the puzzle, like windows and office, would probably
be extremely unpleasant for the people who are sitting on top of the system.
It seems to me that the kind of advocacy most likely to succeed is an
advocacy that's based on people building cool stuff and donating it to the
school. A web application that will allow kids to download syllabii (if one
doesn't exist -- my profs don't use it if it does), or a desktop system like
the one I described at the top of this, or whatever.
Even this seems problematic to me -- if I were on the university's side of
the table, I'd have concerns about how well things were documented, what
happens if the volunteers stop supporting them, and so forth. It seems to
me that we have to figure out how to do our thing in a way that the
university can live with; telling them to change the way that they're doing
things is probably a losing proposition.
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