[Novalug] Student Computer

[John B. Holmblad]

Dan,

you could become one of those annoying "activist" parents and write a 
letter to the university President cc their CFO and the student 
newspaper and explain, in these cash strapped times how the university 
could save money by supporting desktop LInux. You  will need some hard 
numbers however but I would expect that such numbers are readily 
available from Novell, Redhat, etc. I have to believe that their 
marketing teams are already making these kinds of financial arguments in 
pursuit of sales to the academic market.

In fact a well researched analysis of the costs and benefits of 
supporting vs not supporting desktop Linux in the higher education 
market could be a good Novalug meeting topic once the analysis was 
completed.


Another alternative is to suggest that the university offer a daily 
image based backup service for users of Microsoft Windows and charge a 
monthly fee for that service so that if a student's PC gets hosed then 
they lose at most one day of work and have a means to rapidly recover 
their system by restoring from the backup.  This would, of course, 
represent a revenue opportunity for the university so I could see the 
wily CFO thinking, "hmmm, if the students go with Microsoft Windows then 
this service will sell like hotcakes, but if they use LInux, it will be 
superfulous".


Best Regards,

 

John Holmblad

 

Televerage International

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Dan Arico wrote:
> When my daughter headed off to Notre Dame, I got her a laptop - a T60 running 
> XP. Yesterday, it got trashed by a virus for the second time this semester.
>
> There's an obvious solution to this problem - run Linux. The snag is she's not 
> able to do the administration on the computer and the school's OIT doesn't 
> support Linux.
>
> My other option is to get her a Mac.
>
> Any suggestions?
>
> Dan
>
>   
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