[Nottingham] Running Ubuntu at Nottingham Uni

[ForkBombFluf]

On Tue, 22 May 2012, Martin wrote:

> On 22/05/12 13:26, ForkBombFluf wrote:
>> Hi guys, sorry I'm a bit late to the party, but just got back to work
>> this morning, after being on hols in Berlin--
>
> Hey Stef, good you're around. Hope you had fun :-)

Yeah, we had a good time.  And just to make you feel old, they have an 
Asus Eee 700 series netbook in the Museum of Communication.  :-)

I wonder if they have one at Bletchley park yet?  We'd be interested in 
that trip too, by the way, if it's at all still in the pipeline.

>> Upgrading in Linux shouldn't harm or rearrange anything in your
>> bootloader (although the same can't always be said for Windows
>> installations!) so moving to a newer long term support version should be
>> good.  I think Barry's just advised a fresh install rather than an in
>> place upgrade though, and I have to admit I'm curious what sort of
>> issues he's encountered with upgrading.
>
> As in, if you must install Windows, install it first as in the Windows
> world, "nothing else exists"...

I'd say that's a fair asessment. Or at the very least, Microsoft would 
rather like you to continue believing that nothing else exists!  Reminds 
me a bit of some of the religious organizations where I grew up, but i 
digress...

> The only upgrade problems I've seen is when you run out of disk space
> during the upgrade, or when you've installed exotica from the Ubuntu
> Multiverse that is then not supported in the next version...

Ewwwwwwww.  But then again, when has running out of space on *any* OS 
during an upgrade *ever* resulted in something good? (Other than perhaps 
Vista or ME installs, where one might hypothosize that installation 
failure is actually the kinder course of action, thus putting the user out 
of his or her misery at the outset.)

>> The only distro that is remotely "standard" in IS terms in the
>> University is CentOS, and that's mostly because Dave Parkin (the IS
>> support person in Maths and Physics) has put the most effort into
>
> I like the PXE boot. Nice touch and good effort.

Yes, rather good, isn't it!?  If only he could have explained how to start 
the PXE boot through the medium of interpretive dance, rather than the 
usual stauch command to press F12. (Simon Cowell, eat your heart out.)

> Mmmm... Must get Skeptical some time ;-)

Apparently experiments show that drinking alcohol tends to make one 
temporarily more conservative.  In the Mythbusters spirit of making 
experiments "go up to 11", I believe we need a Dutch group to trial 
"Skeptics in the Coffee Shop" for a proper confirmation of findings!

Cheers,

-Stef