[Nottingham] Running Ubuntu at Nottingham Uni

[Louise Brown]

I did, in the end, get a reply yesterday with a possible solution and an offer to come and take a look at it.  By that time I'd sorted it out myself though!

Going to forget about it until Monday anyway as I'm off to FLOSSIE 2012 tomorrow, presenting about TexGen on Saturday.  Hopefully encourage a few more women to get involved in open source :)

Louise

From: nottingham-bounces at mailman.lug.org.uk [mailto:nottingham-bounces at mailman.lug.org.uk] On Behalf Of Cat Clarkson
Sent: 24 May 2012 13:58
To: Notts GNU/Linux Users Group
Subject: Re: [Nottingham] Running Ubuntu at Nottingham Uni


I do have to be honest, when i had a moan i did get offered VM software to install linux myself on, even though i couldnt have a dual boot, so at least my request was accomodated in a way.

It isnt all bad, and there are some proper gem employees in IT - mike in engineering is fab and doesnt seem to mind the odd direct email :)
On May 24, 2012 1:07 PM, "ForkBombFluf" <fluf at freeshell.org<mailto:fluf at freeshell.org>> wrote:
On Tue, 22 May 2012, Louise Brown wrote:
Hi,

They're not overenthusiastic about it but they set up my machine with Windows and Ubuntu.  What they say is that they don't support Linux (maybe that explains the lack of response to my query).  I think if you've a good reason they'll do it for you.  In my case I'm running a cross-platform open source project so I have to know that the software builds in Linux before I release it.

Hi Louise, (& Cat too!),

No, most won't be overenthusiastic, unfortunately, but that's because the majority are employed for their Windows proficiency, rather than familiarity with Linux. The journey into the less-known is a lot more effort when there's already a queue full of more familiar (read: easier to do) jobs to complete.

I checked this morning, and the official word is that Linux is indeed "unsupported" in the eyes of Information Services.  That is not to say you *can't* get support for it, though, just that there are no official SLA's in place for it, so it becomes very much hit and miss depending upon whose lap the job falls into, how much they know about it, and how much time they have to dedicate to it at that moment.

There is certainly no moratorium on running Linux at the University. Many people like yourself require it for multi-platform software development or to run applications which simply don't exist for Windows. There are certainly aspects of University research that just couldn't function without it, especially (and not surprisingly) in the science and engineering arenas!

There is talk of developing some sort of framework for "official" support of OS's other than Microsoft Windows within IS, but progress is somewhat slow and hindered by the emergence of some very diverse ideas about how it should all be managed, and who by.

Different departments have different needs, so the "one size fits all" concept often doesn't work out in reality quite the way management had envisioned it, nor quite in the way the vendors (in the case of externally purchased solutions, such as storage, printing, etc.) had promised them.

Cheers,

-Stef



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