[Nottingham] Running Ubuntu at Nottingham Uni

[David Aldred]

On 24 May 2012 16:48, Martin <martin at ml1.co.uk> wrote:

> On 24/05/12 16:39, David Aldred wrote:
> [---]
> > Though some of that assumption is having to start to break down as
> > students increasingly want to use iOS, Android and BBOS devices to talk
> > to University systems.   The problem for any institution is deciding
> > what 'support' means -  paying for expertise to support Windows, MAcs,
> > all flavours of Linux, BBOS, Android etc etc gets rather costly.
>
> Hopefully your costs *reduce* due to fewer niggles and problems, and
> less of the expensive lock-in, with the Linux and *nix systems ;-)
>
> ?


Well, hardly.  This is about supporting staff and students with their use
of other OSs - mainstream services (the ones for which the university pays)
will continue to run on whatever platform they need.   It's the helpdesk
and IT tech support for whatever flavour of whatever OS someone happens to
have installed (at their own choice and cost, or lack of it) that comes
expensive, and every additional system brings its very own niggles.

And it costs more if you have to be able to tell people how to configure
(say) a proxy on Android 2.1, Android 2.4, BBOS 5,6 and 7, Windows XP and
7, MAcOS, iOS, Ubuntu 9.04 all the way through to 12.04, Fedora and Suse
than it does if you can just chuck out instructions for Windows 7, and say
the rest are unsupported.

(Of course those of us on the web side don't have the choice, really - we
have to make it work, or damn nearly work, on anything, back to IE6 as we
have important research partnerships with the NHS, and lots of users in
China, who won't be upgrading any time soon.  But at least we don't have to
do the one-to-one support on them all).

After all, Linux is supposed to be community supported, isn't it?  Stef,
why not set up a Workspace for Linux support?

David
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