[Nottingham] Running Ubuntu at Nottingham Uni

[Roger Light]

Hi Cat,

> Taking a step back from support, itd be quite nice for IT to let us have
> linux installed on our PCs, but locking bios makes that impossible
> (right?).. That definitely bothered me more than knowing id be unsupported.

We just make sure the bios is unlocked :) Obviously that depends on
whether your IS people are helpful or not.  We've got about 30
computers in our own linux network complete (aside from the physical
sense) separate to the university network. It very convenient for us
with our research and is a definite advantage that we control access.
We try to avoid IS where we can, but it's not a secret. We have our
own rack mounted server that used to be hosted in Kings Meadow but I
think has moved back on to the main campus. We found the people at
Kings Meadow to be very competent, noticing potential problems and
letting us know before they happened for example.

As we run everything ourselves, the only point that we want support is
on the network side of things.

It's also worth pointing out that every university member has access
to the unix systems. It's shell or remote desktop only, but is useful
if that's all you can manage. I don't use them so couldn't say whether
they were Linux or not, but I'd imagine they are. Likewise, the high
performance computing service runs on Linux and again anybody can get
access to it.

Cheers,

Roger