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A question that always generates calm and reasonable discussion: What OS do you use?
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No self-made man ever did such a good job that some woman didn't
want to make some alterations.
-- Kim Hubbard
(Score: 2) by darnkitten on Friday August 07 2015, @02:37AM
At home; Linux (several flavours) by preference-generally dual or triple-booted with Windows as a partition I boot into 2-3x/year.
At work (the local library); primarily Windows, due to proprietary Win-only ILS software.
The Public Access Computers we provide; mostly Windows, though the older stuff (and loaners) are being converted to the more user friendly varieties of Linux, with each one having a different Desktop Environment, (to test which ones our patrons adapt to best).
On my tablet (and eventually phone, when the corporations finally finish fighting over who doesn't have to serve my town, and we have cell service again--we've been been over a year and a half without); Android, rooted and flashed.
In my head; the factory-installed default (can't remember the brand name, sorry--It's been years since I checked); modified by environment, culture, education, media library and internet.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 07 2015, @09:50AM
the local library [...] loaners
Is there a page that describes that?
-- gewg_
(Score: 2) by darnkitten on Saturday August 15 2015, @04:26AM
Not yet--we are still experimenting so we can develop policies and procedures (sanitizing a laptop after it has been out for a week is fun) and convince the Board that it's a good idea. Once we have those, we will publish, so others can do it as well.
Right now, most are running Zorin OS, as Zorin 9 is the only distro that automatically finds the really old proprietary wireless drivers. Once we find the proper drivers and develop process to find the drivers on updates, we then install other distros on a separate partition (keeping the Zorin install for restore purposes), which is then set as the primary partition along with browsers, office suite, Wine and other basic software (and games). We then set it out to be used as a Public Access Computer, and let users know it's available for week-long checkout. When it is turned in, it gets sanitized and restored to base install. We haven't yet come up with a procedure for requesting additional software to be added to the base install.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 18 2015, @09:44PM
Zorin 9
An LTS release, supported till April 2019. Very impressive--especially when you realize that it's essentially the work of a pair of brothers.
Its top cheerleader may be Dmitry Kaglik aka DarkDuck. [google.com]
He's also had a bunch of guest writers who have raved about Zorin as well.
automatically finds the really old proprietary wireless drivers
The Wary Puppy spin [google.com] is another distro that gets mentioned when the topic is support for very old hardware.
(If every distro included every device ever supported by the Linux kernel, ISOs would get very big very quickly; somebody has to draw the line somewhere.)
available for week-long checkout
This is the part I saw as novel.
As I haven't seen such a thing here in SoCal, I was curious about the location and the nature of the entity sponsoring this tech effort / citizen convenience.
Maybe a county that has embraced the FOSS ethos because of a concentration of tech employers?
A sizable college town in Oregon that has discovered how cost-effective/annoyance-free FOSS licensing is?
A neighborly little New England village that invests in its people?
When it is turned in, it gets sanitized and restored
How many units now? How big a support staff? Expected growth?
Will it be a turnkey thing [google.com] that can be accomplished by e.g. a librarian with no tech chops?
When this gets into high gear, I'm hoping that page gets built.
We hear about the schools in Penn Manor running FOSS and about Extremadura converting 80,000 machines of its public infrastructure to all-FOSS in 1 weekend[1] [google.com] and about Munich saving millions by switching to FOSS (as well as getting control over their ridiculous IT infrastructure).
It's nice when folks document their successes and we have those to point to / learn from.
[1] There are also accounts that mention converting 40,000 boxes.
Most of those pages seem to think it was Extremadura's first try at FOSS.
It wasn't. That was A MOP-UP EFFORT to get the remaining boxes that had been running proprietary apps which were found to be replaceable by FOSS apps or otherwise usable without Redmond's OS.
-- gewg_