[ale] Re: This bites (was Re: [ale] More on Mozilla/Java)

[James P. Kinney III]

> Snoopy minds want to know: Were you able to get the liscence fee back from
> MS? Were you able to make the UI identify itself as a Linux implementation
> as opposed to a MS implementation? Are you able to check that the Students
> are aware that they are not using a MS solution, even though it really
> really shouldn't be an issue?

Of course there was no license fee refund. The box shipped with NT
pre-installed. The NT guy then blew them off and installed his Norton
Ghosted NT installation (it took nearly 2 weeks for that get working).
When I trashed the NT of the box, I had already twiddled with the ghost
setup and left a partition big enough for a linux distribution to be
installed in. 

The gdm screen is _clearly_ not M$. I also customized it so it had a
background image relevant to both the school and the department. A few
students didn't catch on to "use the foot icon" very fast. But they
weren't catching on to much of anything in the class anyway. 

It was VNC that really blew them all away! I gave a multi-client demo of
how to use the interface. They all watched the same screen and were
clearly astounded. I was in the process of setting up a VNC control
panel for the lab TA's so they could "observe" from one location the
efforts of the students. This was not specifically a spy tool, but it
had uses during lab exams. It was really speedy on it's own private
network.

Alas, I grew disgusted and left to do other things. The entire Linux
operations were replaced by NT workstations over the next break (it took
over 4 days to reinstall the ghost images, snicker) and the custom lab
software was deleted the following break time. It was a sad thing to see
them go back to the mess of "a program for every task" that I had
replaced with a simple to use browser interface. 

-- 
James P. Kinney III   \Changing the mobile computing world/
President and COO      \          one Linux user         /
Local Net Solutions,LLC \           at a time.          /
770-493-8244             \.___________________________./

GPG ID: 829C6CA7 James P. Kinney III (M.S. Physics)
<jkinney at localnetsolutions.com>
Fingerprint = 3C9E 6366 54FC A3FE BA4D 0659 6190 ADC3 829C 6CA7 



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