Sam Varghese
Monday, 18 February 2008 20:16
Opinion and Analysis
Page 2 of 3
As the students had different versions of various Microsoft programs on their own computers at home, Perkins decided to standardise on StarOffice. A single $119 licence, the cost payable by an educational institution, was enough to meet the school's needs. The application was used on Linux and also on Windows so that there would be no file format incompatibilities.
The move ended up saving a lot of money in licensing costs. Initially, the school used Red Hat Linux; later Fedora, Red Hat's community distribution, was used. The money saved was used to upgrade hardware at the school and also to provide for more PCs.
However, the school did not become a Linux-only zone - there were 35 dual-boot XP machines (which came in later) running Adobe applications. Perkins says that, interestingly enough, when these machines were being utilised for general use the students almost always booted into Linux.
And although the staff desktop machines ran Linux, the staff also had access to a number of XP machines, including 12 laptops available for general use. These, says Perkins, were rarely borrowed.
The school was also running Citrix which served a number of Microsoft-based applications via the Linux desktop - applications like QuickBooks and MapInfo.
Perkins said one possible reason why people kept asking for Windows was because the home experience of this OS is much superior to that in a corporate set-up. At home, one can do what one likes with a Windows machine but this does not carry over into the office where things are locked down, installation and removal of software is not allowed, and a software policy is generally in place.
After the move back, Perkins said he had noticed that the people who had been least comfortable with Linux were also among the least comfortable on Windows. Complaints about Vista had now started surfacing and he attributed this to the fact the interface differs vastly from that of Windows XP with which the complainants had, presumably, been familiar.
Further, the layout and menus of Office 2007, which the school has installed along with Vista, is again very different from the previous version of Office. And the nag screens on Vista, which appear every time one wants to carry out a function which was permitted on XP, tend to make people feel they are doing the wrong thing.
