Social Experiment

[Alex Janssen]

I know this has less to do with technical support of Ubuntu, but it does 
have to do with social support and acceptance.

I just setup the first Linux desktop, Feisty, facing a highly trafficked 
aisle in my sales department amongst a bunch of WinXP'ers.  This should 
be interesting listening to the comments. 

The sales person using this new desktop commented that as long as her 
apps ran, she did not care what OS was used.  She did ask what happened 
to the green start button in the lower left corner of the screen.  I 
told her we got rid of the stupid thing and made a better menu system in 
the top left.  She was Ok with that.  I also informed her that she now 
has the coolest screensavers in the office.  She liked leaving them as 
random rather than choosing one.

I was having a little trouble figuring out what to do fix the refresh 
rate, as the monitor was not recognized, when my factory engineer 
stopped by and commented "must be that damn linux you were telling me 
about". 

I setup putty to telnet to the accounting server, an old sco unix 
installation, and had a little trouble getting the character set and 
translation right for the line drawing characters around the menus and 
screens,  but finally found a combination that worked, the 
lucidatypewriter font and CP437 translation table. 

I finally setup rsync to backup all her important stuff to another linux 
box used as general purpose network storage.

I had prep'd everybody for this eventual change by switching, 2 years 
ago, to all open source apps, i.e.; Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice.org 
...  those are the main ones.  A number of people have taken those apps 
home on CD's I've given them.  People are always surprised to hear that 
they are FREE.

I'll post results back here as they come in.

Cheers to all you rebels,
Alex

-- 
Ourwoods.org
 Do not learn the tricks of the trade ... learn the trade. (87)