Social Experiment

[Mike Smith]

On Sat, 2007-09-15 at 12:10 -0400, Alex Janssen wrote:
> 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)
> 
> Keep up the good work.....

Mike