<meta http-equiv="CONTENT-TYPE" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"><title></title><meta name="GENERATOR" content="OpenOffice.org 2.4 (Win32)"><style type="text/css">  </style> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Hello everybody.<br><br>This question will probably take a little while to type, but I'll try to get it through.<br><br>First off, I should probably point out that I live here in the United States, in northern New Jersey. The kind of people who live around me are rich idiots; they're the kind of people who, somehow, have a lot of money, but still use Windows. No one here knows anything about Linux, let alone Ubuntu.<br><br>I use three different Operating Systems every day: Ubuntu at home, OS X at school, and Windows everywhere else (mostly friends' houses). It's confusing, but I'm pretty good with all three of them. Obviously, Windows is still the worst of the three, and I try to avoid it as often as possible, but that's not too hard. However, I'm completely stuck with OS X at school. I actually have classes where we sit in front of Macs and learn to use Microsoft Office 2008. Which means I'm stuck using that stupid ribbon that those Microsoft imbiciles put into Office 2008. We also browse the web with Safari, the crummy web browser that Apple put into OS X.<br><br>Then I go home to Ubuntu and everything's just perfect.<br><br>I'm not saying that OS X is terrible; it's actually pretty good. But time after time, the teachers and students are confused with one program after another not loading or freezing or something. The IT people, in my opinion, have the hardest job in the entire building. They have to make OS X Server work with 500-some-odd computers with OS X (which is harder than it sounds), and install Office 2008 on every computer, and if anything stops working, they're the ones who have to fix it. And, needless to say, there are many other programs that they use.<br><br>I'm thinking: what if we could just say good-bye to all of this and just switch to Ubuntu or Edubuntu. It would be hard, especially because the school has been on Macintosh since the early 90's, but that doesn't mean it wouldn't be impossible. Everyone was able to switch from OS 9 to OS X without too much hassle. I know that the Ubuntu/Edubuntu servers work pretty well, so they could replace OS X Server with that, and replace OS X itself with Ubuntu/Edubuntu. I know that you can run other OSes on iMacs, so we could do that, and we could replace Safari with Firefox, and replace MS Office 2008 with OpenOffice.org. (One of my classes is "Computer Applications" which is really just learning to use Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc, but my teacher is so used to using the older versions, which were always almost exactly that same, version-to-version, so she is completely confused with the ribbon and all of the other changes. I know that OO.o will probably never put in the ribbon.)<br><br>But I'm still the only person that I know that uses Linux. I'm on my little Linux island, surrounded by Windows and OS X. Many of my teachers don't even know what Linux is, let alone Ubuntu or Edubuntu. The school has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars (yes, I did all of the math) on software alone; for reasons I don't understand, the school always has to have the most recent version of everything, especially OS X and MS Office.<br><br>Still, I don't see any reason that it wouldn't work. Everyone would be using OO.o, so it would be just like older versions of MS Office, and the computers would never get viruses, and I know that there are many open-source Linux programs for helping teachers. It couldn't be done overnight, but they could do it over the summer vacation (or maybe even the Christmas vacation). For the few programs that we use where there is no Linux alternative (by the same company or an open-source clone), we would have to use Wine or something like it. I'm not sure what the other alternatives are, but we could find out.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Would we be able to do this at all? Also: is Edubuntu really that much better for schools than Ubuntu?<br></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Please let me know what you think. </p> <br>Thanks, <br><br>David McNally<br clear="all"><br>-- <br>David McNally<br><a href="mailto:david3333333@gmail.com">david3333333@gmail.com</a><br>apt-get moo<br>