[ubuntu-za] Switching to Linux (was Ubuntu Tea shirts)

[Phillip Pare]

Weiers Coetser wrote:
> I know it is not a lot compared to other setups. But I can now count 23
> computers with Linux installed on our campus. (3 years ago there were
> none. Our IT guys still refuse to support linux, but they are beginning
> to change little by little. They have put Openoffice.org on staff
> computers by default, unless the staff member requested Microsoft.)
>
>   
Thank you Weiers for a very encouraging story. What is the name of your 
College and where are you situated?
I am at the University of Pretoria and there are only a very few of our 
IT guys that are prepared to support Linux and the associated software. 
Once institutions start providing equal support to linux and windows 
installations, people will have more of an incentive to switch.

Two years ago I installed Ubuntu 4.10 in a dual boot image which we 
burnt onto seven new machines. I was the only one who ever actually used 
Ubuntu. The rest of the staff just continued using Windows.

The University runs a Novell network and students have to log on to 
Novell in order to access their quota of megabytes to access the 
internet. I see that some Linux distros offer a kernel upgrade to access 
the Novell network drives. Without proper IT support the average person 
is not going to attempt this. I also use the Novell network drives to 
store lecture presentations. When I go into a lecture theatre, I log on 
to Novell and all my material is available. If this was available on 
Linux then again I could consider switching.

OpenOffice still does not import some graphics rich MS word documents 
correctly. I attach one such document to this email. I submitted an 
issue about this in August 2005 but unfortunately the people at Sun are 
just overwhelmed with work and have not yet been able to resolve this 
issue.
http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=53618

Recently I have submitted the issue to Oxygen Office with the hope that 
someone else may be able to resolve the problem. I feel that there must 
be as seamless as possible interface between MS Word and Open Office 
before one can switch. If not there will just be too much work to be 
done to read through every document that is imported into Open Office to 
check for possible corruption. Abiword looks nice but it too does not 
read everything that MS Word produces.

My other problem with Breezy related to fonts. It was quite a mission, 
without IT support to get all the fonts installed so that documents 
looked the same in OpenOffice as they did in MS Word.

Another problem which always raised its head was that of permissions. I 
slide in a cartridge with a hard drive in it. I can read the files 
correctly, but as soon as I want to update a file I find myself having 
to go to the command line to try and change various permissions. Without 
IT support this can be very difficult.

Regards

Phillip



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