[brlug-poly] A silver lining.

[Will Hill]

The LSU IT people are enthusiastically supporting Linux as part of this 
program and deserve great praise.  They are annoyed by the browser 
misidentification I pointed out and are actively working on more official 
Linux support.  

They pointed out links to Windoze and Linux platform sites that get around the 
browser misidentification problem.  Konqueror, despite the word Linux in it's 
ID string, is misidentified as OSX.  At the bottom of the page, right above 
the copyright notices are these links:

http://tigerware.lsu.edu/default.aspx?platform=1
http://tigerware.lsu.edu/default.aspx?platform=4

1= Windows
4 = Linux
3 = blank page.

So far, there's not much software behind the Linux page.  Obviously, that's a 
low priority for IU and Microsoft in a program that's designed to dump 
Microsoft onto students.  That it's there at all is a miracle.

Given the tigersoft site is run on IIS, the overwhelmingly M$ oriented spam 
that announced it and the browser identification problems, we see that IU's 
Microsoft influence does not end with the ability to distribute Microsoft 
software online.  

LSU's IT department would like to expand that coverage.  They already have 
links to a free version of RHE4 and plan all to host all of those other iso 
images.  They also responded positively to a the idea of identifying software 
that runs with Wine. though they doubt they will be given resources for that.  

I'm glad LSU IT is like that, regardless of student government follies.  They 
seem to have their head in the right place.  I suspected things were this way 
and all of my communications with them have been overwhelmingly positive, in 
both directions.  GO TIGERS!

If you write them, and you should, be sure to praise them for their continued 
and expanding Linux support.  They were happy to see that someone cared and 
no one needs a bunch of grumpy complaints.  That's what this list is for!  
Couch your requests as positive suggestions they can implement.  You know 
that they are going to face all the usual problems expanding Linux support, 
including official blocks, astroturf and other badness Microsoft is the 
master of.

Their work order on this subject is quoted here:

========== WO # 140087 ================
Thanks for the info!  

Yes, this sounds like a similar problem to the one we were experiencing awhile 
back - I'm passing this on to our sysadmin to look into it.  Although it's 
frustrating to be directed to the Mac page by default when you're running 
Mepis, there should be links to both the Windows and Linux pages at the 
bottom of the Mac page.  If you're not seeing those, please let me know - 
that would be a separate issue altogether.  

With regard to applications that will run through Wine, it's certainly 
something worthwhile we'd like to pursue.  Please understand though that it 
may take quite awhile to do the appropriate testing given the number of 
applications we are providing through TigerWare and the limited resources we 
can dedicate to doing so.  I completely agree, however, that it's a direction 
we need to take fairly soon if at all possible.

In the meantime, I'm keeping this ticket open until we can get a resolution 
for the browser problem.  We'll let you know as soon as we have the problem 
fixed.
========== WO # 140087 ================


On Monday 24 October 2005 08:51 pm, Will Hill wrote:
> If you thought you could avoid the Microsoft tax by building your own
> computer while studying at LSU, guess again!