[Discuss] UVic's new portal now available to students, unless they use Firefox

[Thor Heinrichs-Wolpert/MAXIMUS BC]

We selected SuSe (Novell) as our distro of choice.

One of the drivers for this choice was $0 cost access to the same release as the pay-for version, since I'm mostly buying commercial support for my fees.

Most of government uses the Oracle database, which a consulting house can use for free (sans support) for doing development.  If you want to run that on the same OS as your client, then RedHat will set you back say $3,500.  If you use SuSe, then you can run the same distro that the client uses (and pays for support), but you can use the free version.  I stopped using RedHat when they had no equivalent release that could be used at a low cost for development.

In a small way, it lowers the barrier for smaller consulting firms to bid on gov't work and have an environment that mimics the production site.  This then also lowers the barrier to going Linux in the Enterprise.

My 2-cents, support SuSe over RedHat (Fedora).  If you want to know some of our other selection criteria I can list some of those as well.

Cheers,
Thor HW

-----Original Message-----
From: discuss-bounces at vlug.org on behalf of stephen hawkes
Sent: Sat 5/6/2006 8:52 AM
To: discuss at vlug.org
Subject: Re: [Discuss] UVic's new portal now available to students,unless they use Firefox
 
pw wrote:
> stephen hawkes wrote:
>>
>> Good point. However it would be a step in the correct direction. I am 
>> definitely not going to switch which distro I run so I can run UVic's 
>> official distro (if that were to happen anyhow, huge if there). 
>> Having an official linux distro would mean that sites would have to 
>> run with something other than IE. I don't think I would need OS 
>> specific support from a help desk anyhow, but it gives an option to 
>> students that want to run an up-to-date OS that is free. It would 
>> also mean that I wouldn't get ignored because of the OS I run when my 
>> problems are not OS related.
>
> The reason universities have thier own distro is to allow them to 
> provide support to newbies. They just pick one distro as a standard
> so that when people ask for assistance the tech can say, "go to
> widget A and press button B...etc.".
> They'd most likely select RedHat, although debian/ubuntu could
> squeek in.
>
> Peter
>

Redhat would have been my first guess to until I heard of all the 
problems they had with licensing. Plus the ridiculous cost (yes you can 
run fedora for free, but I'm assuming they wanted the support). To try 
and describe it quick, the commercial licensing has three levels: 
desktop, workstation and server. The computers in question would be 
workstations (not desktops since people remote login). Uvic wanted 
educational licensing, but that scheme only has two levels, desktop and 
server. Anyhow, something happened along the lines iirc that they had 
the workstation version installed an updating, and even with the 
educational licenses, then updates stopped working and Red Hat said that 
it wasn't updating because the computers weren't desktops, they should 
be licensed as servers.. something along those lines. Don't take it 
verbatim as I don't really remeber the conversation very well, what I do 
remember is the tone, and they had a rough time with that one linux lab. 
Things were much smoother as solaris.

It'll be interesting to see what happens in the new building (bring back 
AIX!! j/k).
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