Open Source Software Trail

It turns out that I see more and more people using linux on their desktops for more work. I guess it is kind of an exaggeration to put it this way but for the past month I have had more and more people asking me about using linux to do their everyday work.

Starting at the beginning of this semester (September 2006) , I had my friend from Iran getting pissed of with all the installing and reinstalling that he had to do on windows when things went wrong. His question was whether he could use linux and I advised him against it… one of the major reasons was that I was willing to be bothered by him all the time to come and configure this and install that. It is nice that he was interested but I cannot afford to be on call as a systems manager.

Two other people approached me soon after that to either have something installed and/or configured on their computers. One was about getting the internet running with PPP and the other was about getting compiling software running.

What prompted me to write this post, though, was sometime last week when I was in the library and spotted a guy starting up his laptop and saw the Kubuntu splash screen come up. I was thinking to myself, “my this is interesting. More and more people…” Then I decided to go up to him and find out a bit about why and how he started using it. In the end he turned out to be a computer science student and was using it because of partly the same reasons I was using it. Readily available development tools and the chance to experiment with all sorts of software. We did not get to too much talking but it was nice to see.

At the moment I am completeing another kubuntu installation for somebody on a computer that just cannot take windows XP. A pentium II with 350MB RAM. Let us see how this one performs.

Kubuntu Installation

PII Computer