malcolm wrote:
I work in a school and we are thinking about Linux
I put some test machines out - Fedora, Suse and Ubuntu
The view of the students was Fedora was the best ..great so far
Then we did the KDE v Gnome thing - Gnome won ... even better
Then I asked the question - so what do you think of Linux ?
'It sucks ! ' was the almost universal response ( students aged 11 to 18 )
Why I asked .. It never falls over, XP dies all the time ... true they said
OO is just like Office to use and doesn't munge up documents .. also
true they said
It will save the school £20000 per year, so why does it suck
Because we can't watch Yahoo music videos and that was it - Ok I did
point out that
they weren't suppose to be watching them at all really but that doesn't
cut much ice with
teenagers. So the problem is this - I am never going to get this off the
ground if I don't have
the support of the kids. Windows Media is my Linux killer - Codeweavers
are OK but
only support WMP 6.4 - I've never got gxine to work properly and the
Linux version of Real Player
won't do the 'universal player' trick that the Windows one does.
Even the most angst ridden teenager admitted that 99% of Linux was
better than the Windows
equivalent but not one of them wanted to use it simply because of the
lack of Windows Media plugins
Help .... please !
M
If they are not supposed to be watching the videos on the school
computers, then block them at the firewall as our business does. When
they cannot watch them on Windows it won't make any difference.
Or set up a few computers in "non-work" areas that are locked down
with XP on them. I would not use Libraries for the non-work computers.
The school is paying for the bandwidth and network usage so they set
the rules.
As others have stated, get Yahoo to fix the problem.
--
Robin Laing
