In light of the 12.04 release on Wednesday, a retrospective:
When my father helped me build my first computer in 2004, I was about to finish high school and head off to begin my undergraduate education. I had decided that this computer would never see Windows and, while my father was worried that I wouldn't be set up for success in college, I was determined to make it work. I didn't have a background in programming or computer science. I just wanted to make things work.
My first obstacle was replacing MS Office with (at the time) OpenOffice but I had no problems there. When MS Office started using the XML formats (.docx, .pptx, .xlsx), I simply exported my documents to PDF and sent them to instructors that way. B.S. in Geology using Kubuntu ... done.
When I started my M.S. in Geology, the list of Windows programs I needed started to grow. Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator, Rockworks, Grapher, ArcGIS. I was afraid I would finally have to settle for a Windows partition. But I did some searching and some configuring. Soon, Photoshop and Illustrator were replaced by Gimp and Inkscape; of course I had to learn these programs but they always worked flawlessly for me and were even more intuitive and cross-compatible than the Adobe products. But Rockworks, Grapher, and ArcGIS didn't have "acceptable" software equivalents in the Linux environment. Then again, the equivalents were perfectly acceptable to me but the final products had to be compatible with the Windows programs because I had to be able to send files back and forth to peers.
So I thought my mission had failed. I e-mailed the IT department at the school because I had heard rumors about a virtual lab environment that would enable me to use Rockworks, Grapher, and ArcGIS via VPN remotely from my Linux environment. The only problem was that the school would not allow me to connect to their VPN using Linux. Their excuse: hackers use Linux and, by allowing Linux users on our VPN, the system would be made vulnerable. So I requested an exception on the grounds that they could willfully terminate me from the school if a direct attack were to occur from my IP address.
And voila! I was able to accomplish all of my tasks using a combination of native Linux applications and the virtual lab environment. I am scheduled to defend my M.S. thesis in mid-June and, while the faithful Ubuntu has never let me down through the years, it will sit quietly in the background while I present and defend its final products. As universities are getting to the point that almost everything is done digitally, why can't a free OS do everything?
When my father helped me build my first computer in 2004, I was about to finish high school and head off to begin my undergraduate education. I had decided that this computer would never see Windows and, while my father was worried that I wouldn't be set up for success in college, I was determined to make it work. I didn't have a background in programming or computer science. I just wanted to make things work.
My first obstacle was replacing MS Office with (at the time) OpenOffice but I had no problems there. When MS Office started using the XML formats (.docx, .pptx, .xlsx), I simply exported my documents to PDF and sent them to instructors that way. B.S. in Geology using Kubuntu ... done.
When I started my M.S. in Geology, the list of Windows programs I needed started to grow. Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator, Rockworks, Grapher, ArcGIS. I was afraid I would finally have to settle for a Windows partition. But I did some searching and some configuring. Soon, Photoshop and Illustrator were replaced by Gimp and Inkscape; of course I had to learn these programs but they always worked flawlessly for me and were even more intuitive and cross-compatible than the Adobe products. But Rockworks, Grapher, and ArcGIS didn't have "acceptable" software equivalents in the Linux environment. Then again, the equivalents were perfectly acceptable to me but the final products had to be compatible with the Windows programs because I had to be able to send files back and forth to peers.
So I thought my mission had failed. I e-mailed the IT department at the school because I had heard rumors about a virtual lab environment that would enable me to use Rockworks, Grapher, and ArcGIS via VPN remotely from my Linux environment. The only problem was that the school would not allow me to connect to their VPN using Linux. Their excuse: hackers use Linux and, by allowing Linux users on our VPN, the system would be made vulnerable. So I requested an exception on the grounds that they could willfully terminate me from the school if a direct attack were to occur from my IP address.
And voila! I was able to accomplish all of my tasks using a combination of native Linux applications and the virtual lab environment. I am scheduled to defend my M.S. thesis in mid-June and, while the faithful Ubuntu has never let me down through the years, it will sit quietly in the background while I present and defend its final products. As universities are getting to the point that almost everything is done digitally, why can't a free OS do everything?
Comment