lagagnon
September 5th, 2005, 01:13 PM
I volunteer at a local Immigrant and Refugee Community service centre as a computer technician. I basically pop in once a week and make sure the 8 computers are all functioning as they should.
Of the 8 computers, 3 are WinME, 2 are WinXP, 2 are Xandros and 2 are Ubuntu. We decided to switch over the latter 4 to Linux to reduce maintenance - we were tired of removing spyware and viruses and rebooting the machines every week!
The 2 Ubuntu boxes are for general drop-in use: anyone can use them for free - mostly for broadband internet. I loaded Warty Warthog on them about 6 months ago. They are on 24/7 but go into suspend after 30 minutes of non-use. I also "kiosked" them somewhat - removing many menu items and disabled many features - to prevent tampering by newbies. In 6 months I have only had to reboot each of them twice. Once because the power supply failed on one of the machines and once on another machine due to printing problems (since fixed). That is incredible uptime compared to the MS Windows boxes which generally have to be rebooted every week in order to function properly.
Many users don't even notice they are using Linux and many have commented how great it is to have the machines functioning all the time. They just work!!
The two Ubuntu boxes are Pentium 400's with only 256MB of RAM so they are not fast but they are good enough for web browsing, emailing and the odd word processing and printing - which is all they get used for.
Congratulations to the Ubuntu developers for a stable, easy to use distro.
Larry Gagnon
Of the 8 computers, 3 are WinME, 2 are WinXP, 2 are Xandros and 2 are Ubuntu. We decided to switch over the latter 4 to Linux to reduce maintenance - we were tired of removing spyware and viruses and rebooting the machines every week!
The 2 Ubuntu boxes are for general drop-in use: anyone can use them for free - mostly for broadband internet. I loaded Warty Warthog on them about 6 months ago. They are on 24/7 but go into suspend after 30 minutes of non-use. I also "kiosked" them somewhat - removing many menu items and disabled many features - to prevent tampering by newbies. In 6 months I have only had to reboot each of them twice. Once because the power supply failed on one of the machines and once on another machine due to printing problems (since fixed). That is incredible uptime compared to the MS Windows boxes which generally have to be rebooted every week in order to function properly.
Many users don't even notice they are using Linux and many have commented how great it is to have the machines functioning all the time. They just work!!
The two Ubuntu boxes are Pentium 400's with only 256MB of RAM so they are not fast but they are good enough for web browsing, emailing and the odd word processing and printing - which is all they get used for.
Congratulations to the Ubuntu developers for a stable, easy to use distro.
Larry Gagnon