March 19, 2019 at 19:34The use of Linux and open source software in our educational institution: to be or not to be?
Good day, dear Khabrovchane. Recently, I began to worry about the question: how long will Microsoft's monopoly continue in the market sector, which is responsible for delivering software to many educational institutions in our country (in fact, it has been occupied by the corporation since the 90s ).
Let me give you a concrete example: I go to a relatively popular it-circle for high school students at the local university N (this university is pretty prestigious in my city), there we study a number of disciplines:
And now, criticism on most points:
1. Probably the only discipline that more or less suited me. Number systems, binary logic, etc. Here we did without the use of any OS and software, so it has no direct relation to my post.
2. This is where the fun begins. Firstly, almost everything we went through was the history and capabilities of MS-DOS and Windows (all versions, however, on Windows XP, because the presentation was made at the beginning of the zero years), in passing showed the existence of systems such as GNU / Linux, * nix and ... that's it. I did not see the intelligible history and capabilities of * nix in this presentation. Secondly, in the lecture, we talked for a long time about the differences between Windows 3.11 from 95 and 98; remembered the existence of an IDE mode; met FAT12 / 16/32 and NTFS (although the lecturer didn’t really say anything except decrypt the NTFS abbreviation), but I didn’t hear a word about EXT2 / 3/4, BTRFS, UDF, even about disk layout - silence! The same situation was about BSVV: they explained the Legacy-BIOS function, but even forgot about UEFI, not to mention Coreboot and other BIOS implementations.
3. Well, everything is pretty clear: everything is outdated and / or proprietary. I don’t find fault with the characteristics of the PCs themselves: 0.5-2 gigabytes of RAM and Pentium 4 / D are enough for the client computer, just like we have Windows XP and a central file-server server, which partially offloads the load on the system HDD. But I was able to find on these PCs only a couple of free programs from hundreds: Notepad ++ and a very ancient version of OpenOffice. Everything else: Google Chrome, MS Office 2007/2010 (non-activated), Adobe PDF Reader, antiviruses, proprietary compilers, Turbo Pascal ... By the way, Kubuntu 14.04.x is installed on some (at least 1 GB of RAM), since the installation never Neither the system nor the repositories were updated. And they put it frankly for the sake of a tick: I have never seen a single student using Linux. Moreover, people who installed the distribution kit,
Therefore, you can easily find the Rescue Mode item in GRUB2, automatically get root rights, remount the root in read / write, and run passwd. Actually, what your humble servant has done twice. And all (all) of the OS are at my complete disposal. The point then is to password Windu, install antiviruses, configure proxies, if all this "protection" is not worth a damn! Not only that, when I told the teacher about this vulnerability, he answered me that he was of little interest to this problem. But how so? It is forbidden to use usb-flash drives without anti-virus scanning, then they ignore the problem that lies on the surface. By the way, on these Kubuntu there is practically no software. Neither gcc, nor g ++, nor fpc, nothing but the base system.
If we talk about the office, then my use of Libreoffice and open document standards led to the fact that most .odt files did not open correctly in a Microsoft product, the opposite is also true. Although MS Office (IMHO) is a very convenient product, Libreoffice, especially as a free project, is also good. In principle, if it were not for the propriety and closeness of MS Office, then the meaning of the existence of its alternatives would be minimized (again, in my humble opinion).
Despite the fact that I agree with A.V. Stolyarov, I have an understanding that some important software exists only for Windows and in the next few years this system will definitely not be replaced in these areas (well, for example, from programming some microcontrollers to launching software to manage alignment stands), but with each the year of such software is getting smaller and smaller. Moreover, these are quite rare directions, and * nix are not in vain considered good systems for learning the basics of programming.
The moral of this fableConclusion: unfortunately, I note that the local university (most likely, not only this one) gives preference to proprietary and closed products, even if they have to be used illegally. Other software is often ignored, since teachers have no incentive to improve both their real knowledge and students' knowledge (“Teachers do not want to learn”). It begs the words that, in general, free software is ready for use by users, but the users themselves do not want to use it and / or self-develop if "it does."
PS:
Let me give you a concrete example: I go to a relatively popular it-circle for high school students at the local university N (this university is pretty prestigious in my city), there we study a number of disciplines:
- "Fundamentals of Informatics and Computer Engineering" (already completed).
- "Device ... computer": OS, "internal" PC (completed).
- "Work on the PC": the basics of Windows Explorer, CMD, MS Office (just finished).
- "Basics of programming": PascalABC.NET (thank God that at least not Turbo Pascal).
And now, criticism on most points:
1. Probably the only discipline that more or less suited me. Number systems, binary logic, etc. Here we did without the use of any OS and software, so it has no direct relation to my post.
2. This is where the fun begins. Firstly, almost everything we went through was the history and capabilities of MS-DOS and Windows (all versions, however, on Windows XP, because the presentation was made at the beginning of the zero years), in passing showed the existence of systems such as GNU / Linux, * nix and ... that's it. I did not see the intelligible history and capabilities of * nix in this presentation. Secondly, in the lecture, we talked for a long time about the differences between Windows 3.11 from 95 and 98; remembered the existence of an IDE mode; met FAT12 / 16/32 and NTFS (although the lecturer didn’t really say anything except decrypt the NTFS abbreviation), but I didn’t hear a word about EXT2 / 3/4, BTRFS, UDF, even about disk layout - silence! The same situation was about BSVV: they explained the Legacy-BIOS function, but even forgot about UEFI, not to mention Coreboot and other BIOS implementations.
3. Well, everything is pretty clear: everything is outdated and / or proprietary. I don’t find fault with the characteristics of the PCs themselves: 0.5-2 gigabytes of RAM and Pentium 4 / D are enough for the client computer, just like we have Windows XP and a central file-server server, which partially offloads the load on the system HDD. But I was able to find on these PCs only a couple of free programs from hundreds: Notepad ++ and a very ancient version of OpenOffice. Everything else: Google Chrome, MS Office 2007/2010 (non-activated), Adobe PDF Reader, antiviruses, proprietary compilers, Turbo Pascal ... By the way, Kubuntu 14.04.x is installed on some (at least 1 GB of RAM), since the installation never Neither the system nor the repositories were updated. And they put it frankly for the sake of a tick: I have never seen a single student using Linux. Moreover, people who installed the distribution kit,
Therefore, you can easily find the Rescue Mode item in GRUB2, automatically get root rights, remount the root in read / write, and run passwd. Actually, what your humble servant has done twice. And all (all) of the OS are at my complete disposal. The point then is to password Windu, install antiviruses, configure proxies, if all this "protection" is not worth a damn! Not only that, when I told the teacher about this vulnerability, he answered me that he was of little interest to this problem. But how so? It is forbidden to use usb-flash drives without anti-virus scanning, then they ignore the problem that lies on the surface. By the way, on these Kubuntu there is practically no software. Neither gcc, nor g ++, nor fpc, nothing but the base system.
If we talk about the office, then my use of Libreoffice and open document standards led to the fact that most .odt files did not open correctly in a Microsoft product, the opposite is also true. Although MS Office (IMHO) is a very convenient product, Libreoffice, especially as a free project, is also good. In principle, if it were not for the propriety and closeness of MS Office, then the meaning of the existence of its alternatives would be minimized (again, in my humble opinion).
Despite the fact that I agree with A.V. Stolyarov, I have an understanding that some important software exists only for Windows and in the next few years this system will definitely not be replaced in these areas (well, for example, from programming some microcontrollers to launching software to manage alignment stands), but with each the year of such software is getting smaller and smaller. Moreover, these are quite rare directions, and * nix are not in vain considered good systems for learning the basics of programming.
PS:
UNIX in the USSR
My grandfather told me that in 1986-1988, as the head of the organization UPRTSENTRZAPCHAST, together with other colleagues, he decided to transfer the personnel at their base in Stolbtsy and in Tashkent to the Robotron mini-computers and some other computers of our production , with a central server computer. Judging by his descriptions and Wikipedia, Unix was installed on this server, and the Soviet edition was installed on some of them. <sarcasm> Therefore, so to speak, the potential for studying * nix remained.