Re: 33 German Universities Migrate to Suse Linux

On Thu, 30 Aug 2007 09:17:48 +0000, elsid*** wrote:

On Aug 30, 3:14 am, felmon davis <dav...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Wed, 29 Aug 2007 11:38:33 +0200, Jan Kandziora wrote:
When I was at university (~1994, in Germany), most desktop computers
available to the students ran HP-UX, Solaris or similar. MS-Windows
was an option at the second university I attended (dual-boot).
Another (mostly non-technical) university a friend attended at had
SuSE5.x driven computers some years ago.

I was surprised to read this! I have some fleeting familiarity with
Frankfurt/Main but mainly one Fach. years ago (seven or more?) the
secretary was using some kind of DOS machine.

right now everyone I know (in two or three Fächer) use Windows XP.
(it's not that I know tons and tons of people so the sample is small.)

I guess it was really different in different parts of Germany. or maybe
it's the difference between technical disciplines and social sciences
and humanities?

Felmon

i think you mean in the 60s or 70s by <back-then>. Germany and Holland
are one of the first countries using open softwares.
imagine that once i went to get a new glasses back in 2000 from an
optician in Delft and they were using RH on all their systems.


zaher el sid***

I wasn't sure if you were replying to me or not but just a comment: all of
this evidence is 'anecdotal' and so it isn't worth very much so, for what
it's worth, the last time I was in a German bank talking to a consultant,
the consultant was using WinXP. this was HypoBank in December.

but I had this funny joking conversation with one of the security guys at
the airport who pulled me aside to check my laptop for suspicious chemical
substances (he didn't care what _I_ was on!); he wanted to run some kind
of detector over the keyboard and I joked that I hoped he wouldn't delete
my data to which he said, "yes, it wipe your data and then install Linux
on the computer!"

I think he meant by the joke ("install Linux") that my data would not only
be wiped but overlaid by something 'cryptic' but it was nonetheless a
surprise to me he knew something about Linux. of course the 'serious'
business at hand prevented any further chat.

I am sure Linux is used a lot in German universities, for instance the
servers at Frankfurt are some kind of Linux (or Unix), but in my
experience the desktops are, in the disciplines I've visited, Windows
throughout.

Felmon
.