My University goes Gentoo!!!

[Kream]

We're a tiny University in Bangalore, and in the student computer centre we used to run Win98, which, was really insecure, unstable and tough to maintain.

I moved the systems to Windows 2000, but securing even those machines was a nightmare ( e.g. ... any user can delete the bootloader!!!) and after a few months of wondering whether the users would be able to handle the transition, decided to move to Linux.

I downloaded 3 mandrake cds, installed 8.2 (which, to it's credit got DRM running right away on the Intel 810s ) and spent the next 2 weeks screaming and pulling my hair out in frustration. Y'see, mandrake has this really diabolical thing called supermount, which, when used with KDE, would cause the machine to freeze if, for example, you put an empty floppy into it. Oh, and java support was a nightmare.

Bit the bullet, shut down the computer centre and started the long process of Gentoo installation. 3 months later, running KDE3 and OpenOffice, with Galeon, Konqueror and Mozilla, life is much much much better.

Credit for a lot of this goes to the people on #gentoo who, in my opinion are one of the most knowledgeable and helpful user communities around.

A week back, the university's mailserver, running on RedHat 6.2 crashed with some bizarre kernel errors and I was called in to help. 3 days later, with a lot of help from the desktop guide and the security guide, mail.nls.ac.in was up and running, with postfix / apache / courier-imap / squirrelmail (enhanced with lots of great plugins - you HAVE to check them out) and I've a letter of commendation from the Chancellor of the University.

I've been asked to take over the entire intranet and will be installing Gentoo on lots more machines.

Thank you all !

Aniruddha "Kream" Shankar
Bangalore, India

[leej]

[danielrm26]

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