The hard life of the Linux System Administrator
Posted on June 7, 2005
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I am now at the Florestan Fernandes Landless Workers’ Movement’ National School. There is a telecentro: 13 old PC’s connected to a server, which is actually doing the whole job, and five PC’s scattered around. Hundred students fighting with the graphical interface of the computer, sometimes for the first time. I am now included in these hundred students: the course is made by university professors, coming as volunteer, which try to explain in three weeks the base of the political economy.
The school is located in a wonderful place. Something like a convent: with place to read, to walk, surrounded by green hills. The food is good and comes five times per day (three main meals and to coffee brakes). Morning alarm, as usually here in the Movement, at 6:00 am, and lecture time is until 10:00 pm.
The first problem, from my point of view, is that the 13 old PC’s cannot see the floppy, because they are actually working on the server, they are just terminals, so the local floppy is the floppy on the server (and the network block device is not working). It seems impossible to convince people to save their works on their email account: they want to use the floppy, and they are pretty right, as many of them have no access to the Internet back home.
The second problem –it seems impossible to convince people to click just once on the mozilla icon. The about 7 years old bug of mozilla let another window open, asking to delete/create/rename profiles. And if someone quits the application in a dirty way, I have to go there and remove the lock file (I guess I have to appear like a wizard….).
Then OpenOffice: the PC are old, the version installed is not the newest, is the 1.1.2, and it continues to importunate the user with questions like “You are saving the document as Microsoft Word, it is dangerous, you could lose all your formatting etc etc”. Fortunately in the new versions they have changed this stuff –no more question.
So, the fight in order to use free software is hard and, but the fighter is mainly the common user, with less access to new technologies. The Brazilian government sings loud its involvement in the Open Source project, but should care more about using Open Source, than speaking about Open Source (but it does do something!).
In the offices of the Ministry of Communications everybody has a dual boot (can decide if Working on Linux rather than Windows at boot time), but everybody is using Windows and, which is worst, MSOffice: when they get an OpenOffice document they do not know how to open it (MSOffice refuse to read OpenOffice documents in order to go on with the monopoly). So it happens that official documents are produced in a closed and proprietary format. The Banco do Brasil, a bank with high public participation, only offers support for Windows (even if they use java, which is machine and operative system independent). On the other side, with the typical schizophrenia of the market, the bank is slowly migrating to OpenOffice –I was in their office and heard tens of persons swearing because did not succeed to do things they could do with MSOffice (try insert a page number in OpenOffice. Once you know how to do it you appreciate it, but you hardly guess how to do it…). Dulcis in fundo I actually realize only now how “administrator-oriented” is Linux and “user-oriented” is Windows. Something I hate on Windows, like the “My Computer -> C:”, appear a grate feature to some user. Once he get how the filesystem is organized on Linux he appreciate it –not before. Linux is good if you are a bit curious, if you ask yourself “why?”. It is free software, then “why they did something like that and not like this?”. Look for the answer!
Or nfs and shfs, or afs! Grate programs, professional, nothing like NetBIOS, the insecure and… easy to use “Network Places” of Windows.
Mozilla-firefox is universally recognized as better than Internet Explorer, forgetting the bug I spoke above.of which over. And on these old PC’s a better performance of Linux is at least recognized. I guess nobody, outside Redmond, knows why after two years a computer with Windows installed begins to slow down. Everybody says “Hem, you know, it is old…”. But the PC is not a horse –if it is working is working always at the same velocity! Why on my laptop if I boot with Linux no decrease of performance, and if I boot with Windows the Hard Disk begins to make noise after two minutes?
Additionally, nobody has (yet 
lost any data, where on the two PC with Windows viruses are coming everyday.
Only five years ago installing a printer on Linux could be a nightmare (an impossible task without Internet), now the HP, for instance, has released free (as in freedom) driver for its printer. That’s the power of the market: use it, don’t be alone, and the companies will find the way to make money out of it (selling printers, for instance).
Last but not least: OpenOffice still does not have the main feature of MS Word: producing awfully large files.
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