[svlug] Progress at the school with Linux

[Akkana Peck]

Florin Andrei writes:
>> My strategy for installing Win/Lin computers, verified over many years 
>> of practice, is:
>> 
>> 1. Install Windows first, give it one partition (or more), leave the 
>> rest of the drive unpartitioned.
[Other highly useful info snipped]

Thanks for the summary, Florin! One question: what do you recommend
as the best way to partition the disk? And what about laptops that
come preinstalled with no install or recovery disk? I hear people
wonder about that a lot, but since my last Windows experience was
in the Win ME (VFAT) days I never know what to suggest.

>> It's best to expose such people to the most "mainstream" distributions 
>> possible. Not to less popular variations such as Xubuntu. Show them 
>> Ubuntu proper instead, if Ubuntu is what you use.

Christian Einfeldt writes:
> We set up this lab with Xubuntu because the guru who set it up felt that we
> might be able to enhance performance by using a lightweight distro.

Having seen the sorts of machines used in these school labs, I
heartily agree. Performance, alas, is not really a consideration
any more for the mainstream distros (new machines have gotten so
fast, and that's what the distros are targeting), so people with
old and slow hardware really need to look elsewhere. Especially if
they're trying to evangelize Linux to users who haven't seen it before:
you don't want them to say "Oh, Linux, that's the thing we have in
the lab that takes forever to do anything," you want them to say
"Oh, Linux, that's the thing that's running great on all those
donated machines that are too slow to run XP -- and you know,
you can still do everything you need to." Xubuntu is a fine
choice for a situation like that.

	...Akkana