So near the beginning of this semester I launched a personal project aimed at getting the NUS School of Computing technical help desk to make available printed Linux guides to the various essential computing services in the school. These services have a good amount of sophisticated machinery encapsulating them so it is really not trivial to figure out how to go about them on your own. In NUS SoC, there are neatly printed individual guides for Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Windows 7 each (as well as an obligatory one for Mac OSX). There is exactly zero official documentation for any Linux for any service. This was what I was determined to change.
I started out with authoring a draft guide and, with the help of several other volunteers, tested it with reasonable rigor on several distributions, refined it, then contributed the end result to technical services with an earnest note for their consideration. Perhaps non-surprisingly they rejected the request on the grounds that Linux is a very varied and fast-evolving platform that they are not equipped to support officially. I then offered to state explicitly in the guide that the guide is student-contributed, that Linux is not officially supported by tech services, and include external links to further Linux help that the help desk can direct inquiring students to, hoping to push for the guides to be simply made available as-is. For the past month or so I pursued the matter, battling various mysterious phenomena like emails that were successfully sent but were overlooked by both the ticketing system and the people managing the mailbox, and indeed – even emails that simply vanished altogether.
It is with great regret that I today pronounce The End. I had just been speaking with a nice but helpless help desk personnel during which she informed me that tech services is adamant about not making printed copies available, claiming that the act of printing the guides will implicitly imply that tech services is supporting them.
Not at all a reason I am happy with, but it is at least a concrete one. This is a bottom line that I see no way of discrediting or working around without being hostile, so this is as far as I will go.
Technical services has offered instead to make links to my guides accessible from their official document repository, towards which they will then direct any students who ask about Linux. So the whole effort was at least not entirely fruitless. I plan now to simply put/merge my guide up to the unofficial NUS Opensource wiki and then give them links to that.
I’ll post again with the links when the guides are done, if for no other reason than to hopefully boost their Google visibility.
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Zhiwei
Would it be not too audacious to assume that whomever uses Linux as an OS would be computer savvy enough to sort things out themselves in the first place? Oh, and if you’re going to argue that this is an unreasonable assumption, please name me an example of a layperson Linux user.
Jason "moofang"
@ Zhiwei: Firstly answering your challenge, my brother is a Linux user. So is another one of my (non NUS) friends. Both did not know what a “file browser” or a “web browser” was or even what “Windows Explorer” was (they used to be Windows users) until I slowly explained it to them. I would qualify neither of them as quite tech savvy, and they are certainly not geeks by any stretch of imagination.
Moving on, I consider myself a reasonably savvy user when I first picked Linux up. I was able to very heavily customize my desktop within a week or so of tinkering. Then and I’m pretty certain even now, I will not be able to connect to PEAP or print in SoC without external help. In fact, if you can find me even one person who could do both these things without any external help, I’d be very interested to know.
I further note that this is in the School of Computing. How many people in the School of Computing are not at least comfortable using a computer? Why do we need any guides in the first place? Because its not so trivial. I remember that I only managed to print my first page after reading and distilling information out of the MAC printing guide.
I’m convinced there is a very clear need. It is very easy to just give Linux up at the doorstep because you can’t do something as simple as connecting to the damn wireless network, and because with Windows, you have three guides to choose from, and a help desk to bug if they don’t work.
Zhiwei
Oh my. You are pretty angry….there…there….I was just pulling your leg. I am certain such a guide will extremely useful…….
Jason "moofang"
Nah, just not very happy with the result of this whole thing =/
idyllictux
NUS SOC failed! Ughh.. they disgusted me.
passing through
Hi! THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR DOING THIS. I got here by following some youtube video. I am a noob ubuntu user. I couldn’t get the PEAP Setup properly until I read your guide. Bureaucracy is gonna be the death of NUS man.
Jason "moofang"
Hi, glad you found your way around! Linux is a fantastic OS. But now that the opensource wiki appears to be indefinitely down, and nushackers(formerly linuxnus) seems to show little interest in making available and maintaining critical documentation for linux usage, I’d imagine it must feel pretty abysmal trying to get on your feet with linux in NUS :(
E
I am an exchange student and a linux user of 7 years. I have never ever been at an educational institution that is so limited for linux users. Sure, there are a lot of fancy systems, but NUS seem very heavily invested in microsoft and apple, with little interest to do anything for linux users. I have been at multiple universities, and I have never been unable to perform basic tasks because of my OS, until now.
Thank you for ranting.
Jason "moofang"
In my time there at least used to be semi-maintained unofficial documentations for connecting to the network, connecting to the VPN and printing in an opensource@nus wiki, last updated by, well, me. The wiki site has since gone down and has stayed down as the old linux usergroup linuxNUS switched focus and rebranded themselves nushackers. There should still at least be linux users among them though so you could try approaching them (their website here) for help.