THIS IS MY RANT.......APOLOGIES TO ALL


I recently moved to another hotel in the company I work for, but the move is probably temporary.

The Chef's office has a machine running Win ME, so the hard re-starts 6 times a day are starting to wear on my secretary's nerves. Also one of the sous chefs recently managed to get hold of some browser "helper" object so the homepage of IE is re-set to some porn site, and the machine in incredibly slow although on paper its specs are not too bad.

The first thing I did was download Mozilla, show the sec. how to use it and now she is cool. We chatted about open source/free software. She's heard good things about Linux (remember this is Thailand) and is keen to learn anything that will make her job easier.

I spoke to tech support and asked if I could put Linux on the box. "Sure" he said (woot-woot) now comes my problem: it is probable/possible that I will be moved to yet another hotel in the next few weeks and I do not want to leave behind a computer that will confuse people or give them a hard time.

Open Office etc is not rocket science but for people moving over from Windows/M$ office etc AND using English as a second language I can see how some things might cause problems.

Sooo I spoke to the tech guy and told him that they could always dual boot and/or telephone me if they hit something that they couldn't solve. So far so good.

Now, I am no linux guru but so far with help from sites like this I have managed to get everything working at home.

All they need is word processing & e-mail so I figured that as long as the network card can be configured then all should be fine, let's face it Ximian Evolution and OOo are not actually that different from the corresponding M$ products for the average user

As a final comment I said I'd leave copies of the 3 RH9 and 3 Fedora disks I have just in case they need them etc etc.

At this point the meeting got VERY frosty. After some pointed looks they politely informed me that they CANNOT USE COPIED AND PIRATED SOFTWARE


So, that was it, end of meeting. No amount of my bleating could convince them that it was not pirated but freely distributable etc etc and these were the alleged tech support guys I was talking to. My secretary is better informed than these clowns

OK, end of rant, congrats if you read this far, I'm gonna get drunk lol

Mark

Sounds like the tech support was applying advanced CYA (Cover Your Ass) - either he didn't understand about the GPL or knew the boss wouldn't. Or just didn't want to go on record as having approved it, knowing they'd get blamed at some unspecified point in the future. Whatever the reason, it's a bummer

Maybe you could get an understanding manager to help you put the case forward?

to be blunt, id not stress over it. the lady that will be working on the computer knows whats going on, you are not doing anything wrong so let the fools sit and think they are right.

dont leave the CDs for them. if they want to put M$ junk back on there and have those headaches let them. thats what they get paid for. the company will lose more money as a results and someday may wake up and learn.

gratz to you and your secritary.