Episode 71 - Interview with John Rundag

[Chess]

In this episode: no episode next week; an interview with John Rundag, technology coordinator for an Ohio school district; Listener Tip on static ip addresses using DHCP; audio and email listener feedback, including one on using Twitter for software updates.

http://www.linuxreality.com/podcast/episode-71-interview-with-john-rundag/

[Macskeeball]

I found the interview interesting as I'm planning on becoming a computer teacher. As for the listener tip about setting static IPs on the router side based on MAC address, I do this for my server using the Tomato firmware on my WRT54G and it works very well. The Tomato firmware is very nice, largely because of the UI.

Thanks for including my tip about using Twitter for software update notifications. I'm not much of a Twitter user myself; this is the one and only thing I use it for. I find the purpose Twitter is marketed for (letting your friends know that you're currently eating cornflakes or whatever) rather silly, but I am fascinated with the idea of using it for automated notifications. I read something a few months ago about someone who uses Twitter for automated notifications from their home automation system. It's cool stuff if you get creative with how you use it.

As for the distribution mailing list method you mentioned, I'll have to look into that. I'm guessing that would mean getting notifications about packages I'm not actually using, but I'll take a look.

[jviscosi]

This reminds me (on a larger scale) of my experience setting up a small Linux network in my wife's classroom, replacing Windows 95 and 98 machines that were never working properly due to the kids' installing animated cursors or games or whatever and loading the machines up with spyware.  After a slightly bumpy start (I was pretty new to Linux when I put in the network, although I had been working in Windows-based IT for over 10 years), things have settled down and it all just works, all the time.

[mjjzf]

The discussion about advanced distributions is always interesting. On the other GNU/Linux sites I frequent, a word that pops up often is "user friendly" to describe distributions like Ubuntu, OpenSuse and the like. I always struggle with these distributions, because they have a very different idea about how the system should run than I do. So I perceive these as "experienced-user hostile". We usually settle with the word "beginner-friendly", since this usually means "Windows-experienced".