Mmmm...food....and OS news...

While it wasn't a Patrick Swayze Christmas at the Road House, we did have TONS of food and plenty left over as well.

Our Printing Services and ITS divisions were just about all in attendance for our annual Christmas potluck. We set my iPod to play holiday songs (oddly enough, a lot of Gloria Estefan versions of songs were played) and sat down to enjoy our meal. I found it interesting that I only had 71 songs tagged as Holiday.

Now experiencing mid-afternoon lull in activity. Must stay awake.

After a few days of trying different flavors of Linux, and other OS types thrown in for grins and giggles--Ubuntu, Freespire, MEPIS, DSL, SLAX (Kill Bill edition), E/OS, and ReactOS to name a few--I've FINALLY got Freespire 1.0.13 running at home AND gotten wireless to run as well. Ubuntu was nice and easy to install, but I couldn't get the wireless going for anything. So, on my bosses suggestion, I tried out Freespire. I had actually been running it, but was never able to get my wireless to run correctly, despite setting ESSID and key information properly. The info would never stick even though it could detect my network as well as my neighbor's open network. So I started trying other OS flavors out and ended up hosing Freespire on my box. I blame ReactOS--as it failed when trying to install itself.

So, I thought a bit and went with Freespire again. The main thing I did differently was having the OS detect before its first boot and then it eventually set everything, save for video, up. After about two hours of tinkering, I was online and looking at my screen set at 1024 x 768 resolution--it was only displaying 640 x 350 previously, which cut off a lot of Control Center windows and was not at all easy on the eyes.

Because I mentioned to Adam that I was in the middle of working on two towers, I ended up deciding on Isengard as the PC name. Can't wait to get another box to name it Barad-Dûr. Yup. Hey, no making fun of the Linux n00b, alright? You're glad to have this kind of exciting posting again, aren't you?

Ah, yes geekery!

So, Google has a Google Apps for Education program. What does this mean? Well, for one, we've been wanting to get our student users off our mail system and not have to deal with that kind of user base to manage--plus we'll only want to have Faculty and Staff using Exchange in the future. Altogether, I believe we're near 3500 users (I shudder to think what the Verisign fees would be for that large a number of users). Granted, that is not a lot when compared to say, a state university, or heck even some larger private universities as well.

In any case, while I do like Windows Live a little bit I don't want to have to use the Live mail client. I'd like to be able to select the one I like, you know? So, Google Apps for Education could be a great way to go. No final decision has been made yet, there's testing, proposals, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera to go through, but it's nice to know that could be a possible solution.

From the presentation I sat in on, migration of 95,000 65,000 users on ASU's system took about two weeks, pretty good. What that means though, and according to the the presenters, a system with 3500 users could be migrated in say days, perhaps even hours. To which I say, nifty! A very hearty nifty, too.

I ♥ you Google.