openSUSE deployment at a girls high school

I'm really glad to see more educational institutions moving to Linux. There is a region in Mexico that has been transitioning their lower end systems to utilize Bodhi ->

http://forums.bodhilinux.com/index.php?/topic/5898-offcial-s...

Very good to see. I see all these powerpc Macs at my daughter's school and I imagine their computing life could be extended with Linux. Unfortunately the school seems intent on bringing in more ipads and new iMacs I don't see an opportunity for Linux in their classrooms.

Do you live in the US Mike? The schools are have massive priority problems - over paying for closed source software/Apple hardware is NOT where tax dollars should be going.

~Jeff

Rich school perhaps, more intent on teaching how to use facebook and twitter, and other Socially useful pursuits.

Jeff, it is a private school in the US so no impact to tax dollars, just my own pocketbook. That being said all the public schools in my city are Windows shops.

The Public school district here forces employees to access their electronic paychecks using some system that requires IE to access. My father inlaw is such an employee and this proved quite annoying as I had migrated them Linux after getting fed up fixing their windows PC.

Quoting: My father inlaw is such an employee and this proved quite annoying as I had migrated them Linux after getting fed up fixing their windows PC.

Might it work if you change the agent string in his browser to identify as IE? I had a contract in a place with a site like that. It didn't work in Firefox no matter what but I used Opera, had it identify itself as IE, and that worked just fine.

> It didn't work in Firefox no matter what but I used Opera, had it identify itself as IE, and that worked just fine.

That's been a surprisingly useful answer for many years. Surprising, I say, because one would think these people would want folks to use their products.

Oh well. "Assuming" everyone has Windows is, I hope, becoming less pervasive as time passes.

I suspect an ActiveX control in most sites that still require IE to operate. The user agent string trick isn't nearly as useful as it used to be. Of course, this is actually good, because it means that most sites just work with Firefox and Chrome/Chromium.

Still, some companies use ActiveX controls. What I find interesting is the attitude of the technical support for some of these sites which acts like any browser other than IE is junk because it won't work with their site, while the actual problem is their use of an old, non-standard, and insecure technology.

Quoting:I suspect an ActiveX control in most sites that still require IE to operate.

Not necessarily IE, sometimes the requirement is Windows.

Over last weekend, I was at IKEA looking to remodel our kitchen. They have a pretty nice Plan your kitchen in 3D tool to help out in the design, choosing the items, and BOM. The tool is a really nice browser based application that requires Firefox or IE. Unfortunately, when I tried to download it on my Linux box, it kept sending me to Mozilla home page. I tried it on my wife's Windows machine using same Firefox version, it worked flawlessly.

I haven't looked into the details but it downloads an xpi file. I assume it requires Windows for other reasons, may be ActiveX.

Quoting:Not necessarily IE, sometimes the requirement is Windows.

As is true for almost all viruses.