Re: tlug: Office suite for use under Linux

[Manuel Chakravarty <chak@example.com>]

"Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull@example.com> worte,

> However, the three American universities I know best (Ohio University
> (Athens), Stanford University, and the Ohio State University
> (Columbus)) all provide extremely strong non-credit, free curricula in
> computer usage at their computing centers.  These curricula rival most
> academic departments for breadth and depth.  I know that OSU provided
> a course on Linux (using Welsh's Running Linux as the text), as well
> as regexp and Excel classes.

That is definitely a good idea.  My point (in response to
Karl-Max Wagner) was more or less that this is not only a
problem in Japan, because I missed something like that also
at the two German universities that I know best (Univ. of
Karlsruhe and Technical Univ. of Berlin).

> The thing is, with a moderate quality Japanese-localized Linux
> distribution and maybe two undergrad sysad/advisors, I think it would
> be quite possible to provide undergrads with quite powerful systems at
> rather low cost.

I agree.  I also think that Linux would be particularly good
for that purpose, because it requires less resources than
Win and for the students ease of use is not that critical (I
mean, it can't hurt them to invest some time playing around
a little with their machine).

> But nobody is interested in providing a decent curriculum---and we
> have lots of resources allegedly intended for that purpose.

There may be an interest, but I guess their is too much
politics involved to hope for significant progress (but also
this is by no means a purely Japanese probelm---I had five
years to puzzle over the *still ongoing* attempts of the CS
department of the TU Berlin to get to a decent undergard
curriculum).

Cheers,

Manuel

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