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> I am happy there is info on how to "liberate" these devices. The school's usecases are much more around having a locked down environment so that kids' system

by WWLink 3y ago

> I am happy there is info on how to "liberate" these devices. The school's usecases are much more around having a locked down environment so that kids' systems can be recovered easily, and I don't know if just installing Ubuntu helps a lot with that use case. I know it's not practical, but man that sounds like a hell of a cop out. But that's where we are. I feel like with school computers the focus shouldn't be on locking them down but making them easy to restore if they get screwed up. And the students who do screw their computer up should be walked through fixing it. Actually they all should be walked through fixing it. That should be day 1 when the laptops are handed out with no OS on them.

sdenton4 3y ago
When I was a kid, they handed us a blank laptop and a Gentoo Stage-0 install CD. And we liked it!
- mavhc 3y ago
  You had a CD? We had to flip switches to install the bootloader by hand. My security at school is: 1. Set bios password, 2. Set computer to only boot from FDE ssd, 3. Secure boot, 4. Filesystem ACL, 5. set to only run code from places users can't write to
rtpg 3y ago
IT professionals with a decade of experience routinely fuck up their own environments and struggle to fix it. Asking IT staff to walk thorough “fixing up” a borked Linux env (for example because some kid is half following some tutorial to get some weird thing working and in the process breaking repos) is a major ask. Having said that… yeah what I meant really is “have an easy way to reset it all”. This is what home directory partitions and the like are for, of course! And schools are not in the business of teaching kids how to install an OS to a laptop. There are real things to do in the world. Imagine being a kid who does not care about computers. You are now being asked to install an OS so you can use some word processor. What? Interested kids should have good outlets and ways to experiment (like these tech interns fixing the busted computers!), but really the point of giving kids computers is not to get them learning sysops
- NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
  One time I got a bee in my bonnet about cross-grading my Ubuntu system from 32-bit to 64-bit. I blame Chris Siebenmann for linking me to the HOWTO article. Cross-grading is not for the faint of heart. It's the worst I've ever messed up any system, personal or at work. All kinds of things broke in novel ways, and it took me about 2 weeks to put it together again, which was a miraculous event in itself. I rejoiced when X and KDE were able to start again. And that's the price I paid to have an up-to-date system without reformatting.

by WWLink 3y ago

sdenton4 3y ago

When I was a kid, they handed us a blank laptop and a Gentoo Stage-0 install CD. And we liked it!

mavhc 3y ago
You had a CD? We had to flip switches to install the bootloader by hand. My security at school is: 1. Set bios password, 2. Set computer to only boot from FDE ssd, 3. Secure boot, 4. Filesystem ACL, 5. set to only run code from places users can't write to

rtpg 3y ago

IT professionals with a decade of experience routinely fuck up their own environments and struggle to fix it. Asking IT staff to walk thorough “fixing up” a borked Linux env (for example because some kid is half following some tutorial to get some weird thing working and in the process breaking repos) is a major ask. Having said that… yeah what I meant really is “have an easy way to reset it all”. This is what home directory partitions and the like are for, of course! And schools are not in the business of teaching kids how to install an OS to a laptop. There are real things to do in the world. Imagine being a kid who does not care about computers. You are now being asked to install an OS so you can use some word processor. What? Interested kids should have good outlets and ways to experiment (like these tech interns fixing the busted computers!), but really the point of giving kids computers is not to get them learning sysops

NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
One time I got a bee in my bonnet about cross-grading my Ubuntu system from 32-bit to 64-bit. I blame Chris Siebenmann for linking me to the HOWTO article. Cross-grading is not for the faint of heart. It's the worst I've ever messed up any system, personal or at work. All kinds of things broke in novel ways, and it took me about 2 weeks to put it together again, which was a miraculous event in itself. I rejoiced when X and KDE were able to start again. And that's the price I paid to have an up-to-date system without reformatting.