Current mood:	chipper
Entry tags:	education, floss, hardware, ooo, open source, openoffice, software, ubuntu

Self-booting Ubuntu

Not as funny as it sounds .. an English teacher had some horrid connection issues that caused several blue screens of death. I had too much on my plate and a technician would be able to make good any repairs until after the weekend. Instead I I tossed him a self booting Ubuntu CDROM and a spare IT student to show him how to boot from it. I was only buying him some time so he could do some typing with OpenOffice on his USB key but in fact, with no instruction they got the wireless Internet working at school, a printer and later even got it working at home. The following week he asked for it to be installed as a dual boot option and refuses to hand back the CDROM.

As he put it, "insurance from the madness with something that bloody works".

We forget that most casual users are less than forgiving with computer errors and perhaps less demanding of what we think that they might need from a computer.