Tell HN: My horror story as a student dealing with my University computer lab

There's nothing inherently wrong with fvwm2. I'm sure it was cutting edge back in your day. But it's ridiculously outdated in 2009. You might have learnt to use it, but today's students need to unlearn everything they've learnt. Even if they manage that, it's plain inefficient. By a big margin.

Whatever technology you grew up with, you're bound to think of that as the natural interface. That's exactly the point I was making about the professors.

There was a time when you had to do typesetting by typewriter. There was a time when all cars were stick-shift. There was a time when farmers had to plant seeds manually. That doesn't mean it's a good idea to do any of those things today.

I'm not sure if you were claiming you will learn linux better if you use fvwm2, but that's simply not true.

But that is not the main point I'm making. What you need to understand is that no matter what you, the admins or anyone else might think of fvwm2, it's turning away the students in droves. This needs to be stopped.

Why would anyone use the computer lab? How many undergrads actually do any computing for which $500 desktop computers in their dorm rooms would not be more than sufficient? Do the labs require special, non-OS software? In this day in age, that would be really weird. Even if classes are taught using Microsoft stuff, the basic tools are all free anymore.

I recall reading that universities are doing away with dorm phone lines -- between cell phones and VOIP, students have no use for them anymore.

I also use a text login, fvwm2, and install things from source (albiet in Gentoo rather than Ubuntu). As a 19 year old kid, should I feel hard done by? :)

Maybe it's different in England, but I've found my university's computer labs (Uni. of Warwick) to be useful, and not insane. I know from experience that if I didn't have my own computer (as was the case when it was broken during my first week), I could get by without too much frustration using the university systems. I can even use dvorak.

(Noone else seems to have problems with them either, so it's not just that the admins are as insane as I am.)

Not that this is meaningful data. But I'm not sure your experiences are either. Whether computer labs provide value depends on the labs and the students. There's no answer that will apply to all universities.

So how do you propose we set things up? Most of the need for CS labs is conformity in grading/teaching. I see the appeal - both fiscal and hacker-practical - for dropping the Uni labs, but I think that forcing 95% of CS majors to rely on 5% of their peers for support would cause enough grading and deadline ("I couldn't get the package to compile in time!") arguments that both faculty and undergrads would come to hate things even more.

Granted, there are obvious upsides to forcing people to learn systems other than Windows for their own use, and I think enough people would eventually adapt, but I think the initial hurdle would just be too much to overcome in a decently sized department.

First of all, root access to the machine should be granted to anyone at a terminal. Physical access bypasses any sort of realistic security placed on the system.

At MIT, the computing infrastructure is largely a collaboration between students and admins. This has worked incredibly well, and led us to have a continually evolving system and created a great system for tech support.

Right now we're in the process of testing Athena 10, a ubuntu-based overhaul to our old redhat system. It's a huge task, and a majority of the bugfixes and patches have come from student hackers.

You're running linux, so that's a start. I'd suggest seeing if you can get some of the defaults changed (such as fvwm2), and maybe start a discussion about moving to a more user-friendly distribution.

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Here's a few resources about Athena@MIT: http://web.mit.edu/ist/isnews/v24/n02/240203.html http://blog.spang.cc/2008/01/10/mit-athena-not-dead-yet