Getting people into Linux (was: donated computers lab setup)

[Max Pyziur]

On Sun, 31 Dec 2006, Dave Sampson wrote:

> Hey folks,
>
> The chat about this subject is pretty good. I will share some thoughts and 
> experiences.
>
> First and foremost I am an open source geographer, so instead of convincing 
> people to move to Linux as a rebuke against the system I try to expose other 
> geographers and neo-geographers (all the folks that like google earth and 
> google maps etc) to the world of free software and free data for that 
> software. Now the projects I am interested in are all cross platform, but 
> their ancestors are from the Linux world.
>
> In my journeys I have helped organize users groups and helped two like groups 
> in Ottawa merge into one.
> http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php/Ottawa_Chapter  the success of the merge was 
> based on the Open Geospatial foundation www.osgeo.org . the benefit of this 
> foundation is means to rally with other people and share resources to promote 
> open source geomatics tools.  We focus on projects, not necessarily OS's as 
> we promote cross platform.
>


[... good information deleted for the sake of brevity ...]

Are there any statistics which are published regularly which show the 
adoption of Linux, both at the server and desktop levels, over the last 
5-10 years?

Here are stats from a website which I've been running for a number of 
years. One set of stats is from December 2006, the other from December 
2003.  There has been no advocacy of OS's, but the server has been running 
some flavor of RedHat/Fedora since 2000.

Dec 2006
  1: 3747858: OS unknown
  2: 1263906: Windows
  3:   46073: Macintosh
  4:   16892: Unix
   :   16367:   Linux
   :     273:   SunOS
   :     129:   BSD
   :      91:   HP-UX
   :      25:   Other Unix
   :       7:   IRIX
  5:     312: WebTV
  6:      30: OS/2
  7:      30: RISC OS
  8:       4: Amiga
  9:       3: OpenVMS
10:       1: BeOS

Dec 2003
1: 1507785: Windows
2:  564883: OS unknown
3:   38119: Macintosh
4:    9641: Unix
  :    8400:   Linux
  :     945:   SunOS
  :     150:   BSD
  :      48:   OSF1
  :      38:   Other Unix
  :      26:   IRIX
  :      23:   AIX
  :      11:   HP-UX
5:     530: WebTV
6:      90: OS/2
7:      48: RISC OS
8:       4: BeOS

(The Unix section has been expanded to show more detail)

Personally, there is no doubt that the Linux community is incredibly 
active on a virtual level, as exhibited by the vitality of the key 
projects (Apache, sendmail, Linux kernel, etc), as well as some of the 
obscure ones (gnomad2, various Perl Modules, etc).  However, I have yet to 
physically walk into an environment (workplace, university computer lab) 
where you could discern non-Windows/Mac users of any sort of breadth or 
depth.

Thoughts?

Max Pyziur
pyz at brama.com
Desktop Linux user since 1998



>
>
>
> Guillermo Garron wrote:
>> On 12/31/06, Norm <maillist at sios.ca> wrote:
>>> 
>>> Guillermo.
>>> Good to see that you are doing your part.  I don't have any recycled PC
>>> available at this time and none "promised".  If I acquire  several
>>> (enough to make shipping them worth while) are you in a position to
>>> distribute them?
>> Sure I can, I can work together with Universities, to make them help
>> me distribute them.
>> thanks a lot, and if you can that will be appreciated
>>> Recently I found a well written howto on SSL certificates at
>>> http://www.eclectica.ca/howto/ssl-cert-howto.php, He does have a Spanish
>>> version on line already but it may be a good quick add to your site.
>> Thank you a lot, I will add both the English and the Spanish versions.
>> 
>> regards,
>> 
>
>