College students using Fedora 15??

daz11 · #1 23rd August 2011, 06:23 AM

Background:
I just bought an HP DV4t a few weeks ago with a backlit keyboard, and completely took Windows 7 off to install Fedora 15 w/ Gnome 3...
I'm not new to computers/tech but I am also no IT major. I have built desktops and installed software/hardware...

I'm a Finance/Economics major taking online classes and campus classes..
I took windows off because I have a desktop for gaming and MS Office already, and I need something reliable all the time for school. I figured Fedora would suit me better with gnome-shell than Ubuntu with Unity. I was going to go Arch, but I don't have the time to configure it the way I would want it to work.

Any other college students using Fedora 15? Software Recommendations?

tsorvoja · #2 23rd August 2011, 07:36 AM

The Gnome3 (gnome-shell) is still pretty beta. Proper config-tools are missing for example. For proper out-of-the-box experience I would recommend LinuxMint or using KDE or other desktop manager in F15. Otherwise F15 is still good. Remember to encrypt your hard disk because you'll be using it a lot in public places.

Make sure the format your college wants your work. Usual format is .doc and Open-/LibreOffice generated .doc files might be an issue. Also gather info if your college LAN has some MS specific services (e.g. Exchange) which might not work with linux...

Here's few hints.

-Br, Timo

vernomcrp · #3 23rd August 2011, 07:55 AM

Yah, I think fedora latest version is look fine.

sonoran · #4 23rd August 2011, 08:57 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by tsorvoja

Make sure the format your college wants your work. Usual format is .doc and Open-/LibreOffice generated .doc files might be an issue. Also gather info if your college LAN has some MS specific services (e.g. Exchange) which might not work with linux...

When I was a college student (1966-74

) this would not have been tolerated. I mean, just whose University is it, anyway? Apparently college ain't what it used to be, and neither are college students. More's the pity.

Nothing like a protest to start off the academic year. Rallies, marches, sit-ins, occupy a building or two and before you know it you've got a General Strike. Lots of fun.

"You want my papers, Prof? Learn to read!"
"Administration in bed with Microsoft."
"Open Standards for Open Minds."
"Free the laptops NOW!"

GoinEasy9 · #5 23rd August 2011, 09:38 PM

Quote:

Nothing like a protest to start off the academic year. Rallies, marches, sit-ins, occupy a building or two and before you know it you've got a General Strike. Lots of fun.

Heh, Sounds like my freshman year at Columbia, 1968.

Computerphile · #6 23rd August 2011, 10:06 PM

Currently studying Network Engineering, and except for eduroam certificate issues with WiFi (they keep changing and not letting anyone know), Fedora 15 does the job.
Though, my college has some pretty weird ways of making things work on all/most plattforms. For example, in our VHDL programming class we get a 43GiB virtual VMware machine thats ready to use. When you're on a SSD, even with Linux, 43GiB is a lot of space just for a VHDL/FPGA interface/editor to the Altera cards.

sonoran · #7 23rd August 2011, 10:13 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by GoinEasy9

Heh, Sounds like my freshman year at Columbia, 1968.

Columbia College Class of '70 here. Good to see ya.

Things did come to a boil in '68. Must have been an interesting freshman year for you, what there was of it. ("On Strike - Shut It Down!")

Students don't have the same issues we did, but really any issue will do. It's the attitude that counts. The job of the young is to change the world, not conform to it. Oh well.

RupertPupkin · #8 23rd August 2011, 10:19 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by daz11

I'm a Finance/Economics major taking online classes and campus classes..
Software Recommendations?

The LibreOffice office suite should cover most of your needs. You may want to install R (yum install R) for doing statistics. Other than that I can't think of anything special you'd need. If you're really ambitious you could install LaTeX (yum install texlive-latex) for professional-looking typesetting of papers, but that has a bit of a learning curve.

fedvasu · #9 29th August 2011, 02:42 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by daz11

Background:
I just bought an HP DV4t a few weeks ago with a backlit keyboard, and completely took Windows 7 off to install Fedora 15 w/ Gnome 3...
I'm not new to computers/tech but I am also no IT major. I have built desktops and installed software/hardware...

I'm a Finance/Economics major taking online classes and campus classes..
I took windows off because I have a desktop for gaming and MS Office already, and I need something reliable all the time for school. I figured Fedora would suit me better with gnome-shell than Ubuntu with Unity. I was going to go Arch, but I don't have the time to configure it the way I would want it to work.

Any other college students using Fedora 15? Software Recommendations?

sorry for getting late to the party,

As RupertPumpkin suggested about LibreOffice,there other things ofcourse like GNUCash if you are into accounting(am i right guys?), GNU R for statistics (programming langauge approach to data analysis check the following link

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TaxJwC_MP9Q ,

and yeah I'm Grad student in Engineering ,I do basically everything on Fedora , from programming to plotting(fortran,python+scipy+matplotlib,occasiona l scheme) to watching movies to playing Games (Alien Arena totally

)

you should give games spin a spin sometimes (when you are like in a vaction , not as good as windows games but i think the best FOSS games)

so there were my 2 cents (so to speak)

silverglade00 · #10 31st August 2011, 10:35 PM

I just finished an undergrad degree in Information Science after completing half of the Computer Science program. I have spent weeks before looking for a way to do absolutely everything without Windows. The number one program you will need is VirtualBox. This is for a virtual Windows install because there will be some things you just cannot do without it. If it isn't professors who haven't heard of and/or don't care about Macs, much less Linux, it's the book publishers who include the CDs that require Windows. A lot of progress has been made to move things to the web, but they still insist on making them IE only. My university uses Blackboard, which works great for me under Firefox but will randomly crash in Chrome. Another thing that makes it hard for me is I cannot connect to our VPN with Linux, but I can on Windows, OSX, even my phone.