Advocacy report [part 1]

[Paul G Cooper <pgc maths warwick ac uk>]

Hi,

You might remember that I asked for some advocay tips a while ago - well
now I'll tell you how it went . Just as a reminder - I had more or less
persueded the Maths department to switch to gnome as the default desktop
(used to be fvwm) on linux machines. Myself and the Maths dept sys admin
had a meeting with the main campus sys admins to discuss harmonizing
desktop setups and the encroachment of NT. 

The story is long so I've split it into two (still quite long) parts. Part
1 concerns the meeting with central campus sys admins and part 2 with my
attempt to setup gnome in the maths department. Part 1 may be relevant to
the recent discussions about image and pr. Part 2 has more to do with
implememntation and observations of newbie gnome users.

By and large the meeting went well and we agreed about alot of things.
They had already done a little investigating and were impressed with our
gnome setup.

However these guys are (understandibly) fairly conservative about what
goes on their machines and they felt that GNOME had a reputation for being
unstable BUT they felt the GNU in GNOME meant this would get sorted out
eventually (I told them it was already sorted out more or less - this was
a week before October Gnome). So *I think* we agreed that kde would go on
the machines now(ish) - as they are confident it's stable - and Gnome in a
few months when they're happy it's stable. Before we get into KDE / Gnome
stability comparisons or whatever I'd like to point out that them adopting
kde is good for gnome. How? Becasue these are hardcore unix console guys
that don't use desktops so to them it's all the same thing by different
people. Once we get kde through the door it will be easy for gnome to
follow. 

They saw we were using enlightenment and were worried that it was a bit of
a resource hog (again I know that with a minimal theme it isn't - that's
not the point) I did show them sawmill but despite the fact that the main
developer is from Warwick uni they weren't that impressed as they
considered it an unstable work in progress. Unstable is unfair (I think
it's great!) but since we talked it's revved from 0.11 to 0.14 so 'in
progress' is fair enough. I mentioned that could also use WM or IceWM so
had some scope for a lighter weight wm. I know there are more wm's that
support gnome but I didn't want to give the impression that they would end
up supporting 15 wm's.

So the moral of this part of the story is that (first) impressions count
even with Unix people who perhaps should know better. If I take these guys
impression to the extreme it seem that our 'PR dept.' has to battle the
impression that gnome

. is not stable
. relies on enlightenment which is a resource hog

but in our favour is

. the gnu in gnome 
. that when you actually show gnome people realise it's good, and much
nicer than NT!

Admittedly two sys admins from wariwck uni isn't a hugely representative
sample!

Part 2 to follow

Paul

-------------------------------------------------------
 Paul Cooper           | pgc@maths.warwick.ac.uk  
 Phd Research Student  | 01203 523523 ext. 26325
 Room 129              | www.maths.warwick.ac.uk/~pgc/                         
 Mathematics Institute |                          
 University of Warwick |                          
 Coventry, CV5 7AL     |                          
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