Well, having come from a wierd environment where UNIX (and a certain other well-known nearly quarter-century old proprietary operating system) were barely tolerated by the Corporate Management that was 1500+ miles away and who thought Windows was the Cat's Meow, I can sympathize with both sides of the argument.
Part of the reason they never issued me a PC (I had to use the Citrix ICA client on my UNIX box to connect to an NT server on our LAN) was that the standing joke was that they knew I'd run Linux on it instead of Windows. Actually, the real joke is that I had Linux running on another disk on my UNIX workstation, so if they'd deigned to issue me a PC, it would have run whatever "they" decided should run on it. I only needed it now and then to file time cards for when I was taking vacation, or to read a Word document. (Even that was hilarious - as we all know, there are inter-version compatability problems with Word, and sometimes our print servers would barf on some of the documents that were generated internally that I printed...) But, I do believe that when an employer issues you a piece of gear, they have the right to tell you what you can/will run on it and have the expectation that you will follow that edict. The flip side of that They are accepting the responsibility for making that Business Decision, and if a virus comes in and wipes out their vital records or whatever, tough - it's THEIR problem, and they have only themselves to blame. Setting yourself up to be fired for "damaging" company equipment is just plain stupid, particularly in this job market. So, what can you do about it? Well, I'm assuming (yeah, I know about assuming stuff, OK?) that at some point, they will be trading up their hardware, and possibly have done so recently, so there may be a surplus box or two that could have become "available". If you were to "recycle" said box(es) and put Linux on them (without perturbing the "real" machines running Windows), you could run them in parallel and demonstrate Linux' capabilities in a less confrontational manner. And, to bring all this back on topic, I'm still trying to figure out why folks are straining to retrofit the OpenSSH patches onto Red Hat 6.2. While I can understand why many folks, particularly those using Linux in a business environment rather than as a hobby, don't rush out to install bleeding edge distribution releases and/or 2.5.n kernels, I don't think it's a bad idea to upgrade to a distribution/release that is demonstrably stable, so it's maintainable just in case there's an OhMyGawd security patch that was needed Yesterday. I run SuSE 7.3 on my usual dial-up system (that I'm typing this on now) and SuSE 8.0 on my new machine (to which I plan to kick over to on a full-time basis shortly). I make bloody sure I have all of the latest security-related patches installed ASAP. Trying to maintain a RH 6.2 system to that level of protection is a frightening prospect... Bayard ***************************************************************** To unsubscribe from this list, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the text 'unsubscribe gnhlug' in the message body. *****************************************************************
