New trainee laptop fleet for our Open Source courses
Archive - Originally posted on "The Horse's Mouth" - 2007-12-30 18:08:37 - Graham Ellis
"The average age of our fleet is less than 3 years" - so said EasyJet when we flew with them earlier this month. In our business model too we keep our equipment right up to date - our training centre and business hotel was completely refitted less than 18 months ago, and we have just replaced our entire fleet of trainee laptops ...
... if you come on a course with us during January 2008, your machine will be less that a month old!
The new systems came with Windows Vista, and we'll be leaving that on them all and available for delegates who want to use a Microsoft operating system. We're also installing the latest Cygwin there so that all the Gnu utilities (such as C Compilers!) are available for Windows users during courses. And we're making them dual bootable to Linux too ...
What version(s) of software should we be using for our 2008 courses? We're downloading fresh versions and installing them over this slightly quieter few days, going with the latest stable or release candidate versions - nothing too old, and nothing that's Alpha or Beta release or "bleeding edge". So that means:
Perl 5.10.0, Python 2.5.1, Tcl 8.5.0, Java JDK SE6, httpd 2.2.6, Tomcat 6.0.14, MySQL 5.1.22 with connector-J 5.1.1, PHP 5.2.5, Gcc 3.4.4, Ruby 1.8.6, Cygwin 1.5.24.
Not everyone will be running such recent versions on their work systems, of course, and we'll be happy for people to experiment with Apache httpd 2.0 (for example) if they need to learn how to build jk connectors (Easy under 2.2 - provided with the distribution!) and we'll retain some other heritage versions too such as PHP 4.4 to allow people to check script compatibility. And I think I have a Python 2.2 somewhere ;-)
"The average age of our fleet is less than 3 years" - so said EasyJet when we flew with them earlier this month. In our business model too we keep our equipment right up to date - our training centre and business hotel was completely refitted less than 18 months ago, and we have just replaced our entire fleet of trainee laptops ...