Fedora in Court
I served Jury Duty today.
Besides the warm fuzzy feeling of doing my civic duty, I was pleasantly surprised to see good ol’ Linux as the OS of choice for the jury waiting room.
Three computers, probably cheap and slow, were running Fedora (Core 2 I think), using Xfce with the Windows XP theme, in Kiosk mode. Once I paid my daily rate, I could use Firefox to surf, GAIM to IM with, and they even have a flash demo of how to use OpenOffice. Of course my company uses Exchange, and I can’t check my email there without IE, but GAIM allowed me to at least check in with the troops back in the office.
I watched as a few not so technical people paid and logged in, mostly to check their Yahoo! or Hotmail email accounts. Not one of them seemed frightened by the interface, and I imagine they all assumed it was Windows.
In the very least, it was comforting to know that my hard earned tax dollars go to the upkeep of the court, not for the internet Kiosk software.
The only thing that was a little saddening, was the lack of “Linux branding”. Using the XP theme is a great way to fool people into thinking they are using Windows, but it would have been great for the user to learn, maybe even when they log out, that they’ve just used a Free, non-Windows product. (And enjoyed it).
Playing Catch
It’s been a while since I’ve touched this thing. Been incredibly busy with work. I have a nasty habit of putting work first, and pretty much ignoring everything else in my life until I’m done.
Well, after deleting all my comment spam and hacking my way back into my blog admin, its’ time to start catching up with all the things I put on hold two months ago.