Xubuntu saves the day!!!

Well, last week we held a seismic imaging workshop in our department and we needed to convert our 16 XP machine classroom/laboratory into a X-windows/Linux classroom for the workshop. We were supposed to have only 40 attendees but the demand was high so 70 showed up and they were all supposed to be running X11 for them to work on specific seismic applications. So how were we going to do this? We booted all 16 Dell PC's (ranging from 733 MHZ P-III's with 256MB of RAM to 3.0 GHZ Pentium D systems with 1GB of RAM) and whatever Intel laptops people brought with Xubuntu CD's (version 6.06.1 since the guy in charge was too paranoid to go with the just released 6.10). So for a total cost of about $5.00 (25 CD's at 20 cents each) we converted 16 PC's plus a handful of laptops into X11 desktops, all with the same desktop which we could also convert back into XP systems in 5 minutes by just rebooting them all without the CD's. Plus anyone who walked in with a laptop who did not have X11 software could just reboot with a Xubuntu CD and be up in a few minutes. Everyone there was duly impressed. You just have to love those LiveCD's! We had tried others that took a lot longer to boot on our old P-III systems so we stuck with Xubuntu to boot fast on older systems. Way to go, Xubuntu!!!

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