History

A few years ago we were in the standard situation of organisations in Slovakia. Computers used operating system MS Windows, partially installed ilegally, partially legalised based on several projekts between Microsoft and Ministery of Education. Computers were installed with software (everybody what he/she wants): of course MS Office, Adobe, MATLAB etc.

To change this situation, we chose a system of slow changes. We specify with each new computer its purpose. New employees and PhD students receive computers with operating system Linux.

Actual situation

Operating system Linux is nowadays in majority at the department. The most popular is MandrivaLinux, However, Ubuntu has gained in recent times. A few of the staff still use (legal) Windows.

We have started to use OpenOffice as the standard office software due to interoperability reasons. Since 2007/08 is has been taught in bachelor study (Foundation of Informatics) where text, table processing, and presentations are taught. For the future, we also plan to introduce GoogleDocs.

Student PC room is equipped with dual-boot PCs (Windows/Mandriva). However, Winodws is behind a firewall and cannot connect outside the University (due to virus problems). Students (not suprisingly) prefer Mandriva and most of them also install Linux at home.

We operate several servers. Two of them are fileservers for employees and students (Debian Linux) and also as directory servers (LDAP) so that everybody can login at any PC with his/her name/password and gets files, desktop, shared conference CDs, electronic books, etc. Fileservers also provide shared programs: MATLAB (multiplatform), OpenOffice, teTeX, etc.

Webservers operate under Mandriva and contain mapped storage from fileservers with user web pages. We also administer the faculty e-learning system Moodle

Department is filtered from the rest of the faculty with a router/firewall (BSD).