Linux Foundation Announces LinuxCon Brazil

Posted May 14, 2010 1:21 UTC (Fri) by rbrito (guest, #66188)
Parent article: Linux Foundation Announces LinuxCon Brazil

This will be an excellent opportunity to the outsiders to know how much our government promotes the use of Free Software.

Unfortunately, that's not exactly the case with the population that is basically "sold" to Microsoft.

It's a sad situation: but 2 cable guys came here the other day to see the intermittent behavior of my cable modem (which, curiously, unsynchronizes itself from the cable line only when a wireless router is connected to it, but not when a desktop is directly plugged---and I have already ruled out the problems of interference) and they thought that the operating system that I used was different.

I told them that it was called Linux (running pure Debian unstable here, with fluxbox and a very minimal environment), and asked if they had ever heard of something called Ubuntu (and other distributions).

They simply did not know what I was talking about. And they also didn't know what an ARP request was and I could not complain about a second problem that I had. :-(

Nevertheless, according to my experience with my students, despite some governmental efforts, this is a reasonable picture of the whole population, in general.

Linux Foundation Announces LinuxCon Brazil

Posted May 14, 2010 2:06 UTC (Fri) by pr1268 (guest, #24648) [Link] (1 responses)

Darn. I thought that Brazil had a more Linux-friendly (if not Linux-aware) attitude than what your experience alludes to. (I assume you are from Brazil.)

The cable companies, and the service contractors they hire, usually cater solely to the 90% of customers using Microsoft Windows (and the bulk of the remaining 10% who use Mac OS). Similarly, the knowledge and technical expertise of the service technicians has been "dumbed down" to match the users' OSes. At least that's a fair generalization of how cable Internet works in here in the U.S.

Linux Foundation Announces LinuxCon Brazil

Posted May 14, 2010 14:49 UTC (Fri) by NAR (subscriber, #1313) [Link]

The very first software I bought was a collection of pirated C+4 games on a cassette - some 20 years ago. In this "copyright-not-aware" culture Windows is essentially free (as in beer). I don't know if the situation is similar in Brazil to the situation in Eastern Europe, but this is one of the many reason why people don't care about Linux. The (cracked) Windows works and can run the (cracked) applications, so why bother?