Opera Campus Crew Blog

Yess! Iihhaaa! We did it! We installed Opera in NSU computer labs! It was a very long quest... we took the wrong way at first, then we took the wrong way again... and finally, almost accidentally, we realized that we managed to do it!

If somebody wants to get experience and wisdom we gained during the quest, here it comes:

1. The true way of installing software is very long and difficult: By the end of the semester IT teachers make the list of required software, come to agreement with their directors and then the required software is installed into one HDD image. In the next semester all disks in every computer in labs are cleared and the image is copied to every computer. Every week all computers' disks are again restored from this canonical image.

2. If you are not a system administrator or a big teacher, you will never be able to make anybody install anything. Bureaucratism is awful, you will never defeat it, you will never run away from it. Exception is the next point.

3. The way we finally installed Opera was really accidental. This year our university will hold a regional programming contest. It seems that administrators don't know much about contest programming or they just don't have enough time, so they just asked my groupmate (who is kind of a trainer for the NSU-team) to install software and other stuff that is needed for programming. A hundred times I have asked him to install Opera before, and when he finally had the chance, he remembered it! And he installed Opera into the canonical image and now it is spread all over labs.

This was a great way around the bureaucratic system.