There is another good reason. In linux, non-root users cannot install system wide software, but they can still install software into their home folder - although that might be a bit out of the technical scope of the teacher you are dealing with

I think I can get him to understand that if I explain it in a simple form (such as how you have presented it here (except for all the root and user jargon--he won't understand that))

I even made the username and password for the regular user as easy as possible. The username is mitchell and then the password is the school name. The root password I have made secret so that no one can reak havoc

Quite a coincidence about the teacher's name...

I don't get it

I made the username the teacher's name, because that's how they do it for the Windows logons at my school.

(unless i'm mistaken Kerm's last name is mitchell....)

Oh, right I forgot about that.

Kerm, are you 60 years old and senile

Huh? What were we talking about? Anyway, back in my day we had to bicycle six miles to get the internet, and we were grateful for 9600 baud...

Well, he forgot. So I never had to give him any of these great reasons. Thanks for the advice anyways. Now, I just have to get VB on that ubuntu computer. I have tried REALbasic, but I had trouble getting it to work. So, now I'm trying to install wine and then run the windows version of vb6. Any advice?

Yes, but you aren't going to like it. The simplest is to just not use VB. Its a substandard language that really only took off on windows because it was practically the only scripting lang available on windows (and immediate access to all of the win32 API). Therefore there haven't been any (that I know of) attempts to really port VB to linux, because VB sucks. Linux has Python, Perl, etc... instead of VB

Now I remember you saying this was for a VB class, which is why I told you that you weren't going to like it. Really the only option I can think of is Wine - run it from a command line and keep getting all the missing DLLs it reports.... I do believe you need the vb6 runtime tho (vbrun60.exe) to be installed before you try running a VB program. Good luck....

Alright, I'm going to try to install wine tomorrow, and see if I can get vb working. I have the install cd for VB6. Is that of any use, or is everything online?

you need the CD because VB6 (the studio/ID part) isn't free

Well I just ran the setup using wine and it installed fine. VB worked perfect. There was no need to find any missing .dlls The only problem is that it crashes whenever you run the program. I'm not sure why it does, but it doesn't matter anymore because: This computer belonged to a fellow classmate. He approached me at one point because he was getting the windows failed to initialize errors. We tried reinstalling Windows...you know the story. But, he got fed up with Ubuntu today and ran down to the CAD room, and got a spare harddrive from them with Windows 98 on it. So we hooked that up, and now we no longer have a linux computer at school.

Since the school has no need for that 8 GB harddrive with Linux on it, I think I'm going to be able to take it home and stick it in my really really old computer

well, at least you get to keep the Linux drive, that is a good thing

Yeah I'm excited. This is going to increase my hdd space on the old computer I'm installing it on by 400%.

I installed Wine on Cemetech0, but I just realized I have a slight problem. How can I run Wine from an ssh session?

Wait, isn't Cemetech0 is just a server? Why would you need Wine on it?

Because I want to host a couple of dedicated Blockland/TBM games, and that's a DOS program.

Ah, I see.

Edit:

Wow, a three word post. Sorry about that.

I just figured there was a linux port for it. A lot of open source software is multiplatform. It is open source, isn't it?

wine is a command line utility. So if you can have TBM/Blockland go straight into a dedicated server mode (without a GUI), then it can be run from wine via SSH just fine. Otherwise, you will have to use a remote-X session

Excellent, it can indeed go straight from the command line. Now, how would I configure load options to do that? [Answer to self: JFGI]