Since I’m attending WPI in the fall I’ve needed pick out which classes I’m to take in the first two terms (which equals one semester.) To do that, WPI has setup my computer accounts on the network which has allowed me to start investigating what they’ve got. My first disappointment was a pretty Microsoft centric system. Exchange e-mail, a Windows user account, offers of Windows and Office licenses for five and ten dollars. But I was seeing Unix mentioned in places and after some investigation I found the first pleasant supprise. I have a shell account on ccc.wpi.edu that I can ssh into from on or off campus. Another disappointment however was talk of some of my classes requiring software that only runs on Windows and I really want to avoid running Windows on my systems. They do however have several computer labs where I could use the software, and this will be probably the usual way of using it, but they also have a Windows Terminal Server that I can login to with rdesktop from my GNU/Linux box and use Windows wares on. I also found I can remove the forward from the Unix to Exchange mail servers and read my e-mail with Mutt/Pine on my shell account and Squirrel Mail with my browser instead of being forced to use Outlook and Outlook webmail, which was going to be a major roadblock in the fight against running windows on my machines. I was intitially rather disappointed with the lack of support for Unix, but it seems it won’t be so bad.