Wrong. The Supreme Court has already ruled that anything done on company computers absolutely IS the business of the company. There is no such thing as "your business" on a work computer. Period.
If he had a personal laptop there with his own cell wireless or used a personal cell phone, no problem.
Well I happen to know that as a whole, UK is sold heart and soul into the Microsoft world. Many of their sites and services do in fact function fine on Linux, but certainly not all.
They use Cisco for VPNs, so should you be in a situation for VPN usage, support on Linux is just fine for that.
Wireless doesn't do anything special, so it's fine too on Linux. I've tested it thoroughly. They do like to use odd key indexes on some of their secured APs, so make sure you know how to change your key index.
Many of their internal sites are Sharepoint and _should_ work just fine with Firefox on Linux, but not guaranteed.
Office 2007 is pretty much their standard, so you may find many documents you have to download for class could be in Microsoft's own XML flavor. Being that I'm not a student, I don't know if this is an issue or not.
Other than that, I have had success authenticating to their AD domain on Ubuntu. As a fun side note, they gave their domain the super original name of AD.
Is being rude the general company culture? Are the top level management rude and unappreciative to those under them?
If so, you are an army of one up against quite a challenge. Changing company culture while not impossible, is very hard for one person with no authority to do.
You can try the "I'm ok, are you ok?" method. Force them to either admit you have done a good job or tell you what is wrong. Getting people to formulate what's bugging them may force them to realize they aren't really upset with you but rather the crappy meeting they just got out of. You can do it simply with "so is everything working ok and are you all set?" after fixing something or something like that.
If all else fails, I'd suggest changing companies if you can. I did because of a situation VERY similar to the one you are in and it was the single best career move I've ever made.
9.04 is broken for me in some spectacularly stupid and disappointing ways.
-Intel video sucks. Actually come to think of it, this one has probably 3 or 4 sub-issues all on its own
-Brasero doesn't work. Luckily K3B does.
-God awful performance on some Q3 engine based games (8.10 wasn't much better but 8.04 was)
-Right mouse clicks in Firefox randomly do strange things like pick a random item out of the right click menu and select it automatically
-DVD playback is broken despite hours of trying to fix it
-VPNC has a stupidly bizarre bug where it won't let me configure a VPN connection. How this made it out of QA defies explanation.
-Occasionally the computer hangs while the screen is locked.
-Lock screen is taken out of the default CTRL+ALT+DEL menu. Who thought THAT was a good idea?
And these are only the things I've found in a couple of weeks. God only know what other stupid things await me to discover.
In my opinion, 9.04 feel more like a very rough beta at best. To say I'm disappointed with them over this release would be the understatement of the year.
There are people certainly violating Microsoft's IP in areas like Samba
Wrong. Microsoft has worked with the Samba team to get their protocols implemented as required by the European Union stipulation. To try to attack the Samba team over this would essentially spell an end to Microsoft doing business in the EU.
All I ask is a chance to prove that money can't make me happy.
