Ubuntu at Toyota
I’m waiting a few hours at the Thompson Toyota, my Prius is getting some minor work done to it to pass state inspection, it still takes a few hours. They have a wireless connection to the Internet, but even though last time I connected without problems this time my PII Debian system was not happy. So I checked out the bank of beat up Gateways with vagabond keyboards in the corner. I wiggle the mouse, and up pops the Ubuntu Heron! Wow! I can tell from the scribbled out tag that these are likely hand me downs from Thompson Lexus, I bet them bastards over there now have Vista. I expect that they just didn’t want to pay for Licenses, but I can do some work!
The neat part is that other people are actually using them. By default there are no icons on the desktop, so some people can’t find Firefox right away, but they find it. The card games seem most popular thought, at least today. I guess Ubuntu really is a user friendly system.
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Interesting – though it only adds to the irony that Toyota Financial’s website is entirely unusable with Linux. I even emailed tech support, and received a response stating that the Toyota Financial web site does not support Linux – really helpful, eh?
It is one of the reasons that I’ll be re-financing and giving my car loan to a company that doesn’t discriminate on such a pointless basis.
Somebody ought to try to use the TFS website from one of those Ubuntu machines there at Thompson, just to see what they say.
Comment by Chip Bennett — August 18, 2008 @ 18:37 GMT
I too have the issues with Toyota Financial’s website using FF in Linux. I found the solution is to install the FlashBlock add-on. It will get rid of that nasty flash element that gets pasted on top of the entire page and then the entire page actually becomes usable!
I also e-mailed them and they showed the same disregard for Linux users.
Comment by Nick — August 19, 2008 @ 18:40 GMT
Regarding the comments about the TFS site not working with Linux…that’s weird! It’s been a while since I paid off my latest RAV4, but I routinely accessed my account info at TFS prior to paying it off and never had problems. I know I accessed the site at least a couple of times after paying off the loan, too, and no trouble then either. I’ve used Ubuntu since 2005 and numerous other Linux distros prior to that; I can’t even recall which distro I was using during my prior 2 most recent Toyota car loans, but I know I never had trouble accessing my account at TFS. I’ve been using SeaMonkey since before its name change (it used to be known as “Mozilla Suite”), and various other Mozilla-based browsers prior to that. I can’t honestly recall if I ever tried using Firefox to access TFS, but probably didn’t as I rarely use FF.
(NOTE: I hope this doesn’t end up posted a zillion times! I keep trying again because a database error occurs.)
Comment by Grace — August 19, 2008 @ 23:57 GMT
I was in Lowes this week and they too were using Linux at their kiosks. I couldn’t tell the distro, but it was an old version of KDE with a terminal open to their CRM software.
I don’t think seeing Linux around is nearly as uncommon as it used to be.
Comment by Jordon Mears — August 20, 2008 @ 13:54 GMT
I agree with Jordon, but while linux in a kiosks isn’t that strange, actually expecting people to use it in a non-tech environment was. They even had the most recent security patches.
Comment by Sven Heinicke — August 20, 2008 @ 14:03 GMT
Old Gateway computers at a former place of employment got re-used for LDAP, SquidProxy, and even Ubuntu on public machines.
Comment by Tony P — August 20, 2008 @ 20:51 GMT
Thank for info, i will come back later
Comment by car loans — March 10, 2010 @ 08:36 GMT