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you might be interested in this PXES. version 0.9 was released yesterday but never mind that.

this will not provide you with a thin client but with dummy clients. meaning that the client boots from the network via a pxe enabled card (most modern nics support this) and therefore you can disable (or remove) the floopy drive, the cdrom, the dvd, and the hard disk.

translation: the user cannot physically access the operating system except thru the network.

its pretty simple to setup and can even be used with windows terminal services but i do not recommend that legacy OS. in fact, i will recommend mandrake linux for several reasons:
1. draksec will sandbox your users very fast without much interaction from you (if required)
2. if you are not able to set up the server side on pxes. employ drakTermServ. mandrake's dummy terminal solution that comes standard with its distro.
3. it comes with kde which has a kiosk mode available (you will have to do your own research i m afraid)
4. it comes with openoffice.org meaning that your users can also read and write word documents, excel sheets, powerpoint presentations, adobe reader pdf (write!) and flash swf among other nice stuff.

did i mention the dummy clients wont have an operating system? meaning that you will only administer the operating system from the terminal server.

furthermore, (2 or 3 years ago) largo florida has a similar setup for 400 pc running of a 1gb ram dual p3-900 server or something like that

and if you are really stingy with money go get the hp d441 4 monitors, 4 keyboards and mice and 1 pc.

enjoy

Ernie Ball.

This is why the Fortune 500 company for whom I work has adopted a new Linux strategy:

We don't talk about Linux to the press.


Which means Microsoft wins. No more Ernie Ball-style Linux success stories in the press.

>Yes, of course Ballmer would like us to believe that a Windows to Windows transition of more than ten thousand computers would just go smooth as silk.

They had some issues at first too and now are reaping the rewards.

Conversations are always difficult, most windows admins could write books regarding moving from one version of windows to another let alone a whole different operating system and suite of apps. Considering this article is has almost no facts or information other than Ballmer gloating its impossible to tell if something catastrophic has happened or its just another day working in IT.

Just after I posted that (remembering Ernie Ball from an earlier Reg. story) I noticed the same site has a list of large companies who've switched to Linux. Lots of them, with a bit of the story behind each, in just about every category you could imagine. A good number are using Linux on the desktop, not just in a server role.

A non tech company such as the world's largest manufacturer of guitar strings, perhaps?

This guide is mostly a compendium to help users of Microsoft products in migrating to free and open source software equivalents that they might not be familiar with.

In other words, if you've already decided to migrate and don't know much about where you're going, then this will help you. That seems to be insufficient. You need to know more about your destination (and where you're starting from) before you activate a migration.

Such a document is educational, but is not the only set of information that someone needs.

What's needed is an objective survey of organizations that have made a migration, including details of the work mix, what glitches they had to overcome, hidden training costs of moving, extra savings they hadn't anticipated from the move, etc.

Motivation for considering a migration is remarkable because it isn't trumpeted loudly by a particular company that stands to profit if you migrate. Competing organizations that have made a successful migration have little incentive to alert you to any advantages they might have gained from making such a migration. In fact, they can profit by keeping you in the dark if they have obtained a migration advantage.

Just how objective are the big IT consulting firms stand in such evaluations? A recent Gartner recommendation seems to resemble a long list of Why Not To migrate. And certainly there are genuine pitfalls. But IT consulting firms are not foolproof in their evaluations and recommendations nor are they immune to influence.

• what we did right,
• what we did wrong,
• what kind of business we do,
• how much did we save,
• how long did it take.
• would I do it again?

I'm thinking of case studies like Ernie Ball, but including other businesses, too.

See, e.g, here:

http://archive.infoworld.com/articles/hn/xml/02/11 /27/021127hnerniball.xml?s=IDGNS
November 27, 2002

http://linux.bryanconsulting.com/stories/storyRead er$172
10 June 2003
1 May 2002

etc. etc.

A little research please, editors

Link here

Look at these:

Pixar moves to Linux from SGI

Pixar switches from Sun to Linux

"Linux vendors only support their consumer releases (and free distributions) for a maximum of two years, Silver noted."

Sounds like the only research the Gartner Group did for this report was to call Microsoft, call RedHat, and find out what they do.

They don't even bother to say what the TCO issues are between Linux and Windows, they just say "If [enterprise complications result in high TCO] is true with Windows, "we see little reason to believe that the cultural or political issues will change just because the enterprise is now using Linux," he observes. They didn't even check. They didn't do a study of their own, they didn't talk to people who have done TCO studies of this, or talk to Businesses who have already made the jump. They looked at Windows, and they guessed.

And they charge $95 per copy for their uneducated guess.

At least they can do some work before charging people for it.

Windows generates Linux!

Allow me to explain.

Alan Cox; Richard Stallman; Bruce Perens; Wichert Akkerman; Miguel DeIcaza.

What do you see in this list of names? Are there any African-Americans on it? Absolutely not, none of those names sound like one a self-respecting black person would have! No Maurice, no Luther, no Lil' Kim. There are many other lists such as this, you can see one here. Flip through each page, do you see anything other than white faces? Of course you don't, because Open Source and its adherents are ardent racists and they absolutely forbid access to the sacred 'kernel' by any person of color.

Lets look at another list, this time a compendium of the companies using Linux. Are there any black owned companies on that list? Nooooooo. How about these companies? They all have something to do with Open Source software, any of them owned by an African-American? No again. Here is an extensive collection of photographs from a LUG (Linux User Gathering) meeting, more can be viewed at that link. What is odd about these pictures, and every other photograph I have ever seen of a LUG meeting, is that there is not one single black person to be seen, and probably none for miles.

More racist overtones can be found by examining the language of Open Source. They often refer to 'white hat' hackers. These 'white hats' scurry about the Internet doing good, but illegal, acts for their fellow man. In stark contrast we find the 'black hat' hackers. They destroy the good works of others by breaking into systems, stealing data, and generally causing havoc. These two terms reflect the mindset of most Linux developers. White means good, black means bad. Anywhere there is black, there is uncontrollable destruction and lawlessness. Looking further we see black lists that inform other users of 'bad' hardware, Samba, an obvious play on the much hated Little Black Sambo book, Mandrake, which I won't explain except to say that the French are notorious racists. This type is linguistic discrimination is widespread throughout the Open Source culture, lampooned by many of its more popular sites.

It is also a fact that all Unix 'distros' contain a plethora of racist commands with not so hidden symbolism.

It can hardly be coincidence that the prime operating system of choice of the 'open source supremacists' - Linux, features commands which are poorly disguised racist acronyms. For example: 'awk' (All White Klan) , 'sed' (shoot nEgroes dead), 'ln' (lynch negroes), 'rpm' (raical purity mandatory), 'bash' (bring a slave home), 'ps' (persecute sambo), 'mount' (murder or unseat nubians today), 'fsck' (favored supreme Christian klan). I could go on and on about the latent racist symbolism in Linux, but I fear it would take weeks to enumerate every incidence.

Is there a single unix command out there that does not have some hidden racist connotation ? Suffice it to say that the racism pervades Linux like a particularly bad smell. Can you imagine the effect of running such a racist operating system on the impressionable mind ? I don't have to remind you that transmitting subliminal messages is banned in the USA, and yet here we have an operating system that appears to be one enormous submliminal ad for the Klan!

One of the few selling points of Open Source software is that it is available in many different languages. Browsing through the list I see that absolutely none are offered in Swahili, nor Ebonics. Obviously this is done to prevent black people from having access to the kernel. If it weren't for the fact that racism is so blatantly evil I would be impressed by the efforts these Open Sourcers have invested in keeping their little hobby lilly white. It even appears that they hate the Japanese, as some of these self proclaimed hackers defaced a web site with anti-Japanese slogans. Hell, these people even go all the way to Africa (South Africa mind you, better known as White Africa) and the pictures prove that they don't even get close to a black person.

Of course, presenting overwhelming evidence such as this is a bit unfair without some attempt to determine why these Open Sourcers are so racist. Much of the evidence I have collected indicates that their views are so deeply held that they are seldom questioned by the new recruits. This, coupled with the robot-like groupthink that dominates the culture allows the racist mindset to continue to permeate the ranks. Indeed, the Open Source version of a Klan rally, OSDN (known to the world as Open Source Developer's Network, known to insiders as Open Source Denies Negroes) nearly stands up and shouts its racist views on its demographics page. It doesn't mention the black man one single time. Obviously, anyone involved with Open Source doesn't need to be told that the demographic is entirely white, it is a given.

I have a sneaking suspicion as to why their beliefs are so closely held: they are all terrible athletes.

Really. Much like the tragedy at Columbine High School, where two geeks went on a rampage to get back at 'jocks', these adult geeks still bear the emotional scars inflicted upon them due to their lack of athletic ability during their teen years. As African-Americans are well known for their athletic skills, they are an obvious target for the Open Source geeks. As we all know, sports builds character, thus it follows that the lack of sports destroys character. These geeks, locked away in their rooms, munching on stale pizza and Fritos, engage in no character building activities. Further, they interact only with computers and never develop the level of social skill that allows normal people to handle relationships with persons of color.

Contrasted with the closed source, non-geeky software house Microsoft, Open Source has a long, long way to go.

Join me in my next article where I will lay bare the rampant anti-semitism in the Open Source community.