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Moving to the Linux Business Desktop
M. Gagné, a writer for The Linux Journal, does not assume you're going to use any specific distro for Linux. He gives instructions and examples for the most common ones: Fedora (Red Hat), Mandrake, SUSE, Debian, etc. KDE is the primary desktop, but GNOME is covered fairly well, too. I have to admit that, as a long-time Red Hat user, I was well entrenched in the GNOME world. However, after reading Marcel's book, I've make KDE my default environment, and I've been very happy with it.
This book is broken up into three major parts: Getting to Know Linux, Administration and Deployment, and The Linux Business Desktop. Each part is packed with information in an easy-to-follow format. In fact, I found it hard to just read and not fire up my Linux to follow along.
Part One (Getting to Know Linux) covers the essentials of installing Linux and customizing your desktop. As I remarked earlier, Marcel covers multiple distros. He includes instructions on how to install using Mandrake, Fedora Core 1, and SUSE. For those of you who just can't wipe Windows from your hard drive completely, M. Gagné covers setting up a dual-boot environment clearly enough that you will be able to have the best of both worlds.
The second part (Administration and Deployment) assists in setting up a fully functional business environment. In Chapter 7 (Installing New Applications), Marcel covers the various installation programs available across the distros. SUSE's YaST2 installer, Mandrake's urpmi, Kpackage (from the K Desktop Environment), rpm (the shell program), dpkg (Debian's package manager) and apt-get are all covered. In addition, he gives a clearly written explanation of how to build from source (The Extract and Build Five-Step -- page 124) that dispels any anxiety a newbie to Linux might have.
The next chapter covers the device support in Linux. When I started using Linux, device support was spotty at best. Now it's tremendously improved. Marcel shows you the basic of Linux's support. He then goes on to explain about network and Internet connections. Unfortunately, there is one major piece of errata in this area of the book. During his explanation of the difference between Class A, B, and C IP addresses, the information for class A was inadvertantly switched with the class C info. I've been informed that the errata is corrected on his website (www.marcelgagne.com) and in future editions of the book. Outside of that one unfortunate error, the rest of the book is pretty clean.
Later chapters dig into the topics of Backup and Restore (the most important and most underutilized functions), printing, email, web servers, file sharing (both Windows-like with Samba and Unix-like with NFS), thin clients (server-side and client-side) and desktop remote control. He even includes a chapter on installing and configuring LDAP (something rarely written about, but becoming more and more important).
The third and final part of the book covers the usual business applications. Email, arguably the "killer app" for office environments, is addressed first. Focusing on KDE, Kmail gets the lion's share of the coverage, with Evolution following behind. Desktop organizers come next, with Korganizer the favorite and Evolution (again!) nipping at Korganizer's heels.
The web-browsing chapter focuses on Konquerer, KDE's jack-of-all-trades application, and Mozilla. Most notably, significant coverage is given in the next three chapters to OpenOffice and its basic applications Writer, Calc, and Impress. For working with images, digital cameras and USB scanners are covered, with The GIMP as the preferred image editor. On-demand contact via instant messaging and video conferencing rounds out this marvelous book. Kopete and GAIM are discussed in depth for the IM arena, and GnomeMeeting for the VC work.
As with most Linux books, a CD is supplied. However, this book does not give you a specific distro for installation. Instead, Marcel chose to include a branded copy of Knoppix, the CD-bootable Linux. The idea is to let you play around with the various aspects of Linux using Knoppix before committing yourself to the actual installation.
All in all, this is a valuable book, covering most of the areas a business user wants to address. Notably lacking was coverage on how to try to run Windows applications under Linux. At the top of the review, I mentioned I keep trying to steer away from Windows as much as I can. Unfortunately, I usually have a couple of applications that I need but don't come in a Linux version. Even though VMWare, Win4Lin, and Wine were mentioned briefly, I would have liked to have read some examples of running a Windows application using them. In addition, the major snafu with the IP address space marred an otherwise excellent book.
You can purchase Moving To the Linux Business Desktop from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
Has he dropped his annoying French chef schtick? Or is it all "Good morning, monseiur! Zo, we are perhaps interested in sampling ze business desktop of linux, are we? We have several tasty items on ze menu today!"
Our IT folks made the time to get a Linux business productivity system in place (in parallel to their regular support of 2K/XP) so they could 1) demonstrate it to people (the compatibilities and the look and feel) and 2) package it up so our non-IT folks could be set up and supported easily. And re-set up when they broke something. If you hire IT people who actually like what they do, it makes this kind of thing a lot easier. Most of our departments are still MS, but the ones that have switched like it and aren't going back.
"Wow. Now THAT'S a lot of angry Indians." - Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer
...this book does not give you a specific distro for installation. Instead, Marcel chose to include a branded copy of Knoppix, the CD-bootable Linux
No specific distro? Knoppix is a specific distro (based on Debian) which can be installed on a hard drive! Last I heard, all you had to do was type knx-hdinstall at a prompt, but that may have changed since I used it.
Yes, but not everyone has everything they need right there. In my company it is almost impossible since we have windows only software that we can't port, or use wine for (believe me I've tried) This is for the banking industry. So until there is a way to make that work, I've done what most places have done, put linux in the server room.
Sure, Linux can work fine as a business desktop for those who want to use it as such. What about the working stiff's in the accounting / secretarial pool that could care less, know enough Windows 2K/XP to get the job done and would need a 2 week special high intensity training course for dummies to learn where all their new tools are? These are people who would rather be fishing or watching the soaps, secretly despise having to work at all in an office, dream of winning the lottery, and resist change or having to learn something different, worry about being able to transfer these skills to other offices that are likely Windows based, etc.
Just playing Bill's advocate here.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
There are tons of books on sex, and those gaps get filled every night.
Well, I've been in a similar situation.
:-)
However, the department I was in was almost entirely into *nix development, but we would have to do some kinda stuff related to Windows from time to time.
We also learnt that it's quite useful for you to have some kinda virtual machine like VMWare on your box, to boot into alternate OSes. Really really useful.
And the problem is that it's really hard being in the development industry with only Linux -- sooner or later, you're going to run into some client who'd ask you for development on the Windows platform. And it's not as simple as saying, sorry, we don't do Windows
The book sounds like a good resource, I'll take a look at it at Borders this week. I just did my first Linux install, ever, last night on a spare computer I had here at home. I ended up using Ubuntu, which is a Debian flavor distro. It works really, really well. I was surprised that it found the shared resources on the MS workgroup on the wired/wireless LAN here at home. I would like to find a good book to help me understand Linux, from a decidedly beginner starting point. So, when I look at this one I'll flip through some others. Suggestions are welcomed.
http://www.busyweather.com/
The problem with using Linux when the people you work for generally use Windows is, of course, being compatible with them. Linux has come a long way in this regard: OpenOffice reads Word documents flawlessly; gnumeric reads Excel spreadsheets; Ximian Evolution is the perfect replacement for Outlook; etc.
.ppt files in PowerPoint, so it's really only a probablem if you need to import something from another machine.
:p)
The one business application that isn't so well worked out is PowerPoint. OpenOffice's Impress is wonderful by itself, but it doesn't do so good with reading Microsoft generated powerpoints, especially with fancy stuff in them. I had to give a presentation recently on what my team did for the New Mexico Supercomputing Challenge, and I had to transfer the presentation to some long-outdated Mac powerbook to work with it because OpenOffice would just freeze when I tried to read the file.
On the otherhand, I haven't had any trouble reading OpenOffice
But otherwise, I don't see any advantage windows affords. I mean, if I have critical data on my machine, the number one issue for me is going to be stability, which is not one of windows' strongpoints. (And no, Rome Total War is not a business application.
When things get complex, multiply by the complex conjugate.
The people you call working stiffs certainly wouldn't need a 2 week special high intensity training, that's just ridiculous.
You make it sound as if a secretary typing letters all day in MS Word would need to go through a boot camp from hell in order to be able to do the same in Writer and that is simply laughable.
Funny that you mention Gagné's book, because my friend relied on it to switch his small buisness over to linux. After using it to aid him through his quest away from the world of windows, he has become a very satisfied linux user. So far hes saved over $2k by switching to linux from windows 2000. He and I are working to get his apache server up now for his new website. :)
"The Earth is the cradle of the mind, but one cannot remain in the cradle forever..."
I give up. Is it still possible to find laser printers that don't have HP PCL6 or PostScript interpreters?
I can't remember the last time I saw printer that couldn't handle one of PCL and PostScript.
You seem to have confused "laser printer" with "cheap inkjet printer". I've never had a problem with a laser printer not working on Linux.
Most businesses I've seen use networked HP Laserjet printers for their laser printing. These printers are just about as standard (and Linux-compatible) as you can get. No drivers (other than a network card driver which you should already have) necessary.
TANSTAAFI: There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free iPod.
This sounds like a rehash of his previous book, Moving to Linux: Kiss the Blue Screen of Death Goodbye.
Which wasn't a bad book. But, I don't like people milking something by putting a slight editorial slant on it "for business" and making a new book out of it. Still, I'll have to check it out. I need a good book to give to people switching to Linux and this one, because it is newer and hopefully improved with feedback from readers, should be better than the previous one.
until you do realize you can't print to the latest laser printer your boss bought because it's simply not supported by any driver on linux
Run that one by me again. You're saying that after going to the hassle of Linux migration the IT deprtment isn't going to spend the 1 minute required to heck if the new printer they would like to buy is supported?
And then ignoring that issue for a minute - you said "laser printer". I think you're confused. It's the inexpensive home desktop inkjet printers that don't work with Linux. Pretty much all laser printers speak either PostScript (which any UNIX based OS has zero issues with, no extra drivers of any kind required) or PCL which again Linux has no problems with. I dare you to find any decent laser printer that doesn't work flawlessly immediately with Linux.
Jedidiah.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
Let's not forget, te focus here is "business desktops". Not "development desktops". That means we need 100% interoperability with a variety of MS document formats, including:
- Word
- Excel
- PowerPoint
- Project
Word and Excel are mostly there, but PPT is iffy, and I'm not aware of anything for the OSS desktop that is 100% (or even close to that) interoperable with Ms. Project. If someone can point me to solutoins to those two problems (PowerPoint, Project), especially if there are free or reasonably priced, well supported versions for both Linux and OSX, we'd be down to 3 WIndows users within a week (from 10-12).
Recently I sat with my CIO for a little chat re: possibilities of moving our 1000+ desktops from Windows to Linux. Being in a law firm, we made a checklist of apps that our users would not be able to function without. The regular document-churning and groupware apps were easy to replace (OpenOffice, Evolution and such), but when we got to time and billing (currently using Carpe Diem) and document management (DOCSOpen) we couldn't find anything comparable on Linux side. The concensus was that we are not quite there yet - 2-3 years down the road, maybe, but not right now, at least not for the company of our size.
that ldap would be central to this book. How are you going to manage user accounts with linux desktops without it? One could still use NIS (which is easier), but that doesn't play too nice with windows. With samba/ldap/linux combo, you can truly have a multi protocol auth server with everything stored in a directory. What does the author reccomend as an authentication system?
the main issues to me with linux desktops are:
* authentication system (needs to be cross platform), meaning pam and ldap
* automounter (for roving home dirs, etc)
* nfs
You says everything was "server oriented" but that's how it should be - if your linux desktop isn't centrally managed you're doing it wrong.