Where Is The Plug-and-Play Linux Office System?

cdlu writes "Where oh where is the plug-and-play Linux business computer? Robin Miller asks the question and makes the case for starting a business to sell a self-updating networked Linux system for small business. Any takers?" (NewsForge and Slashdot are both part of OSTG.)

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[Gates82]

The author isn't talking about auto updating software or and OS, he's talking about prebuilt Server/Clients for small offices. --> So really, who is hotter? Alley or Alleys sister?

It is in the works!

[jkinney3]

My company, Local Net Solutions has been working toward that goal for about a year now. The system is about ready to go. Depending on the office size and bandwidth from that office, I am looking at a local machine to be the master update server. The SOHO office will update directly from my servers.

Re:As long as the user can say no to the updates

[hb253]

Actually, the GroupWise client for Linux/Macintosh is not in beta. It was released a while ago and the client is up to SP2 already. FYI, the GroupWise server agents run on Linux (and Netware and Windows as well).

Re:Self Updating

[AstroDrabb]

The stink about the auto update feature in WinXP is because MS patches are know to break things. I have never seen a Linux update break a system. Most major Linux distros have had auto update for a long time now. Even if they didn't, a simple nightly cron job to run yum or apt-get does the job.

My work desktop has a broken MDAC 2.8 install. WinXP SP2 doesn't let you reinstall it! When I try to reinstall MDAC 2.8 I get a message that I already have these features, though WinXP doesn't care about the fact that MDAC 2.8 is broken. I searched the web and MS knowledge base, the only option is to _remove_ sp2, reinstall MDAC 2.8 and then reinstall SP2, a _very_ slow process which could result in more things breaking. The only solution I have right now is to downgrade some of my programs to MDAC 2.7. Again, I have never run into this type of madness on my Linux computers at work or home.

Re:Yes...

[Drakonite]

And besides not getting used, I haven't heard of problems with windows update.

While I was still using Windows 2000, shortly before ServicePack3 IIRC, I went to windows update and installed the critical "you must install me now biaatch!" updates. Suddenly my system was running so unbarably slow that it was rendered unusable. After a considerable amount of research the problem was tracked down to one of the critical updates that while fixing a GDI exploit, it caused many systems to slow to a halt. This update is one of the updates which would be automatically installed by anyone with automatic updating enabled.

This is by far not an isolated occurance, and not as severe as many other problems windows system administrators see on a frequent enough basis that many of them adopt a phylosphy of not updating until absolutely necissary. However, now you can no longer claim to have never heard of windows update problems.

Re:Yes...

[Glamdrlng]

To force myself to learn Python, I'm thinking of setting up a Python daemon that will listen for an "administrator" machine that pushes commands that a company's SysAd wants.

You may wanna check out FanOut and FanTerm. Both programs are used to run commands on multiple boxes via SSH. FanOut does non-interactive commands, and FanTerm pulls up one window for each SSH session. You type commands into the master window then see the results from each machine in the slave windows.

Combine that with certificate authentication for your SSH logons and you're good to go.