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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.)
... and they come pretty close, with the best installer in the market, and a very easy-to-use setup. Why is it that the snooty Linux gurus always pooh-pooh Linspire anyway?
On the other side of the coin:
Where is interop Linux/Windows groupware? You'd think that IBM would be all over this with Lotus Notes but there's nothing. I realize that you can get something to work with some duct tape and string but the out-of-the-box solution would complement OpenOffice well. It is one of the few things missing.
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
..and something that most of us have been doing for years, whether the customers know it or not.
I don't know about the rest of you, but I have stock systems that I go with, both hardware and software wise. I get a customer order, I already know which systems I'm going to use ( hell, I have ghost images of the damn things ). It's just a matter of what extra software packages they'll need.
There's another aspect of this, and one that people can't quite grasp: Customers want to feel special. I don't care how much they belly ache about wanting it fast and cheap and good ( heh ), they want to feel like they are your most important customer. On the opposite side, most IT contractors are cock-chokers, and will spend as little time on the customer as possible. You see the potential problems arising from this situation?
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
Most of the small business owners I speak are reluctant to migrate to Linux (or *BSD) because of the perceived lack of business oriented software. They are perfectly happy with the Linux offerings today when it comes to setting up things such as firewalls, print servers and backup mechanisms.
As a specific example, a small handful of these businesses run some very specialized sales tax tracking software. (Think stores that sell both taxable and tax-free goods.) Conceptually, the software is trivial. However, the software is so old that the minimum recommended operating system is DOS!
Let me be more clear. Sure they can run it in a DOS emulator on Linux. That's not the problem. What they want is "external support" for that particular configuration, and they don't have the time or the patience to chase down dozens of Google leads, whenever a problem comes up. They'd rather pay (and expense) for a dedicated vendor, but the market is too small to support one.
I have spoken to accountants who plan to move to OSX as soon as all of their accounting software gets ported over. I believe Peachtree has taken this step. I'm not sure about Quickbooks or some of the more specialized packages. If these companies sold Linux specific, supported, and certified editions, they would move.
They would even still move if you simply "repackaged" existing software for Linux and provided support for the Linux specific issues (and acted as a go-between for the other issues).
That said, I doubt businesses are looking for a zero-administration box. I sincerely doubt they want one that's administered remotely, unless this company was willing to assume the legal risks and obligations. If they break the box when you're trying to submit quarterly financials, will they pay the penalties?
And it sucks ass. When you delete a message in email you can count to three before the screen updates. Very very poor responsiveness..... It is horridly slow, even on a dual processor G5. It lacks filters for email, and spellcheck is not through yet. Also you have to tell it which applications to open attachments with, no preconfiguration in this area at all.
Did I mention the horrible slowness of it yet? I keep hearing that java apps can be fast, but then something like this comes out and I thrown right back onto the "JAVA APPS SUCK" side of the fence.
music lover since 1969
Actually I have been thinking about an auto-update system of some sort for quite some time...
/etc/init.d/yum. This will be dependent on the set cron schedule on when to check and pull updates. This will also depend on the set "exclusions" in Fedora's yum settings.
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. For example, if that person has deployed Fedora machines as the main desktop for an office, the normal options for auto-updating are:
1. Start, by default
2. ssh into each machine (or run around the office) and login and "yum update" all the machines.
What I'm thinking is a daemon that listens for commands that an administrator might want to push. Not just updating, but any commands (have all machines download the main yum.conf or whatever other config). So each client listens, me as Admin types something like "command-push 'yum update'" and all clients start updating like crazy.
Stuff I've thought about regarding this:
1. As admin, I don't set them to auto-update. This way I can force them to update, only once I've tested the updates well.
2. I don't have to ssh into each machine, or run around just to update, or whatever.
3. Security issues... there are plenty. Like how to actually validate the admin that is pushing the commands from his machine.
4. It's 2:36am, I'm sleepy. So ideas are jumbled.
Anyway, the auto-update thing is already in Fedora (just 'chkconfig yum on' I think). But as Admin, I want to automate the update only once I've tested the updates, which might mean a daemon to let me push the update call.
Am I making sense?