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IBM Desktop Linux Pledge, One Year Later
Blue writes "It's been more than a year since the bold announcement from IBM that they planned on dumping Windows for Linux throughout the company. InfoWorld is reporting that not all is well with IBM's desktop Linux push. What went wrong?"
http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/abstracts/sg246380.htm l
Lotus Notes seems to be by far the biggest thorn in everyone's side. While it does run(ish) on Wine, most people who would be adopting Linux early prefer to handle their E-Mail themselves, and no one could ever convince IT to enable the imap servers on the Notes servers.
The thing no one seems to understand about IBM is that they tend to work in 5 year cycles. All the platform planning that's going on now won't be deployed for 4 or 5 more years. That means that the Linux push, which is only a year or two old, still has some time to go before it reaches maturity. Getting a company of 200,000+ people to change course is not a quick process. I would not be surprised to see a huge deployment of Linux company-wide in about 3 years. They'll probably still be running Notes using Wine then, though.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Actually, my personal experience in running Linux exclusively at IBM is different. I haven't had any issues running Firefox for well over a year for all of my internal intranet stuff (POs, boss reviews, web classes, web certification, training, etc.).
The problem is that as far as I can tell, none (or very few) of the stand-alone apps I use* have been ported to Linux. I run Notes on Wine (which is fine -- it's slower but not enough to be a problem on my work machine, a 1.8 Ghz PC), but occasionally have to run one Java (ironic! should be easy to port, right?) IBM custom application that doesn't have a Linux client. So, I have to boot Windows to run this app, maybe once or twice a month for ten minutes.
But the web has never been a problem for me. The closest thing is a news service we have from another company that complains about possible problems since I'm not using IE. It was especially ironic once, as I was reading an article posted on the front page of our intranet portal complaing about IE security, urging people to switch to Firefox, and I had to click on that stupid button for the "you're not using IE" warning to go away. The web page, however, has always renderd 100% ok though. I'm annoyed that IBM doesn't slap this vendor around for stupidity -- all the articles are presented in plain text anyways and render fine on non IE browsers.
* Big company, I guess they haven't gotten to porting the specific stand alone apps *I* use, anyways, to Linux.
Ah, but a community is more than any one organization. Thus, while Slashdot itself may be unwilling to address this problem, other members of the community may already have solved it for you. Try the SlashFix extension for Firefox.
Breakfast served all day!
I can honestly say that a lot would have to be done with their own internal applications to bring them to Linux. Domino client won't run. Neither is a Sametime client available. Both were in heavy use in IBM Global Services, at least.
There are several linux Sametime clients available, ranging from Java to the Gaim meanwhile plugin. So that is not a problem (I run a different internal client which I find is superior to the Windows client).
The Windows Lotus Notes client runs fine on standard WINE (as in available from www.winehq.com) and internally packaged versions are available for employees. That is not a problem either - indeed I believe that the almost flawless execution of the windows client running on WINE has removed any immediate need to port the client to Linux natively.
As I still work for IBM, I see active communities of employees moving to Linux. I don't believe that the original pledge said that everyone would instantaneously move to Linux - for the most part, its a quiet revolution for us developers. I can't speak for other parts of the company. I do know that DB2 UDB continues to spread to more and more Linux platforms (x86, x86_64, IA64, PPC, z/OS) and that is clearly an area where IBM is pushing hard for complete coverage. Both my key productivity machines are 100% linux and I do not have to use Windows unless I am debugging Windows problems.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
Well, if you are trying to do something with a BRAND-NEW computer, about which you know nothing (most likely, you don't know by heart what video card it has, what ethernet card (if not integrated into motherboard, and in that case, the drivers for motherboard) or what sound card it has---and these are basic things), you are going to struggle. For me, the first-time formatting my computers was always a pain (and yes, I was installing "user-friendly" Windows), because I never knew what hardware I had until then...
Actually, do you know what I do when I can't figure out what video card, etc. I have and I don't really want to open up the computer to look up the serial number? I boot up my computer with Knoppix---except for that one time when I was booting my roommate's computer with a gigabit ethernet card ("cutting edge" so to speak), it found all the hardwares correctly, and I just look at the system message (which, as it happens, is more informative than Windows system messages are) so that I can figure out what to do.
If IBM of all companies is developing their internal applications to require Internet-Explorer dependent technologies like ActiveX... What does this say about their commitment to Linux?
Is developing? Nope.
How about legacy apps and small internal projects that grew beyond their original scope? Some of it might be IE-only, but most of the intranet works fine with Firefox -- I use it every day. The only problems I have are with applets and that's because I don't want to install Sun's JVM. When I hit an applet, I just fire up IE. If I didn't have IE, I'd get Java working in Firefox.
BTW: All of our webapps are required to be cross-browser compatible and fully accessible.
A troll, but I'll bite:
/etc. The registry is a horrible idea- editing it is not simple, and if you screw it up, there goes your system. Files are easy to edit.
You've either never used linux, used it a *long* time ago, or expected it to be exactly like your favorite windows machine so you wouldn't have to relearn anything.
1.) Remove all file extensions- Most linux programs use file extensions, and with a graphical file manager, you can double-click files to get them to open with the "right" application.
2.) Export registry into 40374 files and scatter them around hard drive for no reason.- They're not scattered around the file system, they're in
3.) Remember to name those files random things, like trontabs- No one said you had to use the commands, if you don't like a cli, you can use gui programs to do the same time.
4.) Use a program to then scrable those letters,
4.1) Remember to make all folders in the root only 3 characters long with no thought to human organization what-so-ever
- Root directories are well-organized, and what goes into them each is well-definied.
5.) Downgrade to Windows 3.1 to get that box window feel (and jaggy-font feel)- Or use KDE or Gnome, which is probably the default on your distro.
6.) Get rid of your printer driver and use the standard linux one. All your ~ are now @'s- Use the basic CUPS install interface, difficult to screw up.
7.) Remember to type in lowercase- If you don't like the cli, don't use it.
8.) Create batch commands JUST to copy a file!- Or use one of the many graphical file managers that exist.
9.) Run only text games because your graphics card doesn't have a driver for Linux
- Very few graphics cards don't work in linux. Not all games run in linux, but that's a completely different issue
10.) Oops! You can't use the backspace key without editing a file in VI, which you dont know how to use anyway- If you don't know how to use VI, don't use it. There are plenty of graphical text editors that work like you think it will
11.) Realize Windows is easier and get your XP cd from trash.- Or realize that linux is different form windows, and things are usually set up to help you get started on the right foot.
It seems like you installed Linux because you wanted it to work exactly like Windows. Just becuase you were a Windows power user, doesn't mean you automatically know everything about linux. If you had used the graphical configuration tools, you wouldn't have had any of those problems, and you could eventually learn to use a command-line interface if you wanted to.
>> My ultraviolent Linux switch video.
Until IBM ports Lotus Notes to Linux and starts using it, anything they say about the Linux desktop should be absolutely ignored.
It's called iNotes. It is officially supported under Linux too. Check out the spec page. Retargeting large pieces of software is not something that happens over night. This is the direction that Lotus is supposedly heading though.
There are internal deployments of iNotes too. However, notes under wine works so well for me that I doubt I'd switch anytime soon...