Ubuntu On The Business Desktop

rchapman wrote to mention a Mad Penguin story about a consultant who installed Ubuntu on his work PC, and managed to use it for over a month before his boss even noticed. From the article: "This is not a typical review, because you've read enough of those. Instead, lets pretend I'm a typical worker, who just happens to have a soft spot for Open Source software. I want to use Linux, but I have a job to do. The price of Freedom should not be my salary. I don't have time to fiddle, all I care is whether or not it can do what I want, right now. So what do I want out of my system?"

Comments

I worked at a place one

[saskboy]

One time I went to fix someone's Windows computer at work. I found it to be very different from the standard machine image, it was missing something like Microsoft Word. He mentioned that he'd installed linux on the machine, and put Windows back on himself. I didn't know what to do, so I told my boss what I'd seen, and it turns out tinkering with the software in that way, at this company, was a big no-no. I don't know to know what happened to that employee, but thumb screws might have been involved.

Before you tinker with a work computer, ask! You won't like the answer, but there won't be any thumb screws.

Re:NT AD or Domain?

[paranode]

There's an app called winbind that is used with Samba and it can tie you into a Domain using Kerberos tickets. Pretty neat.

More info:

http://www.samba.org/samba/docs/man/Samba-HOWTO-Co llection/winbind.html

Haven't used Windows...

[eno2001]

...on my desktop for about five years here at work now. To be honest, if you know what you're doing with computers, there's no reason to stick with Windows on your desktop in a Windows environment. For those apps that you HAVE to have, there is Wine and 'rdesktop'. When I need to do some Windows admin stuff, I just connect to one of our servers with 'rdesktop'. And I got most of the basic apps installed under Wine if there was no Linux equivalent. Linux gives you everything you need and more than Windows ever could. And of course uptime and reliability... we won't talk about that. Suffice it to say that when my Windows using co-workers are scrambling to apply critical updates, clean up worm/virus issues and griping about malware, I'm always up and running without a glitch.

Re:Ubuntu hype

[AKAImBatman]

In my experience, there is only one app that makes it impossible for the companies I've worked at to switch over to an alternative OS: Microsoft Access.

Love it or hate it (mostly hate it), it lets companies quickly create interfaces to larger databases. It's so simply and easy to do, that many developers don't realize (or perhaps care) that they'll be paying heavily for their choice later on when either their needs scale beyond Access, or Microsoft releases a new (usually incompatible) version.

Sadly, just about everyone I've spoken with has considered Access support to be unimportant to office conversions. "They should use a real database," they say. While that's a fine stance to take, that doesn't help companies that are already relying on MS Access. And if you take the emulation route to get Access support, you might as well just run Windows in the first place.

It's really too bad that the Access format is so widely ignored. Much of the groundwork has already been laid for reading/writing the format, and StarOffice/OSS have a real chance to make Access work correctly. IMHO, managers given the opportunity to use their existing Access applications on a better platform would jump at the chance to save money and support calls.

I did the same thing last January

[digidave]

After installing it an IT guy noticed and my boss got a bit of shit for what I did and I was asked to justify using Linux. I'm a Linux programmer, so that got solved very quickly.

We use DeskNow (http://www.desknow.com/) for email and collaboration so Exchange connectivity was never a problem. Luckily we have a lot of sales reps who don't have a company computer, so at minimum we'd have to have OWA running for them even if we used Exchange. I still don't authenticate with the AD server, but that doesn't really present a problem for me and if it does, I'll figure out how to set that up. Because I'm on Linux I don't even have an AD user, so right now my only problem is accessing the shared drives, although I have never needed to do that. They won't let me dump several GB of server backups there anyway.

I can honestly say that using Linux hasn't caused me any trouble at all. I work with a lot of Excel spreadsheets, but while they're very large (one dataset often is split in several 65000 row files) they aren't very complicated. The one that is complicated works fine in OpenOffice 1.x and 2.0. From Linux it's much easier to manage my Linux servers and test my code. I use Wine to run IE so I can test application web front ends in multiple browsers for the apps that support a web front end.

All in all it's been a smashing success for me. Several people in the office have commented about how much they love my desktop -- how nice it looks and how easy it is to work with different types of files. Even the designers on Macs are impressed. I also got someone else from work to install Ubuntu at home. I just handed him an Ubuntu Live CD and he loved it. After installing the Windows apps like OpenOffice that came with the CD, he took the plunge and couldn't be happier.

Re:Ubuntu hype

[AKAImBatman]

Most of these use a wide variety of COM objects only implemented on Windows.

This is different from my own experience. The standard controls are usually the only ones used because:

1) Distributing ActiveX/COM controls is a PITA
2) Access doesn't correctly support the full range of controls. (I've seen plenty of controls that work fine in VB, fail miserably in Access.)

The real holy grail of Access support is the VBA language. All kinds of business logic tidbits are stuck into VBA.

Even if we do consider that ActiveX/COM controls are the real problem, making minor changes to use alternative controls is a lot less costly than rewriting the entire application. :-)

Re:Exactly

[nequeo]

As the author of this article, I'd just like to clarify a few points.

Had I known I was going to be mentioned on Slashdot, I would have left out the speading fonts over my body line (but don't knock it till you've tried it!), thrown in an 'Inconcievable!' or two, and perhaps criticsed KDE, so that the opposing camps of Trolls would tear into each other, and let me quietly slink off back to work with my pride more or less intact.

I wish to say:

You have probably been thinking of cublicles. I saw a reference or two to the PHB. Luckily, I don't have one.

Yes, I have previously worked in the IT departments of large, international companies who run Windows desktops with an iron first. I cannot doubt the efficiency of this system, nor the intelligence of the people who implement it. In fact, one of these companies had an in-house software dev team, and their 'senior developer' was only 19 years old - having been hired at 17.

And certainly, in such an environment, I wouldn't dream of messing with their precious RIS-imaged desktops. Except to add certain users to the Local Admins group when their company-bought Palm Pilots refuse to work with 'limited' Windows accounts. But as nice as the money is, I do prefer a little more freedom in my work place.

So my 'company' is now a 'boutique' IT consultancy. There are two employees. Me, and the 'boss'. My job description is more or less to innovate. I have absolute lisence to do whatever I want to my desktop, and one of the developement servers, so long as I can continue to support our existing clients - who through historical accident mostly use Windows machines. As mentioned in the article, I do this using VNC and 'rdesktop', which is just as good as looking over their shoulder and pointing out where to click.

Since switching my desktop to Linux I have managed to successfully press for LAMP-type projects over IIS/ASP, and convinced several companies who were previously balking at the cost of putting in a Windows server to at least use a Linux machine to centralise and organise their data and backups. Our costs are down, which means client costs are down, which means more business and good will all-round.

Saying the Boss didn't notice for a month was a bit of artistic licence. Yes, the words are true, but I should mention that's because our office is in a converted wharf facility, and we have our meetings in a cafe overlooking Sydney Harbour, rather than in a cubicle or meeting room. Provided he could read all the documents I sent him, and none of our clients suddenly started complaining that I couldn't solve their problems, or administer their servers, there was no reason for him to care what OS I was using.

2506x2048 desktop was a typo. I did mean 2506x1024.

Windows Server Small Business Edition 2003, (I apologize for not specifying), ya know, the Crippleware version, does in fact automatically set up RRAS for you on first install and allow unencrypted connections by default.

Yes, the Slashdot posting was a little one-sided. I was not advocating large scale enterprise adoption of Linux. I was saying that despite a few hassles, Linux could be co-oerced into doing what I needed on a PC, and that perhaps other small start-up companies, who don't currently have any IT infrastructure, might want to consider Linux. As long as they dont need Access, that is.