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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?"
"However, all was not lost. Exchange server is fairly happy to deliver e-mail, and even meeting requests, via IMAP. I quietly crept onto the Windows server, turned on the IMAP virtual server, and thus set up my Evolution mailboxes."
All very well and good, but no organization with decent change control would allow this to happen. If the policy is MAPI only does anyone have a better solution that fetchmailex ? At least for use with Thunderbird?
Ta,
Matt
Don't let the /. blurb fool you. The article has as many "damn it didn't work" moments as "woohoo!" moments. Hell, he couldn't even get Evolution connected to Exchange. That right there would be a death blow to any Linux-in-a-Windows environment migration.
Don't be fooled, Linux has a long way to go before being a drop-in replacement for Windows on the desktop.
Buses stop at a bus station
Trains stop at a train station
On my desk there's a workstation....
Please help me guys...
:-)
I really can't understand all these issues with Windows desktops! At my (very small) company we have 4 windows pcs and a Linux file/mail server. We have never had half a minute's worth of downtime since 2001, except maybe when during the summer I switched the last PC over from 2K di XP.
Malware? Never. Virii? None. Patches? Just a question of clicking "next" a couple of times.
The trick? No one is allowed to install anything and all users run with minum priviledges. Sounds banal? It should!
Add RDP and SSH and you can administer anything with out burning calories!
You should be modded as insightful. The place to play is on your own machine. If you don't like the standards at your workplace you should find a new job. I'm all for running whatever works on the desktop, but it's the perogative of the *owner* of the hardware (in this case the employer) to decided what is to be run on it.
This reminds me of my teenager who has a habit of decided on her own that certain rules shouldn't apply to her so she'll just do as she pleases. Buy a machine and play with Linux at home. If you feel strongly about running it at work then propose it to your boss.
WTH is this obsession with install time and boot time all about? I couldn't care less if install time was 15 minutes or a day. I've always got plenty of other things to be getting on with. Even if I didn't have one day out of the amount of time I would generally be working with the machine would be tiny
The thing that takes the time for me is upgrades and configuration. I run Debian so upgrades are probably about as smooth as they get for any Linux distro but the number of times a little something goes wrong and needs manually fixing is amazing (yes I could run stable and not suffer as many problems but I like to be at least fairly up to date). I suppose the reason this doesn't happen on windows is simply because you rarely update the installed applications. Even so it would be nice if updates were less likely to mangle the system.
I used to have a better sig but it broke.
This is not your average office worker running Linux from his workstation, as if he was like the vast majority of office workers in the world.
"It is a simple fact that most of our clients run Windows 2003 servers and that it's my job to administer those servers..."
It's cool that he could still do that incognito with Ubuntu, but how easy was it really? Let's find out:
On getting the monitors to work: "I had to install the restricted Nvidia drivers and read the official documentation to get both monitors working, but that wouldn't be too troublesome for anyone used to mucking around with their xorg.conf file." Yes, it is Nvidia's fault, but for the uninitiated, "mucking around" in an xorg.conf file sounds scary.
On networking: "So, not exactly a quick and painless set up, but having done it once it would probably only take five minutes or so to do it again... though I'm a little concerned about the practicality of rolling out a large number of Ubuntu clients in an enterprise environment."
On email: "Ubuntu's default e-mail client, Evolution, is supposed to play nice with Outlook. It actually turned out to be very simple to get Evolution to connect to our Exchange server... That's precisely when things started going wrong. Exchange support seemed to be rather buggy and crash prone, and because Evolution is integrated into parts of the desktop, my desktop was soon littered with the burnt, twisted corpses of panel applets and daemons." He had to change a setting on the Exchange server to get things to work correctly.
On remote administration: "There is a bug in pptp-linux that prevents it from negotiating a secure connection after Windows offers to allow an unencrypted connection, but this behavior is easily solved by configuring the RRAS service on Windows Server to only allow encrypted connections."
On the office suite: "It is tempting to treat 'Base', the database application, just like Access. However it is not Access, and lacks many of Access's features. I was particularly chagrined to find it is not possible to import data from a CSV file into a table... If you rely heavily on local database files, and the Form and Report functions of Access, Base probably won't cut it for you."
That's a lot of issues that could scare away, rather than encourage, Windows-based offices from adding Linux boxes to their networks. I would love to read that article and come away thinking that Linux is ready for business, but unless everything gets switched to *nix is appears to be a big hassle to add Linux to the mix. Whether that truly is right or not I don't know, since I'm not that experienced with Linux and because a lot of the problems are with Windows not playing nice and not Linux, but if a PHB reads this article he might swear Linux off entirely. Sure, the Base functionality loss can be fixed with Cedega + Access, but does a manager who's never heard of Linux know that? It looks like Linux is not yet ready for the client side of a business, but at least the atricle outlines where the work for making that happen needs to go.
since they give you a computer which you can install anything on
Stop right there. Sometimes IT people and even developers can install anything on, generally everybody else gets the system locked down to a greater or lesser extent.
Fascist? Maybe.
Reduces number of calls to the helpdesk? Definitely.
Reduces the risk of a rather nasty audit by the BSA? Definitely.
Reduces the risk of inadvertantly introducing malware? Definitely.
Inconvenience to users? Only if you haven't got the good sense to find out what your users need and make sure they've got it.
No reason? I'll give you a few that apply in my office:
Rockwell Software
Wonderware
GE Fanuc
PI
AutoCAD
SolidWorks
If we can't use those tools, we go out of business. Plain and simple.
Moderators, please consider such things before moderating blanket statements like the parent up to +5. There are a lot of workstations out there that aren't just Word/Excel/Access/Outlook/IE boxes. When you start using dedicated software packages like the stuff I've described above, you're using Windows, and you don't have a choice (PI being a partial exception, you can get the server for Unix but many client tools are Windows-only). Does that suck? Yeah, kinda. But that's the reality, and wishing it were different doesn't change it.