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Ubuntu On The Business Desktop

Posted by Zonk on from the crafty-consultants-club dept.

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?"

3 of 346 comments (clear)

  1. NT AD or Domain? by painkillr · · Score: 5, Interesting

    How'd he get it on the domain?

  2. Me too by psbrogna · · Score: 5, Interesting
    I'm an IT professional that's been using Unbuntu at work for about 2 months know. Everything works fine (email, internet, Office compatible applications, etc). I do miss MS Access (Ubuntu doesn't have latest version of OOO which would have included an Access counterpart). MySQL CC or MySQL Admin+Query Browser aren't as easy to use (though they are faster because all queries are pass through).

    I've been using Suse OSS 10 at home and like it a little better- more robust repositories slightly more stable.

    I will say that when the next desktop o/s upgrade occurs at my company it may not be as hard as I thought to put Linux on the candidate list because the number of non-IT employees that are switching to Linux at home on their own (without any evangelizing by me) is pretty high. This will certainly make it an easier sell if I want to consider Linux on the desktop at work rather than the PIA-Du Jour from Redmond.

  3. Ubuntu on the academic desktop by Pixie_From_Hell · · Score: 4, Interesting
    I'm a math professor at a Windows-centric university. When I got my current job they let me have an old PC running (of all things) Windows 98. I struggled along with it for about a month until my boss (the chair) told me I could do anything I want with it. Soon I was a happy Debian user!

    Since then I got a new PC (a real one this time), on which I'm running Ubuntu. I've converted at least 3 other people in the department to Ubuntu (from MS Windows -- there are a couple other Linux users around, too).

    Sure there have been some issues. Exchange? Printing? Networking? Sound? Nah -- the biggest problem I've had is that LaTeX/dvips/etc were configured to use A4 paper rather than letter.

    Back when I was coping with my old machine (450 MHz, some pittance of RAM), a new PC arrived in the department. It was either for me or for a grad student who needed to run Mathematica. The Chair called the IT department and asked if my old warhorse could handle this (of course I was running Mathematica under Debian, but...). He was told that this box could run Windows XP or Mathematica, but not both. The grad student got the machine and I had to wait another couple of months. Sigh.