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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?"
How'd he get it on the domain?
Exactly! That's why I surf porn on the company network. The fascists won't be telling me what to do...
BBL, I have a special meeting in HR to go to. I wonder if I'm getting a raise.
2560x2048 spread across 2 monitors? I hope he means 2560 x 1024 .. Otherwise that'd be one helluva 17" LCD monitor!
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.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
My name is Simon, I am a Linux addict, and this is my story.
So long for Linux Anonymous.
--
Run for Fun
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.
...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.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
Nausea forced me to stop reading at this point.
"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....
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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Our company was running Windows 2k on the desktop and I took the liberty to install OpenBSD on my desktop (to try it out). Now I didn't have to worry about the stupid "Administrator" password, or not being able to use certain programs. The only problem was that I had never used it before and I couldn't get Wine to work correctly or compile programs very well. My boss found out that day and called me into his office. He asked me what the hell was I doing to company property and I told him how more secure and better OpenBSD was. He had no clue what I was talking about and said: "You don't need to be messing around with our company's computer equipment and you're not even in the IT department. You're a customer support rep." He also stated something regarding company policy, destroying company property, or something to that effect (I wasn't listening). So needless to say I was asked to clean out my desk and leave that day. I wasn't pretty, but I never reformatted OpenBSD off of my computer, so the IT guy had to see the OS on the desktop and must have thought I was a bright guy for doing what I did. Now that was years ago, but I still feel proud for what I did. Although, now I live at home with my mother and haven't found a new job since.
I run multiple machines at work - some native and some on VMWare. Either my Windows XP machine or my SuSE 10 machine can basically do anything that *I* want. RDP is easy with SuSE - none of the problems mentioned in this article. Kerberos and AD authentication was not very problematic - just go into YAST and the kerberos setup, then edit the config file. Windows administration - just RDP to a Windows desktop and use almost any tool from there. A few apps here and there that are Windows only - Citrix. So for it would work fairly well. I also have no problems at home or work with viruses, spyware, etc - mainly because I don't run as an administrative user.
The problem that prevents Linux from being used where I work is (1) with an Enterprise License Agreement for MS versus one for Redhat/Novell - the cost is about the same (**costwise - not sure who has better support). Number (2) and the main issue is that we have many departments that have 'must have' applications that are Windows only. We're not talking one or two applications - but probably about 60 of them. We can run a few on Citrix or some other platform - but that adds up very quickly. Our view of Linux not being ready for the desktop is -only- related to applications. I don't think our users would care about any of the other stuff. IT is going to set it up - so they don't care how hard it is to install drivers, software and hardware. They only care how it is to use. However, the first time you tell them they can't have their business critical application - it's all over (*a lot of these apps were written in-house, but I'm not responsible for the dev team...one of the other critical apps is our point of sale system...which is Windows only).
My guess is that as more and more stuff becomes web enabled, you'll see more and more people migrating to Linux. I think when most people talk about being enabled for the desktop and how 'difficult' Linux is to setup for the 'typical' user they never consider that the 'typical' user never sets up anything in a corporate environment.
...on my desktop ever. To be honest, if you know what you're doing with computers, there's no reason not to stick with Windows on your desktop in a Windows environment. For those apps that you HAVE to have, there is no real replacement for a real Windows machine (point-of-sale software with hardware). When I need to do some Windows admin stuff, I just do it. All of the basic apps installed under native Windows with no problem. Windows gives you everything you need and more easily than Linux ever could. And of course uptime and reliability... we haven't had to talk abuot that since Windows 2000 came out. Not an issue. Suffice it to say that when my Linux using friends are scrambling to figure out how to get their machine to boot, figure out how to do simple things like change the screen resolution and griping about .config files, I'm always up and running without a glitch.
I don't respond to AC's.
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.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
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.
Yeah, I once had a coworker who simply stopped showing up to work altogether and it took well over a month for our boss to notice. I don't find this story quite as astonishing as "Simon" seems to think I should.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
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.
Boss: What's that? [pointing to screen]
Worker: Ubuntu. Been using it for a while. Works so much better than Windows and I'm much more productive.
Boss: Excellent! Good job! Keep it up!
[Boss shuffles off to his office, closes the door, and kneels before raised, circular object on the floor. Hologram of hooded figure appears.]
Figure: What is it?
Boss: My Master, there is a Linux-user here!
Figure: I see. The Rebels are becoming bold, moving faster than anticipated. No matter!
Boss: What shall we do?
Figure: Do nothing. I will send Darth Ballmer to deal with this "Linux-user."
Boss: Very well, My Master.
[Hologram disappears]
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
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.
The global economy is a great thing until you feel it locally.
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.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
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.
That's not a Linux problem, you obviously need to replace your customers.
Note to Linux zealots: Even though you are nodding your heads in agreement, that was humor.