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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.
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.
Nausea forced me to stop reading at this point.
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....
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.
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
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]
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