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Linux Desktop Deployment Postmortems?
duffbeer703 asks: "My employer runs alot of desktop and laptop computers -- something in the neighborhood of 40,000 PCs. Currently they are all Windows 2000 & XP managed by Active Directory and other big, complicated enterprise management tools, all of which can support Linux in one form or another. I'm looking for ways of making Linux (and maybe Unix or even Apple desktops) an option as we replace or add PCs. The problem is, most of the resources that you find online about deploying Linux focuses on server environment, and the articles that I do find about desktop Linux focus on standalone developer workstations, the IBM conversion to Linux (which doesn't seem to have happened) or things like LTSP, that won't integrate well with our infrastructure. Is anyone out there successfully using Linux for regular users? How did it go, and how did your IT and user communities adapt to the new kid on the block?"
This article was posted a little while ago about a user who used Ubuntu in a completly MS environment without his boss noticing for a few months. (linked article from the story)
My experience with it is that it's one of the most mature Desktop distributions, coming complete with most of the tools one would need to perform most jobs. Easy install, and you can use Syntaptic/apt-get for upgrades and additional installation since it's Debian based. You should check it out.
Take a look at the Ernie Ball guitar string company. They made the switch several years ago. It is only 300 +/- people but they did it cause they got hit with being out of compliance with M$
Read Rockin' on without Microsoft
I was able, at some point a few years back, to produce a Ghost image with Red Hat, OpenOffice, and a login model that used my office's Windows infrastructure to authenticate users automatically. It worked very well. I used it on several test PCs and was able to boot them up, ghost them, and have them come up connected and ready to use.
/etc/skel. The only real kneebiter was the fact that the vast majority of the office required Outlook, and for some reason (I don't recall what) Evolution wouldn't quite cut it. I seem to recall problems with lookups in the Active Directory using Evolution, but for all I know that's been fixed by now.
It was fairly straightforward to set things up with simple additions to
I ran this thing on my PC for months before my employer even noticed. I used VMware for my Windows needs (as I was a network administrator, I needed to run some troubleshooting in Windows for user support) and Samba for all of my day-to-day shares and printing. In the end, the only reason anyone knew what I was running was that I was sick one day, and someone tried to sit at my desk, with very small amounts of success.
Now if only I'd kept a copy when I was let go!
Green's Law of Debate: Anything is possible if you don't know what you're talking about.
Let me state that I love Linux, and I am fortunate enough to be able to use it for my work.
In the past I've been responsible for switching a small company over (circa 150 desktops) from -- what was it now? -- DOS to WIN 3.1, or WIN 3.1 to WIN 95, I forget, I've burned it from my memory. And it was a nightmare. Not cuz it was Windows, cuz we were switching, period. Accounting gave us hell ("what are the cost benefits again?"), users gave me hell ("Time is Money, Y'Know!"), and Super Senior Mgt tweaked me more than once ("If you weren't switching us to this, um, upgrade thing, what is it that you would be doing, hmm?"). Learned an AWFUL lot about wacky boutique Accounting-Inventory-Shipping-Graphics-YouNameIt programs that all ran lovely on the OLD system but had to be bludgeoned into submission on the new.
Not saying you should not upgrade. Not saying Linux is not an upgrade from what you're using (not saying it IS, either; you really need to examine the apps). Just saying that you really need to look at this upgrade from every direction short of Sunday before you dive into the change. There's a large, cold room reserved in the House of Pain for Linux Evangelists who push their companies to make The Switch without having a whole pond worth of ducks in a row.
Good Luck, Bud, and God speed! And better you than me.
I can't believe PHB's are using "postmortem!" The term they are looking for is "After-Action Report", or "AAR" in mil-speak. Tell them that using military terms makes them sound bold and dynamic, while using medical pathology terms makes them sound weak and dying.
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
I used to work at a private high school in the Northeast. You can probably figure out what one by looking at my user name. Anyhow, we (read: I) tried a rollout of Linux on our file servers and routers. Here's what happened:
The Linux file server worked beautifully. We had a simple NT4 domain, setting up Samba with proper permissions was easy. It was easy to administer, very reliable, and fast.
The Linux router(s) worked well, too. I had a nice collection of scripts run with cron that would turn off internet access to the dorms at a specified time, and then turn it back on in the morning (remember: this was a high school).
I was even in the process of developing a grading system with the LAMP stack, since at the time, teachers did their grading manually, and often complained about it.
Everything was running beautifully for months, until politics entered the game. Some higher-ups bought software without consulting the IT department (me and one other guy) that of course only ran on Windows. They also decided that we were going to go with FileMaker for a grade database, that was maintained by some high-price consultant. In the end, they wanted everything to be Windows for some reason or another (misinformed about how Open Source works, you know, the whole deal). My wonderful little Linux environment disappeared, and eventually, so did I.
Moral of the story: technical challenges aside, your project can always be torpedoed by someone who is self-important and more powerful than you.