Moving Small Organizations from Windows to Linux?

chris1646 asks: "Currently we are a small organization that is entirely a Windows shop. Next year much of the server and desktop hardware we run will need replacing. I am looking for creative ways to introduce Linux as my desktop and server OS of choice, however a couple of our core applications run exclusively on Windows. Has anyone had any success hosting Windows applications via terminal server while using Linux as the client OS? Has anyone handled a AD to open source LDAP migration?"

Comments

Look at costs, Servers first

[innosent]

Look at your costs before migrating to Linux clients for RDP. Terminal Services Licenses cost nearly as much as a full XP license, so you will likely spend more to do it this way. Having said that, you might be able to run your critical apps under WINE, and use Linux X clients to run it via SSH. I would definitely focus on the servers first though. Check out the O'Reilly books for LDAP and "Linux in a Windows World" for guidance, but it really depends on how many people need to use those critical windows apps, and what apps they are. Let me know what type of apps you are talking about, as there may be replacements or documented WINE support for them. AD to LDAP isn't likely to be much trouble with only a few users, and any mail, file, and print services should be relatively simple to implement, whether you convert or use winbind to maintain AD integration. Having been on both sides, though, I would definitely prefer switching to LDAP first, as AD can give you plenty of headaches down the road. Also, regardless of which path you take, be sure to make use of NTP to maintain your clocks, since a small drift will eventually wreak havoc on anything using kerberos, and it might not be the first thing that comes to mind when something suddenly stops working.

Re:Look at costs, Servers first

[TheRaven64]

If you have some spare XP Pro licenses, then you could conceivably dedicate a few XP machines (or a few HVM domains on a machine running Xen) to running the Windows-only apps. Only one person could connect to XP at a time, but if the apps are only used infrequently, or by a few people, then this might work.

Personally, I would begin by switching to cross platform applications, and then switch OS last, once you no longer need it for anything. As another poster said, investigate running the apps under WINE. The longer you can go without upgrading them, the more likely they are to work.

Re:Look at costs, Servers first

[bjourne]

AD to LDAP not likely to be much trouble? Then your experience is different from mine..

The recommended way to switch over an AD to Linux, is to setup Samba to host file shares and LDAP to do the authentication. Setting up Samba itself is fairly easy. It is the different and weird ways in which Windows clients connects to the shares that will cause trouble. You will need to analyze the log files very closely because very minor errors in your setup will cause clients to be unable to connect for very strange reasons. You will have to learn about machine accounts and all the problems they can cause you.

Also, AD:s most often use ACL:s. There is no equivalent in the Linux world but you have to be content with the simple user and group settings available in the *nix world. So if your AD uses more advanced access control features you probably wont be able to replicate them in Linux. Sure, you could try using the Extended Attributes that some distros use. But that is yet an unproven technology and you shouldn't rely on it working.

Then you will run into character encoding problems, but that should be fixable. Just select the correct character set so that the filenames look correct in Windows and let your Linux clients (if you have any) see the corrupted filenames.

Setting up LDAP could be pretty painless. Just learn the very weird syntax ldapsearch and other LDAP directory querying tools use. It is the smb-ldap-tools package that will cause problems. It is a bunch of Perl scripts that are supposed to simplify setting up Samba/LDAP, but they are fairly buggy.

Doing all this isn't impossible and most of the problems are possible to solve (except for the ACL one). But it is not easy, and the resulting environment will NOT be identical to a pure Windows AD environment. I have done it for a small company and it took me roughly one month. In the end they stayed with their AD. Mostly for two reasons. First, Samba+LDAP does things different from AD. It is not worse, but it doesn't behave exactly like an AD. Second, where the HELL do you find a Samba/LDAP specialist to administer it and how much do you pay him or her?

Re:Look at costs, Servers first

[secolactico]

Having said that, you might be able to run your critical apps under WINE, and use Linux X clients to run it via SSH.

... after making sure with your software/support provided that this is a supported configuration. Otherwise, they might use it as an excuse when something breaks (even if it's not a wine issue) to wiggle out of fixing a particularly difficult problem (if they are anything like the provider of a company I used to work with, they probably sold you the Windows licenses and might not be tickled pink to see the OS upgrade revenue going away).

Don't rush things. Break in the users nice and calm. Set up sample workstations for each environment and ask them to give them a try and get their feedback. That way you'll be prepared to deal with the little (yet annoying) issues or even better, you'll be able to avoid them. For example, in Windows, the U.S. International keyboard layout differs slightly from the Linux version in the way they handle the entering of special characters. It's no big deal, but for a fast touch typist, it can really wreck your pace while you retrain your finger memory.

Good luck. If you do succeed, please post your story and let us know.

Re:Look at costs, Servers first

[innosent]

Doing the switch while maintaining Windows clients can be done easily by replacing the login handlers in windows with something like pGina. Posix ACLs are fairly mature, and work quite well in Linux, and of course are fully mature in Solaris, if you decided to go that route (which might be worth it for zfs, if there is a large enough set of user files). Of course, the major reason why I said the migration is not likely to be difficult is because we are talking about a small business, not a 100+ user migration. Also, the whole idea (at least my take) is to not have the headaches associated with running an AD domain, so one would hope that it would not be identical to Windows. Realistically, though, in a small business there is likely to be only two or three groups of users (managers and everyone else, maybe legal), and ACLs are probably overkill. Samba with LDAP becomes almost trivial (aside from the 20 different ways to set up Samba, according to 20 different setup guides) once you remove AD and winbind from the equation.

Re:Look at costs, Servers first

[Anonymous Coward]

Excellent post. Too bad somebody doesn't come up with a way to push GPOs via Samba/LDAP.

Re:Look at costs, Servers first

[mnmn]

Its more than just the immediate costs.

I used to bitch and complain about X and other parts of Linux that were obstacles... I then worked at a company where I could move everything to Linux, in theory.

The question came up... why should we anyway? Every new computer comes with Windows and all the drivers preinstalled. We just have to spend 30 minutes uninstalling all the crap that comes with it.

And then how much of your infrastructure will you move to Linux? If you're not using an app that requires Windows you might in the future. The next version of that app might be dependent on .NET 2 which may not work under WINE, or newer versions of the computers you're using might not work with the Linux images you currently have on hand... more work to get things going..

You'll simply be less flexible. Not to mention if you get run over by a bus the next admin may not:
(a) know what the heck is going on in that setup
(b) know Linux in general
(c) agree with the setup

In contrast if you're running your standard Windows 2003 Active Directory with Windows 2000 and Windows XP clients, you can pick any admin and place him there and he will hit the ground running. That predictability and repeatability is what is so valuable, and it comes straight from the fact that Windows is consistent (no distros).

Linux lacks such standards not only in companies but even on each desktop and across distros. It takes that much effort to know the system before fixing it and that much more difficult to write universal scripts and manage networks of disparate Linux workstations.

Re:Look at costs, Servers first

[linuxrocks123]

> The question came up... why should we anyway? Every new computer comes with Windows and all the drivers preinstalled. We just have to spend 30 minutes uninstalling all the crap that comes with it.

You shouldn't be using the default Windows install anyway. You should be using an image. Default Windows installs sometimes have viruses and spyware (no, really, they do).

> And then how much of your infrastructure will you move to Linux? If you're not using an app that requires Windows you might in the future. The next version of that app might be dependent on .NET 2 which may not work under WINE, or newer versions of the computers you're using might not work with the Linux images you currently have on hand... more work to get things going..

Well, first, if it's on .Net you would be using Mono, not WINE, which already does support most of .NET 2. Second, WINE is really only suitable as a stopgap measure today; if you're being forced to use it you should be planning on changing to an alternative program anyway. Third, WINE will almost certainly support the new version of an app that is already working with it -- eventually. So if you insist on abusing WINE in the manner you describe, you might have to hold off on upgrading for a few months but that's it. As far as the images issue ... you make new images for new computers, no matter what the OS is. (See above about default Windows installs.)

> You'll simply be less flexible. Not to mention if you get run over by a bus the next admin may not:
>(a) know what the heck is going on in that setup
If you document it properly, a competent admin will be able to understand it.
>(b) know Linux in general
If this firm would hire someone with no Linux experience to maintain a 100% Linux network, they have some serious HR policy issues.
>(c) agree with the setup
Why do you perceive this to be a problem?

The rest of your comment is ignorant drivel that doesn't deserve a response.

Re:Look at costs, Servers first

[FishWithAHammer]

Well, first, if it's on .Net you would be using Mono, not WINE, which already does support most of .NET 2.

Not really true. It supports .NET 1 really well, but the .NET 2 support is miserably weak. Mostly nonexistent.

Re:Look at costs, Servers first

[George Beech]

Terminal Services Licenses cost nearly as much as a full XP license Huh? A 5 pack is ~300$ making it about 60$/license. Not even OEM windows pricing is that cheap.

Re:Look at costs, Servers first

[Achromatic1978]

Default Windows installs sometimes have viruses and spyware (no, really, they do).

Please, name one. And no, OEM recovery disks laden with 3rd party extras don't count (though I'd still be wary of your claim even then).

Name a Windows installation disk that has come from Microsoft with a virus or spyware on it.

Re:Look at costs, Servers first

[Shawn is an Asshole]

You shouldn't be using the default Windows install anyway. You should be using an image. Default Windows installs sometimes have viruses and spyware (no, really, they do). IMHO, imaging sucks. It's really only a decent idea if every system you deal with gets the same exact configuration.

Give Unattended a try. Once you get over the learning curve and get the installation and configuration of all your apps scripted, this approach is extremely easy. It took me about a month to get it set up, but now I do little more than update the scripts occasionally. Instead of maintaining about a dozen different images (different computers need different apps), I just have profile scripts that inherit from each other. Every other week I just go to all the computers, hit F3 after the POST then every system rebuilds itself. Works great and beyond the initial time investment it saves a significant amount of work.

Quoting the Unattended project:

Whether you use Unattended, RIS, or some other system for Windows deployment, one technique which you should absolutely avoid is disk imaging.

Also called "cloning", disk imaging means taking a snapshot of the hard drive of one machine and restoring it onto the hard drive of another. Microsoft provides tools like Sysprep and RIPrep to help you with this task, and it is a very popular way to deploy systems.

But it is usually a bad idea. Never mind that imaging provides poor support for non-uniform hardware; the big problem is that it creates a maintenance nightmare.

For example, suppose you have several system configurations, including salesperson laptops, developer workstations, automated build servers, and financial systems. In addition, suppose you are in the process of migrating your organization from Windows 2000 to Windows XP, so you need to be able to install both.

Even for this simple example, you will need to create and store eight different images, one for each combination of OS and application suite. To update a common application, you will have to modify and re-create all eight images. Add some diverse hardware like fancy laptops into the picture, and the nightmare becomes clear.

If you are cranking out thousands of identical workstations with completely identical hardware and software, imaging is a fine approach. But if your organization is like most, with heterogenous hardware and software, true unattended installation will give you better reliability and much easier maintenance.

Why?

[NineNine]

As always, there's not enough information. Why do you want to do this? What are you trying to accomplish? What apps? How critical are they? If you want to switch just for the sake of switching, then really, you should be fired.

Re:Why?

[Anml4ixoye]

If you want to switch just for the sake of switching, then really, you should be fired.

I disagree somewhat with this. For some people, it goes beyond technology to beliefs of free and open systems. It was me deciding to switch "just to switch" that led me to the great programs I use today (Firefox, Thunderbird, Eclipse, etc), and a desktop I enjoy (Gnome on Gentoo).

As long as he takes into account all of the things (like are they going to pay for support if one of the systems does down - or do they even /need/ support if it goes down) I think it is a good thing to at least investigate what is involved in switching. If we don't investigate alternatives, we won't know the ways our current stuff could be better.

Re:Why?

[Null Nihils]

As always, there's not enough information. Why do you want to do this? What are you trying to accomplish? What apps? How critical are they? If you want to switch just for the sake of switching, then really, you should be fired.

Dude, this is Slashdot. The benefits of switching to an Free/Open solution should be obvious.

At the very least, we can assume the goal here is to prise the organization from the jaws of Vendor Lock-In. A vendor like Microsoft has no reason to be nice to a small- to medium-sized company, and this leaves anyone locked in to a Microsoft system vunerable.

Also, despite all the "TCO" FUD Microsoft adversises, a move to a Free/Open solution can potentially save a lot of money. Not in all cases of course, but the question being asked isn't "Why should I?" but "How can I?". And I don't see any reason why the submitter should be assumed to be an idiot incapable of using proper judgement.

Re:Why?

[NineNine]

For some people, it goes beyond technology to beliefs of free and open systems

Well, if you're personal system, it doesn't matter what you use. But this guy is talking about a business. If it's anything like my business, computer downtime costs a lot of money, and a lot of families depend on those computers being up and functional. I think that basing what should be a business decision on a (questionable) philosophy can be a pretty irresponsible move. If it goes badly, what do you say to the employees who are not getting paychecks? "Sorry about not being able to pay you, but our software is Free, which makes it... better. Sorry about not being able to pay for food."

That's not an exaggeration. If our computers at my business (retail) went down for any signficiant amount of time, then I've got to lay off people.

Re:Why?

[ScentCone]

A vendor like Microsoft has no reason to be nice to a small- to medium-sized company

What are you talking about? Microsoft makes a lot of their money off of smaller operations that use their products. MS utterly relies on third party consultants and expertise to deploy/support solutions for those users, and if that whole channel (including the end users) aren't kept happy and functioning, they'll lose a lot of mindshare.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Bollocks. Avoiding vendor lock-in is a sound business philosophy for a cost sensitive small business. If there are employees who can comfortably administer *nix, Microsoft boxes are an unnecessary and unreliable burden. The only problem we had switching from Windows was our proprietry accounts package.

Re:Why?

[NineNine]

A vendor like Microsoft has no reason to be nice to a small- to medium-sized company, and this leaves anyone locked in to a Microsoft system vunerable.

OK, let's think about this realistically. MS is the largest software company on the planet, with a financial statement that rivals the largest companies on the planet. They're not going away any time soon, and their OS is used everywhere. There are tons and tons of applications of all kinds that will work with Windows.

Case in point: basic small-business accounting software. There are tons to pick from that run on Windows. You can go down to your local office supply store, and pick one of a dozen, and they'll all do the job. If you switch to OSS, you have about one choice: Gnucash, and it's mediocre at best (let's forget that it doesn't have some critical functionality, such as payroll). If Gnucash, a piece of software being written by a handful of loosely-organized volunteers in their free time, getting paid nothing, happens to die for whatever reason (very possible), then you're quite literally, SOL, unless you're a big enough company that you can pay $150/hour for programmers to re-invent the features that exist in a $100 off-the-shelf package. If you're using Quickbooks, and for some bizarre reason, Intuit shuts down (very unlikely), then you pick up Peachtree, or any of the others, export and import your data, and you're back in business.

I won't consider going to OSS because the inadvertent lock-in from having a lack of choice is very real. If I were to switch my company to OSS alternatives, there's no doubt about it, I would be "locked-in" to using what few options there are. "Lock-in" on the MS platform is unlikely. Sure, it could theoretically happen, but it makes as much sense to worry about that as it does to worry about a comet hitting the Earth tomorrow.

I feel that is is much safer for a smaller company without deep pockets to stay with mainstream software, as much as possible. Buy whatever is generic and does the job, then move on to getting to the part of the business that pays the bills.

Re:Why?

[networkBoy]

All your points are valid. Here's the flip side (which I assume you'll appriciate):
All thosed licences *should* cost money. I know several small businesses with pirated apps and OS's. I myself used a pirated suite of OSs and such for quite some time. Margins are thin enough without paying M$ nearly a grand and a half for Office, OS, and sundry other apps, add another $2K to Adobe and that's a chunk of change when you are trying to start-up.

More than one of my clients has switched (or tried to till some wierd app that only runs on windows and won't run on WINE comes along, or till my admittedly weak Linux/WINE fu fails), simply to be leagal. That is as good a reason, if not better, than the "free is good".
-nB

Re:Why?

[electricon]

If you want to switch just for the sake of switching, then really, you should be fired.

You must be new here.

Re:Why?

[ClosedSource]

"Bollocks. Avoiding vendor lock-in is a sound business philosophy for a cost sensitive small business. "

What is the dollar value of "avoiding vendor lock-in"? That's right, you did say it's a philosphy, so perhaps it's unconnected to the bottom line.

Re:Why?

[NineNine]

Oh, I own a tiny company, and I spend more than that. I've got about 10 machines, all with licensed W2K or XP. The kicker is that my point-of-sale software costs $1600/workstation, and I have 5 workstations, and support for this software is no more than two years. That's a *lot* of money for a six person company. But really, I have no alternative. It's a cost of doing business. There's no free alternatives to my POS software, and the OSS ones simply don't do what we need them to do (integrated credit card processing, integration with Quickbooks, Win 32 API to hook into our web site, etc.). So, I have to look at my business. My options are to spend $8K every few years of software, or try to run a retail store with more than 10,000 items and over $1M/year in sales with some kludged together OSS stuff that would take a *lot* more effort, and may not even be possible without spending about 20 years worth of licensing costs to pay somebody to develop something.

If I owned a white-collar business that used computers for basic word processing and email, then sure, it doesn't really matter what you use. But how often is that the case, in this day and age? My friend, an attorney (basic office job, right?), needed some good way to handle scheduling, contacts, email, etc. Of course, he went with Exchange. Why? After spending about 6 months looking for OSS solutions (and don't forget, he could have been using those hours to bill clients at $150/hour), he had lost a ton of money, he pissed off the other lawyers in the office with all of the software mess, and he looked very unprofessional when whatever he was using wasn't working, and he couldn't respond to his clients. Finally I told him to spend a hundred bucks a month on hosted Exchange service, and get on with his law business. Everything is running pretty smoothly in that office now.

Maybe, MAYBE if I ran, hmm... maybe a... hmmm... catering company, then OSS would work. All you need is some basic financial tracking (ooops... still no payroll), and something to print pretty estimates and invoices. But really, I can't think of a lot of businesses in this day and age that would be willing to do something so dramatic to save such a small amount of money (I spend about 30 times more on rent than I do on software).

Re:Why?

[NineNine]

A vendor like Microsoft has no reason to be nice to a small- to medium-sized company, and this leaves anyone locked in to a Microsoft system vunerable.

I'm about to spend a lot more money with MS, as we migrate our point-of-sale systems to MS RMS. They have very helpful salespeople that are willing to hold my hand even though the total bill won't be in the 5 digits, and they even are financing it for me. MS is actually very easy for my small company to deal with.

and this leaves anyone locked in to a Microsoft system vunerable.

Vulnerable to what? Give me a real world scenario. I just don't see it.

Re:Why?

[dave562]

Maybe, MAYBE if I ran, hmm... maybe a... hmmm... catering company, then OSS would work. All you need is some basic financial tracking (ooops... still no payroll), and something to print pretty estimates and invoices.

Or you could just run CaterEase (a Windows app) and forget about having to hack together some OSS solution. =)

Re:Why?

[thrillseeker]

MS is actually very easy for my small company to deal with

Faust? Is that you?

Re:Why?

[NineNine]

Well, they are. If I don't like their software any more, I'll buy something else in a few years. I'm not selling them my soul. It's just software.

Re:Why?

[pogson]

"If you want to switch just for the sake of switching, then really, you should be fired."

No one wants to waste time and money switching for the sake of switching. Most open-minded IT folks understand:

• Windows is fragile compared to a UNIX/POSIX OS.
• Microsoft has a monopoly. It costs money to buy from a monopoly. Competition is almost always better. Let Windows compete on its merits by examining alternatives.
• There are tens of thousands of malwares out there looking for Windows systems.
• Microsoft likes to force huge costs when "end-of-support" for one of its releases is reached. This makes the locked-in folks believe Windows is relatively cheaper.
• Most organizations that switch to GNU/Linux cover their costs in reduced maintenance the first year. If specialty apps block the switch, perhaps the mistake made to go with those apps is better corrected sooner rather than later. Accept no app that is not designed with portability in mind. If a business is valuable, you do not want Microsoft or any Microsoft partners controlling it.
• What will you do when the hardware finally dies and your version of Windows cannot understand the new stuff you buy? You will have to replace everything eventually, anyway. Do it sooner rather than later and use FLOSS as much as possible to prevent a recurrence.

In my work, I helped a school switch when they moved to a new building. Previously they had on-site personnel to manage hardware and software. Now they can go many months without intervention. The conversion costs over and above the new hardware which they were going to buy anyway was $5000 and an hour long introduction to the new software. By now that cost is all recovered. They should not have to do major hardware upgrade for ten years and software is continually upgraded from the distro in a few minutes as desired. By not installing Windows, the cost of the IT system would have been cut in two except that they had a sum in the budget and spent it to get twice the capability. There has been no downtime since a faulty memory module was replaced after some weeks of operation. Earlier we did need to replace a driver for video. That was done in the off hours.

Granted we had no "specialty" apps, but we have way more software now than we did last year.

The librarian did insist on using proprietary software. The shrinkwrap was lost in the mail and her library is still not functional although we had a FLOSS web app available early on if she had chosen to use it. What is the cost of delayed implementation of a major component of our business?

Re:Why?

[TeknoHog]

What is the dollar value of "avoiding vendor lock-in"?

It depends on the timescale. Philosophies rarely pay off during this quarter-year, but they can make a big difference in the long-term survival of the company and the society.

Re:Why?

[RobertLTux]

What is the dollar value of "avoiding vendor lock-in"?

i don't know it depends on what %Nextversion of the app will cost you ie
Oh The new version has some many %shiny features that we have to charge 12X to upgrade but we will charge you only 10X if you upgrade NOW (and in ?months oh Old version is no longer supported and your upgrade window has closed so you will now have to pay 20X and purchase a legacy migration tool at $$$$ per seat)

Re:Why?

[vruz]

have you had a look at jpos.org ?

they're friendly and will help you analyze alternatives

Re:Why?

[greenguy]

WTF? A comment poo-pooing considerations of vendor lock-in gets modded to 4, and replies pointing out the importance controlling your own data get modded to 2 and 1, respectively?

Anyone who sneers as philosophy as being disconnected from real life (including "the bottom line") deserves to be modded into the ground. Exactly what do such people think philosophy is?

Re:Why?

[Galactic Dominator]

http://www.sql-ledger.org/ Now you don't need QB and can write your site to query the Postgres DB. There are also several OSS CRM packages each having their own strengths. vtiger is one...compiere another, opentaps another...compromises have to be made using virtually any software and the OSS CRM's/ERP's generally make their money helping you customize. Of course there are more issues here, but see it's OSS...you can fix it yourself. And even if you can't and require paid support, you can least count a moral victory by not perpetuating what's wrong w/ our current system.

Re:Why?

[pogson]

" It's a cost of doing business. There's no free alternatives to my POS software, and the OSS ones simply don't do what we need them to do (integrated credit card processing, integration with Quickbooks, Win 32 API to hook into our web site, etc.). So, I have to look at my business. My options are to spend $8K every few years of software, or try to run a retail store with more than 10,000 items and over $1M/year in sales with some kludged together OSS stuff that would take a *lot* more effort, and may not even be possible without spending about 20 years worth of licensing costs to pay somebody to develop something."

Why cannot you use a general purpose web application? (I assume you can use a web form to interact with your system.) That takes care of the web interface automatically. There are PHP scripts that do the credit card thing. That leaves only the accounting. Anyone who can write PHP/MySQL stuff can interact with accounting data and put it into a form needed for the accounting software. Likely it will be the usual stuff: invoice/deposit/withdrawal. It is not rocket science and routine. The trick to using FLOSS is to use as much of the libraries and already existing code as possible. Then you have only to write your custom small bit and interface them witht the rest. There are several decent accounting packages that could be used. Surely they have a simple way to move data into the system from the web application. Even if you do not make such a switch, a business should have a clear understanding of the flow of information. The flipside, using proprietary everything, is that someone else may own your data. Using FLOSS, you own your bits and you get to keep and use the other bits, so effectively, you own the code you use. No third party can mess with you. The purveyor of the POS apps can always dissappe...

Re:Why?

[ClosedSource]

You can't just invoke the word philosophy and expect everyone to stop thinking. There's nothing unethical about getting locked in to a single vendor if it makes sense for your business. If your philosophy doesn't believe that the "bottom line" is key element in business, than your business will most probably fail.

It's OK to have a failing business and it's OK to have a philosophy that rejects basic principles of business, but philosophies get disconnected from real life when an individual's profession is in fundamental opposition to his philosophy.

Re:Why?

[bky1701]

The end never justifies the means. Saying philosophy has no place in business if it doesn't pay off over night is idiotic. Many businesses exist today because they had or have some philosophy behind them and many have fallen or are falling due to lack of them.

Re:Why?

[networkBoy]

Again, I can't disagree with you.
Ever notice that the POS app is usually a POS? Anyway, the clients I've successfully moved to OSS/Wine were a DJ, a coffee shop back office, and an office supply company. All had minimal transition issues, the coffee shop being the worst. The coffee shop front office stayed windows, for your same reason, the POS POS was windows only, and wouldn't run on WINE. Still they saved quite a bit on licence costs for the back office, and while I was at it I set up a Wi-Fi with metering/throttling/proxying* that allowed them to attract more customers.
The DJ was the easiest, all he needed was a calendar and a player app for his digital collection. His hardware was mostly supported which, honestly, was quite a shock for me.
-nB

* The Wi-Fi was free, but using metering/throttling & a proxy to selectively kill certain P2P and game ports we've mitigated the loitering aspect without much impact on the average paying customer. Using MAC filtering has allowed us to grant game access to a select few who spend money on a continuous stream of caffine while gaming.

Re:Why?

[Rantastic]

Actually, there are other options. I used to work for an all open source company, and they used some web based accounting software to do payroll.

To say that any product is required to run a business is just silly. Companies existed long before the computer, the phone, or even the desktop calculator. Part of running a small business is being able to just make it work, because it has to.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

>If I don't like their software any more, I'll buy something else in a few years

And to think, only a few posts ago, you stated that "...I have no alternative [to Microsoft]. It's a cost of doing business. There's no free alternatives to my POS software, and the OSS ones simply don't do what we need them to do (integrated credit card processing, integration with Quickbooks, Win 32 API to hook into our web site, etc.)."

So are you locked in, or aren't you?

Re:Why?

[Sparr0]

Why do you need integration with quickbooks instead of some other open accounting/bookkeeping/invoicing software? Why the HELL do you need a Win32 API for integration with a website... wtf is your website running*? I have used FOSS POS programs, they arent very mature but they do work and they store their data in open well-documented formats and systems so custom software to pull it out and do [whatever] with it wouldnt be that hard to write.

$4000/yr buys you the services of a local college graduate and experienced php/c++ programmer with moderate web design and AJAX experience (the local equivalent of ME), for about 400 hours. That's 6 weeks of 8hr/day development and then 11 months of 4hr/wk support. If I couldn't replace your current system, completely and improved in every aspect that you use, in those 6 weeks then I would eat my hat.

* - youre probably running a .NET powered website... see previous comments regarding the downside of vendor lock-in.

Re:Why?

[scum-e-bag]

(ooops... still no payroll)

Chapter 14. Payroll

Re:Why?

[advocate_one]

"and this leaves anyone locked in to a Microsoft system vunerable."

Vulnerable to what? Give me a real world scenario. I just don't see it.

to being forced to upgrade when they want you to upgrade rather than when you want to upgrade... to having your business critical data locked into a proprietary binary blob that can only be read/written by their software and leaves you beholden to them for the ability to access your data.

say your system currently runs XP and all your software is XP compatible. One day, the box on your desk fails badly and the replacement is only available with Vista. Now you find your accounting package won't run on Vista and you need to go and purchase the latest version for your box. Hey, what do you know, they just changed the file format... what a surprise, now your other boxes can't read data saved on your machine so you have the ugly workaround of having to remember to save in the old format every time (because as sure as eggs is eggs, you won't be able to make it the default) or else upgrade all the other machines to the new software... which surprise surprise only runs on Vista so you now have to upgrade everything else in your company

Re:Why?

[discord5]

My friend, an attorney (basic office job, right?), needed some good way to handle scheduling, contacts, email, etc. Of course, he went with Exchange.

For small companies there are easy solutions to do scheduling and handling contacts. I worked in a small company that had a couple of applications integrated with LDAP and a webinterface for contacts and scheduling. Unfortunatly, these things don't deploy well on the large infrastructure of most companies. I'm not a big fan of exchange, but most of the times it's the right tool.

he looked very unprofessional when whatever he was using wasn't working

Don't deploy software that doesn't work? I mean, seriously... Before you start using something, make sure that it does what you want it to do.

All you need is some basic financial tracking (ooops... still no payroll), and something to print pretty estimates and invoices.

Most people tend to use accounting packages that are built for windows for this (for small companies, large ones typically have more expensive software with lots more features).

I hate this trend of people trying to convert entire offices to operating system X. Give people what they need to do their jobs, and the investment you do in software should repay itself in no time. Theoretical debates about free formats (yes, they are important) and open source (yes, that too is important imho) aside, people need to be able to do their jobs. If the free alternatives aren't good enough to get the job done, then pay the price for a license and get it over with.

Suppose for a moment that you need a fileserver. Considder the features you need on that fileserver. Are they available in samba? If so... Use samba, it'll cost the company nothing in licenses, and it'll get the job done. The most important questions a company should ask before deploying software is:

• What features do we need? Will something rudimentary do, or does it need to do something very specific only package Y has?
• Who will be using it? Are they capable of using this software effectively, and how much will training cost?
• What do the licenses cost? Will the cheaper software end up costing me in lost productivity?

Once you've answered those questions, you'll be able to pick. Don't convert to another operating system because you can (or rather, you think you can), do it because there's a benefit other than just the licensing cost.

Converting most desktop PCs in a company to linux usually ends in tears, either for the admin or the users. They'll receive e-mails with attachments they can't open, or that don't look like they are supposed to. They won't know what software to use to do trivial tasks. The camera they used for taking pictures of some project's status won't show up like in windows, etc etc etc. Most of the problems are trivial ones, but they'll end up costing you a lot of time, that it's either going to frustrate the admin because he spends most of his time solving trivial problems, instead of working on the other important tasks he has, or the user who's getting frustrated that he can't do trivial tasks without having to bother the admin for everything.

I'm a big fan of linux as a server OS. 90% of the machines in my rack are linux machines, with the windows machines running specific software only available to windows. But when it comes to desktops, give users what they know and you'll save yourself some real headaches.

Re:Why?

[greenguy]

You can't just invoke the word philosophy and expect everyone to stop thinking.

I don't see that happening. I see just the opposite.

There's nothing unethical about getting locked in to a single vendor if it makes sense for your business.

If you can think of a situation where choosing to reduce your options and increase your overhead makes sense for your business, then you get an A+ for Creative Writing.

Re:Why?

[ClosedSource]

"If you can think of a situation where choosing to reduce your options and increase your overhead makes sense for your business, then you get an A+ for Creative Writing."

Limiting options is a very effective way of managing the complexity of any endeavor, including running a business. In any case, F/OSS advocates don't really believe in increasing options, just eliminating companies like MS as an option.

As far as cost is concerned, you have to take a detailed look at each business situation. Sometimes the "lock-in" solution ends up being the most cost effective one, sometimes not. Zealots never want to do the real analysis, they just throw slogans and insults at you.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

GNUCash is a joke it commits the cardinal sin of linking against gconf and if all those other Gnome libs aren't enough, it also links against qt.

deploy root # emerge -pq gnucash
[ebuild N ] gnome-base/gail-1.9.3
[ebuild N ] gnome-base/orbit-2.14.2
[ebuild N ] gnome-base/libbonobo-2.16.0
[ebuild N ] app-crypt/opencdk-0.5.5
[ebuild N ] dev-libs/lzo-2.02-r1
[ebuild N ] dev-libs/libtasn1-0.3.5
[ebuild N ] net-libs/gnutls-1.4.4-r1
[ebuild N ] net-libs/libsoup-2.2.98
[ebuild NS ] x11-libs/qt-4.1.4-r2
[ebuild N ] dev-python/pyrex-0.9.4.1
[ebuild N ] sys-apps/dbus-0.62-r2
[ebuild N ] gnome-base/gnome-mime-data-2.4.3
[ebuild N ] net-misc/neon-0.26.1-r1
[ebuild N ] gnome-base/gconf-2.14.0
[ebuild N ] app-admin/gamin-0.1.7
[ebuild N ] gnome-base/gnome-vfs-2.16.3
[ebuild N ] gnome-base/libgnome-2.16.0
[ebuild N ] gnome-base/libbonoboui-2.16.0
[ebuild N ] gnome-base/gnome-keyring-0.6.0
[ebuild N ] gnome-base/libgnomeui-2.16.1
[ebuild N ] gnome-extra/gtkhtml-3.12.2
[ebuild N ] dev-util/guile-1.6.7
[ebuild N ] dev-libs/slib-2.4.6
[ebuild N ] app-text/docbook-xml-dtd-4.1.2-r6
[ebuild N ] app-text/scrollkeeper-0.3.14-r2
[ebuild N ] app-text/docbook-xml-dtd-4.4-r1
[ebuild N ] app-text/gnome-doc-utils-0.8.0
[ebuild N ] gnome-extra/yelp-2.16.1
[ebuild N ] dev-libs/g-wrap-1.3.4-r1
[ebuild N ] x11-libs/goffice-0.2.1
[ebuild N ] app-office/gnucash-2.0.1

FWIW, I've never used a small business accounting package (including "leading" commercial solutions) that didn't suck.

Re:Why?

[DerekLyons]

"If you want to switch just for the sake of switching, then really, you should be fired."

No one wants to waste time and money switching for the sake of switching.

Nonsense. We routinely see (here on Slashdot) folks advocating switching for what, in the end, amounts to political, philosophical, or religious reasons. They don't care about costs - all they care is that 'Linus is the l33t and Micro$oft is shit and everyone should thereforr run Linux'.

Re:Why?

[sjames]

What is the dollar value of "avoiding vendor lock-in"? That's right, you did say it's a philosphy, so perhaps it's unconnected to the bottom line.

Avoiding vendor lock-in is a matter of risk management. There's an industry full of insurance underwriters that could probably put a dollar value on it, but since I'm not one, I don't really know.

However, It's not hard to understand the position vendor lock-in puts a business in. When a business has it's critical data locked up in a proprietary format and one and only one vendor can grant them the right to continue accessing it, that vendor is said to have the business "by the short hairs".

There are always costs and pain associated with switching vendors, even in the absense of lock-in. Compatability goes only so far. The question is how much is that pain worth. A vendor that practices lock-in tactics generally knows about how much and calculates the ongoing costs to fall just short of that mark FOR NOW. They are well aware that they can, in practice, extract many times that much by spacing things out far enough. All they have to do is present you with a bill for 80-90 percent of the cost of switching and make sure you percieve the next shakedown as non-existant or in the distant future (better yet, as coming from someone ELSES budget next time).

Of course, if you can afford to look just past the annual report, you'll save a substantial sum of money by accepting the pain NOW and reaping the benefits later.Simple economics will tell you that when multiple vendors offering approximatly the same value have to compete for your business, you win.

So, it's not always directly connected to the bottom line, particularly to the bottom line THIS quarter or THIS year. However, it IS connected indirectly and the effects are real. In part they are masked these days by the high prevalence of the lock-in. It can be hard to realize how badly you're doing when everyone you can see is in the same boat.

Re:Why?

[ClosedSource]

Risk management is one factor to consider, but not the only one and you have to look at risk comprehensively, not just focusing on a single issue. Even if you do end up paying more for your software due to the lock-in, it may turn out that it's still a better economic decision even for the long term. It seems to me that many who are anti-proprietary tend to exaggerate the economic importance of things like vendor lock-in relative to overall business economics.

One should also keep in mind that for some businesses "accepting the pain NOW" may not be economically feasible. I could have saved a bundle on my house if I had paid cash for it, but I didn't have the cash.

Re:Why?

[sjames]

It seems to me that many who are anti-proprietary tend to exaggerate the economic importance of things like vendor lock-in relative to overall business economics.

Likewise, those who advocate the proprietary solution tend to understate the non-license costs of vendor lock-in and closed apps. Those include minor mods (perhaps bug fixes) which would save several (collective) man hours a week but will never happen. Meanwhile the proprietary app requires a proprietary OS which requires proprietary backup solutions etc. each with their own time wasting bugs and mis-features that you can never fix. Finally, you have to 'upgrade' the whole thing because you need one more workstation but can't just license a new copy of what you have, you must buy the 'new and improved' version. In turn, you must now replace all of the hardware to support the new OS version.

All of that said, I do recognize that sometimes you're just stuck and can't afford to break the lockin. That's why I qualified my statement by saying IF you can afford to look past the annual report.

Neither answer is cut and dried, but I suspect that with more detailed and complete analysis breaking lock-in makes sense more often than is generally recognized.

Re:Why?

[ClosedSource]

Thanks for the one-sided argument. I could just as easily speculate that proprietary solutions work better from day one so mods and bug fixes aren't required. I have no evidence to support the statement, but it's no different than assuming that a) mods exist that could save "several man hours a week" b) that somebody actually makes the required mods and c) that those mods actually make it into the official release of the software and c) the small business user is aware that the mod is available.

The only point you made that doesn't require "cherry-picking" the scenario is the one about having to upgrade to a new OS when buying a new computer. On the other hand, you could lease a computer with Windows 95 on it as recently as 2 years ago, so there are other options.

Re:Why?

[sjames]

Thanks for the one-sided argument.

That is a process known as "discussion" You presented one view and I presented another. The scenerios I presented are not at all uncommon. I have, in fact, NEVER found a shop using proprietary solutions that didn't have a wishlist of simple mods that would save a great deal of pain. In many of those cases, were source available, the cost of hiring a contract programmer to make the mods would be a tiny fraction of the man-hours cost, that is, a payback measured in weeks or months.

Consider for a really simple example how many would benefit if they could add a "just shut up and do as I say" button with an admin password check. Also consider either removing the OK button or adding an admin password check to things like running an attachment or accepting an active-x control from random websites.

On the other hand, you could lease a computer with Windows 95 on it as recently as 2 years ago, so there are other options.

As for older versions, If I really want to, I can download and install SLS 1.03 (Soft Landing System Linux) ca. 1992 with kernel version 0.99, right now with no questions asked. I can even backport Gig ethernet drivers to it even though there was no gig ethernet when it was a current release. Admittedly, other than for a walk down memory lane, I can't imagine why I would want to do that, but the option is there. If there was some 'killer app' for my business that ran on SLS and it was Free software, I could simply recompile it on a new Debian box and be happy with no questions asked and no permission needed.

Re:Why?

[Stradivarius]

The post in question presented one perspective on the situation, you presented another. The problem is that we're talking in generalities when the "right choice" is going to come down to specific circumstances and their costs and benefits. Even then, some costs and benefits are not known a priori.

We can't know the future, so you have to consider hypothetical situations, and take a guess at their probability of happening and their associated costs. That's not "cherry-picking", it's picking the areas that you think will be of concern to your company. You can't know whether your tool vendor will be around in N years, whether they will provide adequate and timely bug fixes. You can't know the severity of the bugs you'll encounter. You can't know how big your company will have grown in N years and what the corresponding changes to your needs will be.

So you guess to the best of your knowledge, and try not to paint yourself into a corner for important decisions with significant uncertainty. Open-source has a lot going for it in managing particular uncertainties - you have the ability to hire people to fix bugs or make enhancements on your schedule rather than a vendor's, and you know the software isn't going to disappear from the face of the earth (either from licensing changes or a company's demise).

That doesn't mean open-source is always the solution - a commercial tool may simply be a better fit for your needs and the risks of the proprietary solution may not be large in a given situation. But it's going to come down to that sort of case-by-case judgment call.

Re:Why?

[NineNine]

That's not a useable payroll system.

Re:Why?

[NineNine]

That IS contrived, actually. There's no reason I couldn't run the software on another XP computer or, just re-install XP on a new/used machine. Really, it's no big deal. I'd be much more worried about having that happen using a Linux system. The various versions come so fast, that after a few years, you'd have to pay through the nose for private, custom support. You gotta realize, that there's a big advantage to using popular, commodity software.

Re:Why?

[Overzeetop]

Find me a competent IT person I can contract with for $10 and hour that will cater to my business for 200 hours a year (I have a smaller shop) and you've got a job. Burger flippers cost more.

Re:Why?

[ClosedSource]

"We can't know the future, so you have to consider hypothetical situations, and take a guess at their probability of happening and their associated costs. That's not "cherry-picking", it's picking the areas that you think will be of concern to your company."

Yes, what you describe isn't "cherry-picking" but it also doesn't describe what the poster was doing. He was considering only the hypothetical situations that supported his point of view while a sucessful businessperson would let the analysis drive the conclusions.

Re:Why?

[dattaway]

It would be nice if GNUCash could link just to ncurses for a minimalistic, resource friendly, terminal application.

Re:Why?

[dave562]

...they store their data in open well-documented formats and systems ...

I have yet to come across any sort of "proprietary" POS system that doesn't dump data to CSV at a very bare minimum.

Re:Why?

[Sparr0]

My bad, I screwed up the math halfway through. I was aiming for $15/hr. I am making $18 right now, but that includes a lot of web application stuff.

All of your issues are no problem.

[Shaman]

We have a single W2K3 system which serves up a couple of legacy apps over RDP (Rdesktop) and integration with Samba, etc. has gone well for us. The standard KDE applications work fine although you do have to choose your distribution, largely because Flash can hang and/or crash Konqueror on a regular basis (blame Flash, not Konq).

The only issue we have run in to is that Windows will only let you log in with RDP so many times before it will blacklist your machine's hostname for not having a genuine MS license. It's a pain but we just more or less randomize the hostname regularly. Good old Micro$oft... they won't even let you administratively remove the blacklisting without delving into the Registry (haven't tried that, but I figure it must be possible). This happens infrequently, by the way, W2k3 will probably accept a good 100 connections before it whines.

Re:All of your issues are no problem.

[MSFanBoi2]

Or maybe just stay legal and this isn't an issue at all.

Re:All of your issues are no problem.

[tftp]

He *is* legal, his client box runs Linux (see the rdesktop reference.)

Re:All of your issues are no problem.

[richie2000]

He *is* legal, his client box runs Linux (see the rdesktop reference.) Yeah, but MS requires Terminal Services Licenses for the clients. These come with XP but would theoretically need to be purchased from MS if connecting with other clients. In addition, you probably need to have enough CALs too, depending on what the servers are being used for (for example, a Win2k3 SBS comes with only 5 CALs). I had to research this whole scam^H^H^H^Hscheme back in the Win2k Server days and it's a total bitch. Apparently it's even more convoluted in 2k3...

Re:All of your issues are no problem.

[Shaman]

[b]Yeah, but MS requires Terminal Services Licenses for the clients. These come with XP but would theoretically need to be purchased from MS if connecting with other clients.[/b]

Nope. I'm not using any Microsoft software on the client. Just need to buy the CAL (which in itself is totally bollocks, IMHO) and you're in. The problem is that M$ also wants to be paid for the client, which is really double dipping.

They could use ICA client as well, but in my experience the ICA client for Linux is pretty particular about the distribution and versions of libraries, whereas you can recompile rdesktop any time you want... and it's in the distributions itself.

Re:All of your issues are no problem.

[Sparr0]

Fortunately most of us live in a country (the USA) where MS doesn't have the authority to "require licenses".

Re:All of your issues are no problem.

[richie2000]

I'm not using any Microsoft software on the client. Just need to buy the CAL (which in itself is totally bollocks, IMHO) and you're in. The problem is that M$ also wants to be paid for the client, which is really double dipping. They are actually trying to triple-dip:

"In addition to a server license, a Windows Server Client Access License (CAL) is required. If you wish to conduct a Windows session, an incremental Terminal Server Client Access License (TS CAL) is required as well."
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003/howtobu y/licensing/ts2003.mspx#EWC

Re:All of your issues are no problem.

[doj8]

Terminal Server Licenses do not come with Windows XP when you are using Terminal Server on Windows Server 2003. That was true on Windows Server 2000, but even that ended about a year ago. You need to buy a client license for each user, irrespective of what operating system (Windows XP or Linux) they are running for any version of Terminal Server now.

Start with your applications.

[jonadab]

> however a couple of our core applications run exclusively on Windows

Then that is where you have to start.

Yes, you could insert a couple of Linux systems in side roles that don't require them to run the core apps, e.g., a DNS server here and a CGI server there and so on and so forth -- and that's likely worth doing for its own sake -- but if you want to migrate entirely off of Windows, you've first got to migrate to all cross-platform applications.

Re:Start with your applications.

[wynler]

Absolutely 100% correct.  If you have a small company, and applications that require Windows.  You don't switch to Linux.

Re:Start with your applications.

[Brandybuck]

But you can switch to apps that do NOT require Windows first.

Re:Start with your applications.

[tftp]

But you have to find them first.

Re:Start with your applications.

[Brandybuck]

Of course you do! But that's not a reason not to at least look for them or find alternatives.

Freedom doesn't mean your decisions are going to be effortless. Before you can decide whether to take the left or right fork in the road, you first have to get your freaking butt off the road dirt. People who whine that they have no choice but to use Windows should at least have the decency to get off the road so other people stop tripping over them.

Re:Start with your applications.

[tftp]

There must be a poet somewhere deep inside you :-)

My largest problem is with MS Office. There is no equivalent replacement that would be acceptable for business purposes. Truth be told, it's not easy to make an office suite that has so few bugs that it is considered to be useful. First releases of MS Word were awful, and it took MS a lot of time (10 years?) to get to the point where it is actually stable. Don't know how good Office 2007 is though, and not in any hurry to check it out.

In any case, OpenOffice is the only other game in town, and it is no good. At least it was no good at all when I tried it last time. It opened other people's .doc files, but hardly any of them was opened "just as" MS Word would do it. I don't even call it a bug - the .doc format is not exactly an ISO standard - but the fact is that if just one document out of a hundred is wrong the whole package is dropped. You can't just tell the boss that "tables here and margins there are outside of the paper, and that's why you can't see them... oh, you MUST see them, since the author OBVIOUSLY saw them when he entered the data? Hmm, let me post a message on a forum and I will be back to you in a few days... Oh, you need the data RIGHT AWAY ? Hmm, we have that laptop with MS Office, it will do the trick..."

So yes, searching is good, but it takes time away from your main business (one of other posters mentioned a tale of a lawyers' office). And often I *know* already that there is no replacement for QuickBooks (GnuCash is not acceptable) and no replacement for MS Office, and no replacement for AutoCAD (not even on Windows, please keep the Intellicad $stuff, it's not working :-), and no replacement for many other professional s/w packages that I know everything about. And I know that it will take a lifetime to write any of those from scratch, so I don't hold my breath. And I say so here because that's what the discussion is about.

Re:Start with your applications.

[Sparr0]

OpenOffice is just one of many contenders. Try Star Office, OpenOffice's commerically supported brother. Or KOffice, the office suite from the KDE project. Or for a less mature option, there is Gnome Office which is just a wrapper for AbiWord and Gnumeric for the most part.

Re:Real world vs. fanboy fantasies

[richie2000]

I have the certificates to prove this, and furthermore they're issued by the biggest software company in existence. Oh, you're an IBM Certified Enterprise Developer? Good for you! Way more impressive than, say, a MVP for MSN Messenger or Notepad. ;-)

VMware Server, Converter Beta

[Semireg]

Next year much of the server and desktop hardware we run will need replacing. Migrate your servers to virtual machines. You can do this for free using Cent OS as the host, and VMware Server (free) software to run virtual machines. The VMware Converter (now in beta) will allow you to p2v, or migrate physical-to-virtual machines and this is done while the source server is powered on. So, regardless if you're going to Linux right now, you can make the jump to hardware-agnostic VMs with just a few clicks, and no extra money spent. Right away, you'll gain flexibility by utilizing your new hardware more efficiently. Good luck!

My Office

[Sparr0]

My current boss, a close friend of mine, single-handedly began a FOSS migration in our 3-location 100-desktop 20-offsite-laptop-user office about a year ago. I came on board about 3 months ago, almost through the first stages of the process. We now have 99% of our users on OpenOffice (one holdout, and I am going to fix his missing feature ASAP to get him off Excel), and 100% migrated away from IE+Outlook (most on Firefox+Thunderbird, a few people requested Mac desktops and are using Safari+Mail). We transitioned to Open Directory on an OS X Server with nary a hitch, with the added bonus that OD supports LDAP which means it plays nice with all of our new extranet and internet services (LDAP login to our helpdesk, CMS, etc).

Eventually Windows XP will lose support and we will have to consider sticking with unsupported XP, or moving to Vista/Fiji/Vienna, or a complete migration to Mac, or a final alternative that I am starting to push slowly up the list of possibilities... Linux. My boss is a Mac user, he dislikes many of the problems with Windows. He had the popular misconception that Linux is hard to install, hard to maintain, and hard to use in general. My first day, when provided free reign over my own desktop, I let him watch me go through a Kubuntu installation. Cleared up all that nonsense right quick. From a blank hard drive to a better-than-Explorer GUI, with both of our network printers completely configured, desktop shortcuts to our network shares, Firefox and Thunderbird installed as well as a GUI terminal (we have legacy apps requiring telnet to our SCO UNIX machine), all in under 30 minutes, and without touching a text console.

Running actual GUI Windows applications in Linux CAN be difficult, but often is not. There is a VERY good chance that they will 'Just Work' under WINE or Crossover Office. If you need terminal services functionality, rdesktop has worked great for me. There is also the VMWare/etc option, if the programs are old enough for the perfomance hit to not matter (and if you're developing "core" applications that only run on Windows TODAY, then youve got other problems).

Re:My Office

[swillden]

There is also the VMWare/etc option, if the programs are old enough for the perfomance hit to not matter

One comment about this: The VMWare "performance hit" is overblown, IMO. As long as the machine has enough RAM to give both the host and guest operating systems what they need, VMWare virtual machines run at very close to native speed. In most cases, no one will be able to tell the difference between VMWare in fullscreen mode and Windows running natively on the machine.

The one real exception that I've noticed is that disk I/O can be greatly degraded if you make use of snapshots. That makes sense, because writing one page to "disk" requires not only the main copy of the "disk" to be updated, but some number of snapshot files to be updated as well. In many cases, snapshotting is so convenient that it's worth the performance hit, but it's optional so you can make that decision yourself.

Re:Translation

[richie2000]

Well, I guess this is what happens when some well-meaning doctor teaches an old ex-GNAA renegade to play Minesweeper as therapy...

P2V IS TOO EXPENSIVE

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you actually tried to purchase a license for P2V ? The tool is licensed on the number of uses, and it isn't cheap.

A better bet is a combination of BartPE and GHOST. As long as the server have some form of IDE device the Ghosted image will come up just fine under Vmware, and you can then go and add/move disks around.

P2V is an enterprise tool - definitely out of reach for small shops

Re:P2V IS TOO EXPENSIVE

[Semireg]

This is not P2V. VMware Converter is the successor to VMware P2V. VMware Converter is absolutely free at this point, with just a few little bugs, and a few missing features. Once officially released it will come bundled with a VMware VirtualCenter license, or free but with a limited feature set. In my experience BartBE and Ghost is a last resort for P2Vs. The converter tool will not only replace the drivers so there is no "New Hardware Found" caveats, but it also has the option to configure the new machine's identity using sysprep. If you're looking to spend money on a good P2V tool, check out PlateSpin PowerConvert.

Provide the complete analysis first

[tftp]

One computer costs $1,000 in hardware. One employee costs $120,000 per year, with burdening. One "mission-critical" application costs anywhere from $800 (AutoCAD 2007) to $5,000 (Inventor 11, non-pro.) One WinXP Pro license costs mere $150 even if you buy it at maximum cost, as a retail box. Now, aren't you putting the cart way ahead of the horse? A single wasted hour of any of your employees' time (or your own) will cost as much as an XP Pro license. Have your numbers straight before switching, and have very good reasons to switch.

The problem with businesses is that they are not very open to OS theology; businesses just want to do what they are doing, and if the job requires computers and OS and apps and stuff, well - that's just the cost of doing business. It will cost money to run a Linux shop, and it will be probably *more expensive* to run a Linux shop, considering that every Windows app -- that normally would be "install and run" on any Windows box -- becomes a WINE nightmare, to see where it crashes and how to work around those crashes. Do you really want to buy a $20,000 app (there are plenty of specialty apps in this price range, all mission-critical) just to find out that no, it won't run under WINE, and no, vendor support in such environment is not provided. Do you want to lose the support on such an expensive app? You are risking not just your job, you are risking jobs of your coworkers too - if the company loses a contract because of OS troubles then some employees may need to be laid off, starting with you, of course.

If you have dreams about using RDP for those few apps that you must have on Windows, it depends on what those apps are. Some apps do not permit running under RDP because that would be inviting to buy one copy of an app and then have the whole company to access the server and run the thing. I personally know of some examples, so check before you buy into it. And other posters already said that the cost of a terminal license is as high as WinXP, and you have all the eggs in one basket (server.) Server dies - the whole company stops; are you OK with that?

Again, businesses don't want anything that deviates from tried, tested and true path. Cost is not a concern here; labor and apps cost uncountably more than the OS. If you want to migrate, you still can do that; I tried myself, starting with a 3-man company, and guess what eventually happened? Once we started growing, the total cost of maintenance of a mixed network shot through the roof (and disappeared among the stars.) Now we stick to Linux on firewalls, and Windows XP everywhere else. We do use Linux on our embedded systems, and it's perfect there. Desktops are a different matter.

Re:Provide the complete analysis first

[RAMMS EIN]

``A single wasted hour of any of your employees' time (or your own) will cost as much as an XP Pro license.''

But won't XP Pro cause its own wasted hours of employee time? Malware, crashes, sluggishness, ...

Re:Provide the complete analysis first

[tftp]

Not really. A properly administered network has minimal, and filtered, access to the Internet, and your employees aren't supposed to surf pr0n sites at work. A typical use of a business computer is to work with spreadsheets, create and edit documents, drawings, send and receive emails using Thunderbird, or browse Digi-Key or Mouser catalogs using Firefox. An engineer would be using his CAD to create models of mechanical parts, or electrical diagrams, or RF simulations. This works, and the proof of the pudding is you know where. Per my observations, people stopped rebooting their computers daily since Win98.

Re:Provide the complete analysis first

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

The problem with businesses is that they are not very open to OS theology; businesses just want to do what they are doing

Some of us would argue that this is not a problem, but a feature.

Re:Provide the complete analysis first

[fimbulvetr]

A properly administered network has minimal

That's the thing. A properly administered network? There's no such thing without a lot of constant work.

New patches, new patches gone bad. Installing thunderbird. Fixing corrupt registries. Removing the new virus that just came out. Rebooting your exchange server. Installing new service packs. And on, and on, and on, and on....

The COST for windows XP is far, far, far greater than $150.

Re:Provide the complete analysis first

[bky1701]

Like many things, that only works on paper. Someone will always be able to cause some major problem, even if it's IT themselves, and most likely they will at least once. Many viruses only take one computer to infect a whole network. Running a fully patched win XP I got a virus from a corporate network (I was visiting and they had a virus... go figure), how I still don't know, and my systems are all configured very secure compared to most.

Re:Provide the complete analysis first

[tftp]

You sound like such maintenance work is totally absent from Linux setups. One of my older SuSE boxes was once killed by a patch, and none of that ever happened to any of my WinXP boxes, so what? Things happen, that's life. I don't have an Exchange server, so I don't even know how to reboot one, but my Postfix + Cyrus mail setup is mostly bug-free, though I still haven't figured out why an admin can't delete top-level user.foo mailboxes with cyradm. And on, and on, and on, and on....

The bottom line is that I spend more time on maintenance of applications than on OSes. Any serious, professional, multi-CD application is usually a nightmare to administer.

Re:Provide the complete analysis first

[fimbulvetr]

I used to run several hundred debian installs with cfengine. At the job I'm starting at in a few days, I will probably do the same. I left the old one partly because it was boring. With desktops, it could be almost as painless, though there will always be cases like the one you mentioned above.

In any case, my point was that you shouldn't trivialize XP to $150.

The problem with Cyrus, in your case, is that you chose CMU software. Like most other CMU software, it mostly follows standards and logic but likes to deviate in ways that are inexplicable at best, and absurd at worst.

Re:Provide the complete analysis first

[Sparr0]

One computer costs $1,000 in hardware. One employee costs $120,000 per year, with burdening. One "mission-critical" application costs anywhere from $800 (AutoCAD 2007) to $5,000 (Inventor 11, non-pro.) One WinXP Pro license costs mere $150 even if you buy it at maximum cost, as a retail box. Now, aren't you putting the cart way ahead of the horse? A single wasted hour of any of your employees' time (or your own) will cost as much as an XP Pro license. Have your numbers straight before switching, and have very good reasons to switch.

Bullshit. I don't know where you live, but $120000 per employee per year would be a seriously high class company in any city/market I have ever worked. I am currently contracting, so my $18/hr is exactly what I make. My employee counterparts are making $15/hr+benefits, so call it $25 with benefits and HR expenses and whatever else. If switching from windows did nothing but waste time, it could waste 6 hours before we saw a loss, and it doesn't. Every machine I move from Windows to Linux is 1 less hour per month I have to spend fixing patch deployment problems, rooting out spyware, installing new product-vendor-provided software, etc. It adds up.

Re:Provide the complete analysis first

[Anonymous Coward]

"A single wasted hour of any of your employees' time (or your own) will cost as much as an XP Pro license"

That works both ways - do you know anyone who wasted an hour or more due to problems with Windows XP?

(We have teams who wasted whole weeks trying to fix things that work in Win2000 and break in WinXP)

Re:Provide the complete analysis first

[edmudama]

One computer costs $1,000 in hardware. One employee costs $120,000 per year, with burdening. One "mission-critical" application costs anywhere from $800 (AutoCAD 2007) to $5,000 (Inventor 11, non-pro.) One WinXP Pro license costs mere $150 even if you buy it at maximum cost, as a retail box. Now, aren't you putting the cart way ahead of the horse? A single wasted hour of any of your employees' time (or your own) will cost as much as an XP Pro license. Have your numbers straight before switching, and have very good reasons to switch.

I agree with your general point, that the OS costs are trivial compared to the applications, but I think the scale for many companies is an order of magnitude or more higher. Many companies can afford a separate platform for each application when necessary. I've worked at companies where an old box running SunOS was purchased just for running a specific version of the VHDL toolset they liked. $100k/seat for 10 engineers means that the $20k they spent on the box to run it was trivial. Whenever a group had a new application they wanted to work with, they got whatever box or platform it had to run on to try it.

I think the key to a good IT group and a good migration plan is the flexibility to support Windows, Linux, Solaris, SunOS, HP-UX, and everything in between without freaking out. Sure, the more esoteric systems will require more user assistance and can't just be supported through the IT help desk, but users demanding those applications tend to be significantly more technically savvy. Besides, what support is really necessary besides occasional patches and regular backups? The applications are how the business gets their work done, and for a lot of specialized tools, you can't pick your platform.

Re:Provide the complete analysis first

[tftp]

In area code 95050 many contractors won't even consider a job offer if it is below $100/hr. Many charge twice that much, if they have unique skills (FPGA design, for example, or microwave.) Also, an employee costs the company anywhere from 30% to 100% more than his salary is, because he needs a manager, a room, a computer, a vacation, insurances of several kinds, and payroll taxes that employer pays.

Re:Provide the complete analysis first

[Sparr0]

Unique skills, sure. We aren't talking about unique skills. We are talking about trivial OS operation knowledge.

And why did you elaborate on "30% to 100% more..." when I said $15/hr cost the company $25/hr? Was my 66% more too precise? It seems to fall right in the middle of your range, a reasonable approximation.

Re:Provide the complete analysis first

[tftp]

And why did you elaborate on "30% to 100% more..." when I said $15/hr cost the company $25/hr?

Well, your formula was unclear, and in any case if your numbers match my numbers then we are both correct (or incorrect.) With regard to contractors, a car mechanic here charges about $40/hr. See here, for example. And this post offers $15/hr for a data entry position, no knowledge above high school needed! But this is what I would call an entry level programmer's position. Feel free to browse for more.

Re:Provide the complete analysis first

[Overzeetop]

Oh, you've stepped into it. I try and bring this stuff up from time to time, but it seems that /. is populated by fry cook sysadmins that value their time as $0 and figure if they get paid $9/hr, it cost $9/hr to the company. Your post should be at +5, but the mods who have never run a business will ensure that you never make it that high.

FWIW, I have tried the same thing with a small (3-4 person) engineering firm I run. WinXP, for us, costs $0, as we buy Dell products (cheap on sale, good support if you buy the right product/support service), and they all come with the software, and there's no discount for Linux on machines on sale. (servers excluded, of course). I tried OO, and gave up due to comaptibility problems with Office docs. There is no good calendar/contact program or simple-to-use, inexpensive Quickbooks equivalent. I'm not about to tackle AutoCAD and Wine - Acad barely runs reliably on a native OS, I doubt it would be more stable under Linux. As for viruses, I haven't had one in a decade (knock on wood), and the decent antivirus software we use (AVG) is cheap. We sit behind a commercial (though consumer grade) firewall, and the employees generally don't do stupid stuff.

Especially true for small businesses is that most hires know MS products, many are not OS savvy (suprisingly so), and training costs in time and money is just not a real possibility. By the time a really small firm gets a new hire, they REALLY need that persons skills, and to get them up to speed is just painful. It's probably the main reason I use AutoCAD - everybody in my industry knows how to use it. I used to use it because my clients used it, but with the vertical products and 2D-3D imcompatibilities we may as well get dxfs.

Anyway, I'm really just posting to say, "yeah, you're damned right." When you run the numbers, the costs of OSs are just diminshingly small, and the cost to manage them in a small environment is similar.

Re:Provide the complete analysis first

[pogson]

"Again, businesses don't want anything that deviates from tried, tested and true path. Cost is not a concern here; labor and apps cost uncountably more than the OS."

If businesses A and B have 100 seat computer systems and A pays tens of thousands of dollars for software and B uses FLOSS, B has an advantage. For seats that involve the usual office stuff (word processing, spreadsheet, image processing), GNU/Linux works today on the desktop.

I think most of the "special" apps with the high price tags are archaic and represent lock-in. What do they do that requires a particular piece of software and no other? I have heard many say that they can work with PhotoShop but not with Gimp and I ask for details and get some tiny detail that is an insignificant part of the task.

I was once involved in a project that was locked-in with software that took six man-years to develop. The developer went bust. I replaced the software with all the functionality we needed in six man-weeks of writing from documentation and the result was better. We used to train employees to use the old programme (and the industrial systems it controlled) in six months. The new programme took only one month of training because the user interface was greatly improved (hints at the bottom of each screen). The entire cost of the transition was recovered in the first year because it took so little time to train users. This was mission-critical software without which the system could not run. The cost of the whole system was millions of dollars and it was in jeopardy if we needed to change anything in the software, so we replaced it with something we controlled. It made business sense, was cheaper, and it worked better.

I recently moved a school from Windows to Linux with no downside. Everything works. We control our destiny. We saved a ton of money on each seat and could afford twice as many seats as was planned when Windows was the concept. Linux is ready for the desktop certainly for many users who browse, write, move and store stuff.

Re:Provide the complete analysis first

[tftp]

I think most of the "special" apps with the high price tags are archaic and represent lock-in

They do represent lock-in, but they are not necessarily archaic. I am afraid you have very low opinion about industrial / professional / scientific software that is available. For example. This is a $20,000+ product, and it represents a man-century of labor to create, literally. What the students do in "school" (whatever that may be), most businesses need at least one unique s/w package that is not cheap, and usually comes for Windows only. I don't think there are many product-oriented businesses that can survive with F/OSS software only. You probably can run a service-oriented business this way, if you are a one-man company. But as soon as you grow, you will need Windows + IE to just run fscking paychecks because at least one such service requires this, and Java, and won't work with Firefox even on Windows (I checked today.)

The industry is full of such specialized s/w packages. Elsewhere in this thread other people gave examples of Quickbooks, Web stores with c/c processing, CADs (check out SolidWorks and tell me when a F/OSS equivalent will be ready, I need it :-) - same applies to Ansys/CosmosWorks, RadTherm, ProEngineer, SolidEdge, SystemView or MicrowaveOffice, and much much more. When you say that one man (you) can replace such a package within a few man-weeks of labor, you are immediately seen as a person who must not be trusted in such matters. We are not talking about 37th rewrite of Notepad (which resulted in Kate, kedit, knotepad, pico, etc. ) - we are talking about production software that is expected, and required, to reliably tell me if this steel beam or that pipe will withstand the acceleration of 5G within the strength limit of the material, or not. Because if not the whole fscking thing will break, and someone will die. That's what we are talking about here, not a 38th incarnation of a wordprocessor.

UltraVNC

[Anonymous Coward]

UltraVNC is wonderful. Even shares the clipboard and does file transfers. It would be fine if only one person needs to connect with a Windows computer at a time.

Talk to the users first

[Anonymous Coward]

1) Find out what they do
2) Find out what applications/services they use to perform 1
3) Identify what alternatives there are to 2
4) Determine where people can switch to these alternatives
5) Develop a (costed) plan
6) Talk to management and enlist their support. Hightlight both the benefits and the problems.
7) If management are happy with what you propose, then try piloting a couple of users (or build a test lab) and confirm that it will work
8) If you get this far, just do it.

The key is not to look at a philosophical switch from MS to something else - but simply treat it as a transition from one generation of technology to another. You may want to transpose 6 & 7 if management are happier seeing before comitting.

Look at the "why" first.

[mrscott]

Ok - since this is Slashdot, I expect to be thrashed for looking at this from the business perspective (I'm a CIO with 13 years of IT experience). The first question to ask yourself is this: "Why?"

Ok, I'll be the first to admit that there is a tremedous lure to FOSS software and have rolled it out myself in a number of situations, but not to desktops. I've replaced web servers, database servers and Windows file servers with servers running Apache, PostgreSQL and Samba. However, before I considered something like this in my current environment, I'd need to do a serious cost analysis that went way beyond licensing costs. For example, what will this mean to the user that has been using Windows and MS Office for 10 years? And, you mentioned that some of your core applications are Windows-only affairs. Sure, you can use RDP/Citrix to run these apps, but then you're throwing the Windows licensing costs into the mix. Not to mention the possibility that your apps won't like running in this way.

So, how much is your infrastructure *really* costing you?

How much would retraining cost?

How much would it cost to possibly have to give up your core vendor support due to running in an potentially unsupported configuration?

This may sound like I'm anti-FOSS. Actually, I'm not - I love FOSS in the right situation. WHat I AM against is FOSS for the sake of FOSS. While I "grew up" on the IT side of the house, I'm a big believer in the business needs dictating IT's role and responsiblity rather than the other way around.

My advice: Think this through before you put a lot of time into it. You may end up saving a whole lot more (not just money) by sticking with what works.

Re:Look at the "why" first.

[Anonymous Coward]

No way in hell you are CIO.... you know what you are talking about.

I have over 20 years Corperate experience Anyone that is a Cxx is a idiot in technology. Hell Director and above is typically not capable of even installing Windows XP on a computer let alone making decidions for the IT department...

If you ARE a real CIO.... where do you work?? I am all over working in heaven where the executives actually know about what hey are in charge of.

My last CIO could not figure out how to work a palm pilot and had tech support out to his HOUSE to fix his wireless... he shut off the radio and did not know how to turn it back on. CIO that cant do any of that is useless to a company.

Re:Look at the "why" first.

[Frumious Wombat]

I tried this once. It worked well under Win2K server, and the old licensing regime. For the new one, I paid almost as much in client access licenses as I would have for Windows XP licenses. As an academic shop, our costs were low enough for that to make sense, but for those of you in the real world, I'd be more careful.

We ran into a couple of issues. The easily solved one was multiple copies of Office and Matlab are resource hogs. Get a large application server for those, and look into some sort of clustering. The harder issue was that some software actually sniffs to see if you're running on a remote session, and refuses to start if you are.

To an extent, this worked great, as the desktops were more secure and easier to manage, while the Windows boxes transitioned from whatever Dell had cheap that month to multi-proc systems with hardware RAID, high-speed SCSI drives, and redundant power supplies. The only real lossage occurred for those users who needed high-performance 3d rendering on Windows, and most of them were easily transitioned to Linux equivalents. You may wish to consider getting WinTerms if you go this route, as those have fewer parts to maintain and fewer ways for employees to tinker with them.

Quite seriously, you may wish to give Sun Sunrays http://www.sun.com/software/index.jsp?cat=Desktop& tab=3&subcat=Sun%20Ray%20Clients/url and Secure Global desktop http://www.sun.com/software/products/sgd/index.jsp /url a look. It will run from a Linux server, so it's on the right path from your perspective. One past job used an earlier version of this technology for student kiosks in the library, and it cut our maintenance headaches versus real PCs. Just a thought.

Re:Look at the "why" first.

[Bios_Hakr]

I'm kinda in the same position. 12 years of experience working mostly on WAN and LAN/MAN backbone links. My vision is very skewed. On the backbone, things "just work". If they don't, KDDI, ATT, Cisco, Juniper, and other companies send a *very* skilled tech to look at our problems. 24*7*365 I can get a tech on-site in under an hour.

When I went over to the dark side (doing server to switch to user support), I was shocked. Everything sucked so bad. I had 300 users with different installs, different software, and different problems.

My first step was to install SNMP and set up traps for disk full, memory full, CPU utilization, things like that.

The "Why" of linux came down to this: the ability to easily standardize desktops and easily back-up and restore a user's PC. In Linux, I know all the users' files are in /home I can easily set up scripts on a server to back up those files nightly. If a user's PC breaks, I can easily copy his profile to a laptop and have him back up within an hour.

VMware with a NLITE cut-down version of WinXP allows us to access crap web apps that demand IE.

We had a few people who complained about the lack of Access in Linux. I set aside some money to train them on MySQL and PHP. Within a week, they were building the same Access apps in a browser-compatible interface.

We had a few people complain about OO scripting support. They wanted things like spreadsheets that automatically turn past-due dates red and such. A few hours on IRC and that was solved.

Corporate recently began touting SharePoint. We've been using Wikimedia for shared document access for over a year.

The one "why" for linux for me is the fact that I can easily back up and restore a desktop PC in a short time. The "how" is that you look for alternatives where you can, and use VMWare where you can't.

Re:Look at the "why" first.

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows stores all of its users files in Documents and Settings, and with roaming profiles, you can keep a copy of the profile on the server for easy backup.

Crap IE apps aren't an issue if the PC is properly locked down.

Moving a user from Access to MySQL/PHP is like moving a user from Access to MSSQL/ASP.Net. Yeah, you get extra functionality, but in many cases, the extra functionality is outweighed by the amount of time the user is spending on building their application. Access is meant to be a quick and dirty solution for applications that don't require an enterprise-grade database.

Wiki functionality is only a small subset of SharePoint's featureset.

With RIS and Group Policy automating most software installations and Windows customizations, a user can completely re-install their machine from scratch with an IT-approved image and be fully functional in 10-15 minutes, all without IT intervention.

Linux certainly has its place, but more often than not, the "why" for Linux is ignorance of how to properly manage Windows.

Re:Look at the "why" first.

[toadlife]

"When I went over to the dark side (doing server to switch to user support), I was shocked. Everything sucked so bad. I had 300 users with different installs, different software, and different problems." What you has there was a horribly managed group of Windows machines. I've seen many of them before, and I'm sure I'll see many more of them in the future.

"The "Why" of linux came down to this: the ability to easily standardize desktops and easily back-up and restore a user's PC. In Linux, I know all the users' files are in /home I can easily set up scripts on a server to back up those files nightly. If a user's PC breaks, I can easily copy his profile to a laptop and have him back up within an hour." All of that is just as easy to do with Windows.

I'm not saying that what you did was wrong. If it worked for you then that's great, and I'm sure you've saved a bit of money. I'm just saying that situation you ran into was not caused by a shortcoming of Windows, but by a shortcoming of the monkeys who set up the environment before you arrived.

AD

[Realistic_Dragon]

Can't Linux clients participate in an active directory domain? It's probably not a bad idea to migrate in small stages, get people used (including the admin staff!) to each chunk before you move on.

Stage 1: Open Office, Firefox on the desktop.
Stage 2: Start migrating storage to a Samba server.
Stage 3: Set up your terminal server and provide clients on the Windows desktops. Only add new apps to the terminal server from this point on (so people start using it).
Stage 4: Get a couple of Linux machines out into each department for testing and gather feedback on what else users think they need.
Stage 5: Address problems (in writing, with sign off) brought up at stage 4.
Stage 6: Retire Windows machines slowly.
Stage 7: Test and deploy a Linux based PDC.

This will let you reduce your risk exposure as each step in itself is not that expensive and pretty easy to back out of. It'll set your users expectations, ensure service is continuous, and keep down the risk of everything blowing up at once and souring people permanently on open source solutions.

Re:AD

[Realistic_Dragon]

Oh, and when putting machines out for testing you have a good opportunity to help manipulate the users.

Make the test machines pretty spiffy. Get some flat panel displays for example, if you haven't already got them deployed. Draw lots for who gets the 'first upgrades' rather than allocating it out like it's work.

Properly set up (if your office is anything like mine just set the default screensaver to the 3D matrix one and make them dual screen machines) you will get huge enthusiasm for 'the upgrade' rather than bitching about how everything is now insignificantly different.

Re:AD

[Lumpy]

Stage 8 scream OH CRAP as you find out that AD is not supported as a PDC on samba. return to step 1 and replace AD completely with LDAP.

Active Directory is an abortion that needs to be eratdicated on the first step so you dont get it ingraned in the company. Kerbos and LDAP first, switch the BACKEND way before the frontend and clients.

It's far easier to swap out the servers without impacting the users... after you get rid of the MS only services then the desktop rollout is far easier.

Eliminate exchange is STEP #1. then migrate to kerbos and LDAP, then migrate the servers over and finally start on the desktops.

The funny part is evolution for windows works quite nice... so getting people used to a non exchange based email/groupware is easier...

Re:AD

[bazorg]

Oh, and when putting machines out for testing you have a good opportunity to help manipulate the users.

In this case, try naming this upgrade/switch something like "Upgrade from Windows XP to Windows Vista KDE edition".

Open Office + VB ?

[Anonymous Coward]

We now have 99% of our users on OpenOffice (one holdout, and I am going to fix his missing feature ASAP to get him off Excel) Just out of curiosity how well do OOo Basic and Calc handle Excel documents with hevy duty VB content? The reason I ask is that I am a Corporate Mac and Linux user and since MS Office for Mac won't be supporting VB in it's next iteration I'll have to convert to a spreadsheet editor that handles VB enabled Excel files properly some time soon. If all else fails I suppose my last hope is Wine....

Re:Open Office + VB ?

[Sparr0]

I am not really sure. We never had much like that. One option to consider, that I am completely unfamiliar with the details of, is that there is some way to create self-contained executables from scripted Excel and Access interfaces. I have never done it myself, but I have used the results. You may want to consider something similar with the binaries running as mentioned previously for windows apps.

Re:Open Office + VB ?

[darkonc]

OO is free, so I suggest that you download a copy and find out for yourself. (( then come back and tell us how it went. ))

That's the nice thing about Open Source and Free software -- It doesn't cost you anything to do a quick test, (and you always have th choice of fixing any deal-busters on your own dime).

Just out of curiosity how well do OOo Basic and Calc handle Excel documents with hevy duty VB content?

Re:Open Office + VB ?

[JoshJ]

From what I understand OOCalc handles any north american excel formulas (ie: it may not handle MROUND because that's in the excel european formula set- that's the only example I can't think of off the top of my head and it may actually handle that anyway).

If excel won't run in WINE, try Crossover Office.

Re:Open Office + VB ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, no, it costs $100/hr, because that's what I would be billing. That's what makes microsoft products cheaper. How about an oracle that's a *gasp* windows binary that I could download and see if the word and excel files I have will work in OO? Nope, instead we've got snotty kids who suggest I make Free Software more expensive then proprietary software.

Re:Open Office + VB ?

[mr.hawk]

So what are you doing reading Slashdot then? Get off to work!

slight amendment...

[way2trivial]

in all situations where fast user switching is possible, (not domain enviroements, not media editions with extenders) you can have one user on an XP machine locally, and one on RDS logged in remotely.. so- two people could connect to xp at a time.

see http://sig9.com/articles/concurrent-remote-desktop

before my network at home became a domain enviroment, I used this to run xp sessions off a crappy win me laptop....

except for processing video, it was just like a full fledged xp on my laptop..

Re:Real world vs. fanboy fantasies

[altstadt]

The plural of anecdote is not data -- Frank Kotsonis

<anecdote>

Now, here are the facts as they're found in ONE PREVIOUS PLACE OF WORK:

We had roughly 150 people working in a branch office, 110 of which were a mix of hardware and software engineers. The rest were either support or upper management.

We had roughly twice as many computers as people, with the computers in the lab area shared among many people depending on who was using a bench on any particular day.

About 80% of the computers were running a couple of Unix variants, mostly Solaris. The rest of the computers were running Windows.

We had 3 full time IT people who had to support all the workstations, servers, and communications equipment.

• The IT people reported that 80% of their support tickets were for the 20% Windows machines.
• Since we didn't have root access to the Unix machines, many of the remaining 20% support tickets were spent in either shutting down Unix machines so we could move them to another bench, or for installing new hardware and/or software.

</anecdote>

I have yet to talk to anybody who has actually experienced a situation where Windows support and development costs were less than Unix (or Linux) support and development costs for the same staff at the same location. I figure these places must exist, because SEVERAL INDEPENDENT RESEARCH INSTITUTES seem to stumble over them all the time. I'm glad I've never worked at any of them though.

Re:Real world vs. fanboy fantasies

[nacturation]

You didn't explain why you would want to migrate your shop to Linux in the first place. You even mention that the software you need is Windows-only stuff, but you want to make things complicated, difficult and expensive by running this Windows software on Linux virtual terminals instead of natively! Those first two sentences contained some great advice. It's too bad your post turned into what looked like a bunch of [independently researched] BS numbers.

However, if I were to add to that first bit as a reply to the submitter, I'd seriously consider the question of whether or not this small shop can continue on servicing a Linux deployment with a complex mix of Windows/Linux after you leave. After all, you don't plan to work there forever and given that you have to ask others for advice, how likely is it that:

A) you can seamlessly make the transition yourself; and
B) someone else can easily pick up where you left off?

Unix-based servers are absolutely great and typically rock solid at doing server kind of stuff... much more so than Windows presently is. However, I'd actually advise you to stay with Windows. It's what a lot of people know, you know it currently works, and unless there is a serious compelling reason why you can't just continue with the status quo, it's the cheaper to use what you have than try and make changes with potentially unknown complications.

If anything, I'd setup a parallel network running Linux and host some services off of that, gradually migrating services one at a time over to it while you transition off. And if things go south and you run into issues you can't resolve, you could always pull the plug and you still have your original Windows network.

Have your numbers straight

[way2trivial]

xp pro costs double that, full retail.

Re:Have your numbers straight

[tftp]

Prices vary wildly; this one is $180, and this one is $330. Non-retail, as you get from Dell or HP, is of course cheaper still.

Re:Have your numbers straight

[anomaly]

Ok. You're right. That means that 2 hours of employee time make up for the cost of one Windows XP license.

Please don't misunderstand - F/OSS provides LOTS of great software, but I don't see any way you can pencil the cost of Linux as a desktop replacement for Windows. Linux makes just about everything possible. (FWIW, I have been a daily Linux user since 1994.) Just because it's possible doesn't make it a good idea. Just because it's cool doesn't make it make any business sense, either.

All of the software/hardware vendors work their butts off to make sure that Windows compatibility is met. This doesn't mean that they do it well, but they don't care about any other OS. You can care, and if you select peripherals well, it won't be any issue at all. What happens when one of your "important" users goes out and finds a great deal on a digital camera/printer/trackpad/some other device which is completely unsupported in Linux?

It's not worth fighting the battle for the desktop. Linux is not complete enough yet for non-technical users to have. Linux on the server makes great sense, and I highly recommend it. (Although at home I just migrated all of my services to OS X.)

Respectfully,
Anomaly

LDAP Is Much Easier Than Active Directory

[curmudgeon99]

Having worked on both, I can promise you that you will be happier with implementing an LDAP solution. Let's step aside right now. Your problem is now how to migrate your AD stuff to LDAP. Just step back and remember what you're trying to accomplish. You need to do Authent & Authoriz for users. Build that directly without worrying how the AD world does it. We did a migration from LDAP to AD (the customer demanded it--their legacy was AD) and we had ten-thousand more problems getting Active Directory to work. Therefore, I know you will find the reverse is much simpler. Don't try to make a hybrid--just start over with LDAP and your requirements. Don't keep the AD blinders on. As for your other application issues, you will have your own troubles with those. Still, going to the Linux, Java world, you will find life so much easier than in the MS world, in my opinion.

Slow slow slow

[gilesjuk]

Virtual servers, remote desktop etc is less responsive. Sure, it depends what applications you're using, but anything like Photoshop or video is out of the window as speed is critical.

As Others Have Pointed Out

[Master of Transhuman]

...the issues are: what ARE your "core applications"? How MANY users are there that NEED them (which translates into license costs)? Can those apps be run in some other way than currently done?

If you have core apps which are PACKAGED third party apps that you need to run and cannot alter yourself, then you'll have to find a way to run them if you want to switch.

OTOH, if your core apps are DEVELOPED third party apps - start planning on how to either get those third parties to port them to Linux, or, better, hire new developers to develop new versions using OSS cross-platform tools like Java - which in many cases might get you altogether better software using newer technologies.

I know, I know, most SMBs can't afford to pay for third party development, let alone in-house development. Nonetheless, there ARE developers out there who are affordable and who can probably do the job at a cost an SMB can afford - IF the SMB PLANS and BUDGETS for this development in a reasonable manner (meaning no "We need it next week" bullcrap - take your time.)

As for the rest, any SMB can be converted to Linux/OSS aside from non-portable core applications. And core applications can frequently be handled by either Terminal Services or conversion. The issues in most cases are training and support - both of which can be solved by hiring a Linux/OSS trainer and/or consultant to deal with those issues. This needn't cost the earth either, again, if you PLAN for it.

I signed a client this week who HAS to run Adobe software - he runs an AV conversion company that relies on Adobe (and other multimedia) Windows-only software. He told me he would switch to Linux in a heartbeat, because he knows Windows is not reliable or secure - but he can't without Adobe software. He has ten terabytes of data he needs backed up - and I'm pitching versions of rsync and rdiff-backup (on Windows under Cygwin or Windows only versions of rsync) to show him how flexible OSS software is compared to commercial Windows backup utilities. Later, I'll see what can be done about his Adobe requirements, if anything.

It all depends on what the SMB is DOING and HOW they are doing it. Many SMBs could easily convert to Linux/OSS - others need to wait and PLAN for such a conversion when the necessary solutions appear - as they inevitably will over time.

Re:As Others Have Pointed Out

[opc.chr0n1c]

i thought i would mention... i just got photoshop v7 running with crossover office on ubuntu. i have not tested it full throttle yet, bu i did load a pic and run some filters on it! i plan on checking it out in depth more next time i boot into the linux (dual boot machine with xp) ... may help your client out!

Re:As Others Have Pointed Out

[Master of Transhuman]

Nice to know, but this client needs a lot more than PhotoShop running. He needs Adobe Premiere, Adobe Encore, and just about everything else Adobe runs, as well as quite a few other AV apps that only run on Windows.

According to CodeWeavers, PhotoShop 7 runs as follows:

Silver
This application installs, and runs well enough to be usable. However we find it has enough bugs to prevent it from running flawlessly.

If you can get it working better than that, let the people at CodeWeavers know how you did it.

Re:As Others Have Pointed Out

[bensch128]

Photoshop works fine for me under WINE.

However, directshow still isn't implemented in Crossover office so no video apps are going to work correctly.

Maybe in another year or so.... :(

Ben

Why does it need replaced?

[/dev/trash]

Is it going to just stop working?

Re:Why does it need replaced?

[Rod Beauvex]

I think he means when Microsoft and other companies develope their software to only work on Vista ans stop supporting the ones the poster is using.

Re:Why does it need replaced?

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's say, hypothetically, that a company is using Visual Studio as it's IDE. Not the compiler mind you, just the IDE, everything is cross-compiled for... let's say embedded targets.
say the company has many different embedded targets to compile to for it's product, which for the sake of argument we'll call an embedded real-time OS.

Imagine if you will that MS "updates" visual studio three times in one year, each time breaking the build environment, requiring re-structuring of hundreds of projects each time,and continuing uncertainty any time an old project is used. The company gets so upset over this that they decide to write their own IDE based on the Eclipse framework. Problem solved (well, whole new can of worms really, but the problem is being managed instead of the company ineffectually shacking it's fist at MS)

P.S. Not Really Hypothetical.
P.P.S. in other words, yes, it can "just stop working", and it does all the time.

Use Dummy Terminals

[keithcybin]

Ncomputing has an excellent Ultra Thin Client (ncomputing.com L200). Use this dummy terminal to connect to the windows terminal server which holds your apps. Then put the dummy terminal on a KVM switch with your Linux machine. End of story.

Not sure about your set up but ...

[troll -1]

You might not need LDAP (except for email client address look ups). Microsoft has a much more complicated way of handling user accounts that *nix does. At the most basic level a user exists in Linux if they have an entry in a plain text password file. Of course they'll probably need a home directory as well but it's pretty simple stuff, no database necessary. If you do need it, try openldap.

I switched a company of about 400 users with 2T of data from Windows, Netware, and Lotus Mail to Linux. I started by replacing the mail relay with sendmail, then moved the mailboxes to POP and IMAP on Linux. I used openldap for mail address lookups/auto complete for mail c lients. I used Samaba and Netatalk as fileservers for Windows and Macs. After that I set up DHCP and DNS. Next came apache for web services. I even built a nice java app to organize employee info with tomcat as the container and using MySQL for a small database that pulled info into a web browser (phone extensions, employee locations, department, supervisor's name, etc.). I did live online backups using rsync in a shell script. The company saved about $100K in proprietary licenses and service contracts. I got a nice $25K bonus as a sign of their appreciation.

Having been a Windows admin, Linux was a relief. I could actually open the hood and see how things worked. Trouble shooting was much easier. Plus there seemed to be nothing I couldn't automate. Remember, bash is your friend.

LOL

[Anonymous Coward]

And the idiots bite hook, line, and sinker. Nicely done.

Re:LOL

[jpardey]

But... he totally slandered Linux 7.0!

Reading Is Much Easier Than guessing.

[Anonymous Coward]

"We did a migration from LDAP to AD (the customer demanded it--their legacy was AD) and we had ten-thousand more problems getting Active Directory to work."

That's what books like this are for. USE THEM!

Re:Reading Is Much Easier Than guessing.

[curmudgeon99]

AC, We used manuals up the Wazoo and still had problems. I understand that RTFM is standard industry response to problems but it still was notable how much pain was involved in an AD implementation. (Sorry, I'm from the Java world where everything is much easier, IMHO.)

Not sure about your set up but ...WMI

[Anonymous Coward]

"Having been a Windows admin, Linux was a relief. I could actually open the hood and see how things worked. Trouble shooting was much easier. Plus there seemed to be nothing I couldn't automate. Remember, bash is your friend."

And WMI and WSH are a Window's Admin's best friend

Re:Not sure about your set up but ...WMI

[Anonymous Coward]

"Having been a Windows admin, Linux was a relief. I could actually open the hood and see how things worked. Trouble shooting was much easier. Plus there seemed to be nothing I couldn't automate. Remember, bash is your friend."

And WMI and WSH are a Window's Admin's best friend

Oh please.. I can rip a *BSD, Solaris, or Linux box to pieces and figure out what went wrong. Even using WMI, WSH, and everything Sysinternals has up for grabs still is a pain in the ass. And yes, I've been doing all of the above for quite awhile (12 years in the MS camp, 16 on the UNIX side).

lucky you...

[Anonymous Coward]

The office I work in is slowly being assimilated into using microsoft products, after running since forever on Linux, Solaris, BSD, etc, on both server & desktop. It's all because there is no open source exchange server equivalent, but instead there are 500 million independent half-assed attempts at it.

:-(

Re:lucky you...

[JoeCommodore]

instead there are 500 million independent half-assed attempts at it.

Um... can you list them here? Which of those 500 million are any good (more closer to half-assed than quarter assed , etc.)

Re:lucky you...

[Hymer]

...there is at least one commercial multiplatform Exchange equivalent... it is called Lotus Domino... it got all the functions of Exchange plus a lot more.
it is far better solution than migrate the whole shop to Microsoft.

Re:lucky you...

[Anonymous Coward]

You've obviously never had to administer Exchange and Outlook. After getting it all working the best I could, I gave notice at my last job. The only reason Exchange is used is some decision makers have an expectation that every business needs Outlook, which needs Exchange to work right, and don't realize the IT work that goes into keeping such a setup afloat.

Moving small organizations from Windows

[westlake]

I am looking for creative ways to introduce Linux as my desktop and server OS of choice

Hold up, there, cowboy. That is the wrong question to ask.

The systems and servers aren't your personal plaything. They are there to meet the needs of your employer. The small organization. The all-Windows shop.

There are often reasons for choosing the proprietary app. The predominant OS for a business of your size or type or location. Reasons that are not always narrowly technical, not always narrowly economic.

Don't limit yourself this way.

[twitter]

... if you want to migrate entirely off of Windows, you've first got to migrate to all cross-platform applications.

No, all that you should worry about is data continuity. Your criteria, which sounds reasonable, removes KDE and other best of class choices from consideration. Why do that if the substitute application can use the data without problem and then do many more things with it? KDE's groupware is excellent and as good a reason as any to migrate away from Windows. Not considering it because it won't run on Windoze is silly. You are moving away from Windoze because the Windoze world is limited, why constrain yourself to the even smaller world of stuff that runs on Windoze and Linux? If you can suck up your company's data and your employees can continue to use it you have everything you need.

Re:Don't limit yourself this way.

[JoshJ]

This same AC has posted this exact same post to the exact same person multiple times. I suggest repeated applications of "-1 troll" and perhaps an administrator should step in and block this chunk of text in any post from an AC with the word "twitter" in it.

Re:Don't limit yourself this way.

[jonadab]

> Your criteria, which sounds reasonable, removes KDE and other best of class
> choices from consideration. Why do that if the substitute application can use
> the data without problem and then do many more things with it?

Because it ties you unnecessarily to a specific platform.

Bear in mind that the cost of switching applications can be much greater than the cost of switching operating systems, due to staff training issues. You don't want to switch applications again several years from now when you decide that you want to move from Linux to something else. (If that seems unlikely, consider how likely it seemed ten years ago that you would move from Windows to Linux.) And you *certainly* don't want to have to switch out *all* of your core business applications at one time. It takes *years* to get staff comfortable with a change of *one* core business application; doing them all at once is unconscionable.

Yes, you will occasionally choose to switch applications, but this decision should be made individually, one application at a time, for reasons having to do with that application (e.g., your needs have progressed beyond what it can continue to meet). If your applications are married to a specific platform, you get stuck in a situation where due to a platform migration you may have to change them all out at once, which is excruciating for everyone involved, exasperatingly unpopular with your staff, and amazingly expensive.

Either that or you are eternally tied to a dying platform. (All platforms die eventually; it is a matter of time.) Some places _still_ keep DOS systems around for this reason, because ten years ago they were unwilling or unable to replace all of their applications at one go, because of the impossible training issues it would create, and so they have one or two DOS apps left that they still need to migrate away from. (Yes, there are many DOS applications out there that will not run, or will not run properly, under Windows -- certainly not under XP.) Virtualization can help a little (reducing e.g. the requirements for hardware and physical space), but it's still a very substantial problem (and creates training issues of its own, as most end users are not comfortable with the extra layers of interface created by virtualization). And it takes *decades* to move away from one legacy single-platform application at a time until you finally get weaned off the last one.

If you select cross-platform applications in the first place, you don't get stuck.

I understand what KDE is trying to do, but standardizing on it wholesale now will make large headaches if you ever want to move to any other platform, for any reason, in exactly the same way that standardizing on Windows fifteen or twenty years ago makes large headaches now if you want to move to Linux. (By standardizing on KDE wholesale I do not mean using it as a desktop environment. I mean using applications that won't run on anything else to meet core business requirements. If you're running cross-platform applications in a KDE environment, you're still free, because you can run them in a different environment later if you so choose.)

Also bear in mind that I am *not* saying you shouldn't let your IT geeks use KOffice. IT geeks can train themselves on a new application in hours, so you can let them use whatever they want (within reason). If it gets their job done, fine. And I understand what you're saying about file format compatibility, but I'm not talking about selecting file formats. Yes, you standardize on certain file formats, but that's not what I'm talking about.

I'm talking about selecting the core applications you deploy for your end users, train them on, and so on and so forth.

Re:Don't limit yourself this way.

[jb.hl.com]

Twitter has posted stupid cookie-cutter posts which will blame Microsoft for any real/perceived (mostly perceived) injustice against him or the world. Where's the (stupid) requests for an administrator to step in in that case then?

The nice thing about Slashdot's mod system is that you can post whatever shit you like (within reason) and have only the moderation system affect it; no administrators involved.

Why?-Gallows humour.

[Anonymous Coward]

"Vulnerable to what? Give me a real world scenario. I just don't see it."

Vunerable to insults and put-downs from the "I don't like MS" crowd. Now don't you feel naked?

Use Windows clients with VNC

[sunset]

Do it the other way around. You can set up one or more beefy machines running Linux and serving VNC sessions to desktop machines running minimal Windows XP installations. Users can run under Windows what they must, and everything else via their VNC client.

This simplifies/centralizes Linux maintenance, reduces the maintenance complexity of the desktops, and minimizes the need for desktop hardware and software upgrades.

Warped Analysis

[twitter]

One computer costs $1,000 in hardware. One employee costs $120,000 per year, with burdening. One "mission-critical" application costs anywhere from $800 (AutoCAD 2007) to $5,000 (Inventor 11, non-pro.) One WinXP Pro license costs mere $150 ...

Software costs are a burden. Employees are productive assets.

The rest of your analysis is based on the presumption that Windows works. If that was true, no one would be considering a migration.

Re:Warped Analysis

[tftp]

Software costs are a burden. Employees are productive assets.

Software and hardware costs, rent, business licenses, salaries and taxes are your business expenses. It does not matter what names you use; it only matters what you pay for. If you rent a tool, it's out of your pocket. If you hire an employee, it's out of your pocket. Money-wise they are the same.

The rest of your analysis is based on the presumption that Windows works. If that was true, no one would be considering a migration.

Modern Windows works, that's not the problem. IMO, one of primary motives to migrate to F/OSS is costs of licensing. Windows-only infrastructure may be expensive if you go beyond the desktop and start buying PDC, BDC, TS, SBS, Exchange and other servers that MS will happily sell you. That's where the real cost is - server license, CAL licenses, TS licenses... start counting. That's what I consider a motivation. Cost of a desktop OS is nothing. Cost of several Win2k3 servers, each with full complement of CALs for all your employees, can be devastating.

Re:Warped Analysis

[Anonymous Coward]

twitter, please read this carefully. Following this advice will make Slashdot a better place for everyone, including yourself.

• As a representative of the Linux community, participate in mailing list and newsgroup discussions in a professional manner. Refrain from name-calling and use of vulgar language. Consider yourself a member of a virtual corporation with Mr. Torvalds as your Chief Executive Officer. Your words will either enhance or degrade the image the reader has of the Linux community.
• Avoid hyperbole and unsubstantiated claims at all costs. It's unprofessional and will result in unproductive discussions.
• A thoughtful, well-reasoned response to a posting will not only provide insight for your readers, but will also increase their respect for your knowledge and abilities.
• Always remember that if you insult or are disrespectful to someone, their negative experience may be shared with many others. If you do offend someone, please try to make amends.
• Focus on what Linux has to offer. There is no need to bash the competition. Linux is a good, solid product that stands on its own.
• Respect the use of other operating systems. While Linux is a wonderful platform, it does not meet everyone's needs.
• Refer to another product by its proper name. There's nothing to be gained by attempting to ridicule a company or its products by using "creative spelling". If we expect respect for Linux, we must respect other products.
• Give credit where credit is due. Linux is just the kernel. Without the efforts of people involved with the GNU project , MIT, Berkeley and others too numerous to mention, the Linux kernel would not be very useful to most people.
• Don't insist that Linux is the only answer for a particular application. Just as the Linux community cherishes the freedom that Linux provides them, Linux only solutions would deprive others of their freedom.
• There will be cases where Linux is not the answer. Be the first to recognize this and offer another solution.

From http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/docs/HOWTO/Advoca cy

Re:Warped Analysis

[Anonymous Coward]

"Software costs are a burden. Employees are productive assets."

It appears that you don't understand the meaning of productivity. Productivity is negative until an employee's cost is exceeded by the revenue he generates. If the only work you need from an employee is to replace a software package, he'd better be cheaper than the software or he won't be productive.

"The rest of your analysis is based on the presumption that Windows works. If that was true, no one would be considering a migration."

No. If Windows didn't work, most people would have already migrated to something else many years ago.

Re:Warped Analysis

[Anonymous Coward]

Software costs are a burden. Employees are productive assets. And this is the reason why most businesses don't trust OSS people--because most don't have a clue about business.

Burdened (or, as I learned it, "loaded") employee costs are those which the company pays on top of an employee's salary. Some costs are required (unemployment taxes, social security, medicare, etc). Some are voluntary (health insurance, retirement plans, etc.). And the rest is overhead and G&A (things like computers, software, chairs, desks, rent, heat, electricity, telecom/datacom, coffee, pens/pencils, et al).

Most companies have a loaded/burdened employee cost of 1.5-2.25 times employee salary. Meaning that--for instance--$2.25 is needed for every $1 in employee salary...just to break even.

Frankly, technology costs are not the primary driver in this equation. Taxes and withholding are (in the US at least), followed by health and retirement. My monthly tech costs (depreciated over three years instead of five) is only about $100/person (desktop and server hardware and software, storage, and networking). Meaning, only about 1.019 times average salary is technology related.

The point here is that while technology costs do have an effect loaded employee costs, they are by no means the biggest chunk. In fact, they may actually be one of the smallest--even with Microsoft's licensing.

For my business, I use a mix of OSS and MS; but if you really want to help, drop the healthcare, tax and withholding costs. The IT side is negligable.

Re:Warped Analysis

[JoshJ]

This same AC has posted this exact same post to the exact same person multiple times. I suggest repeated applications of "-1 troll" and perhaps an administrator should step in and block this chunk of text in any post from an AC with the word "twitter" in it.

In fact, you can see it twice in this thread. There really should be a way to foe or block a specific AC. :\

Re:Real world vs. fanboy fantasies

[darkonc]

I don't think that the situation heavily favours Windows at this point. It's not entirely clear. They have a couple of core applications that are currently Windows only. The path to go will depend a lot on what the core applications are, whether there are Linux equivalents, whether the core applications will run well on Wine, or VNC, and how many people use those core applications.

It may be, for example, that 75% of the office could move to Linux and Open Office today, while the other 25% might have to either stay with Windows in the interim or use VNC or Cygwin on Linux with a longer delay while a more permanent solution is worked on.

If, on the other hand, 90% of the company uses the critical applications, they are designed in such a way that running them on an emulator or network isn't feasible and there's no Linux equivalent, then you've got a slam dunk for staying with Windows.

As with any situation where you're depending on a 2 paragraph description of a complex situation, there's a lot of detail missing that would likely make a critical difference.

Server Virtualization

[rwa2]

The path to getting what you want is via "server virtualization". This path is working even at large corporations.

It's quite easy to build a case for the benefits of virtualizing your server hardware so you're managing several disk images on a redundant cluster of physical servers. Once you get your shit working under VMware or maybe even qemu, it's easy to build the server farm on VMware ESX server (which only runs on Linux) or etc. After that, you can start deploying other new services more natively on Linux, using Xen, whatever.

Don't bother migrating your old applications yet, just show what new applications can be hosted on Linux that fill a gap. Think the "linux server that does everything".

Good luck!

Nice troll...

[Anonymous Coward]

OSS ones simply don't do what we need them to do ... Win 32 API

OSS apps happily do the rest of what you asked for - and the answer to this one is to *STOP* using the Win32 API which seems to be forcing you to make poor technology decisions across your organization.

Finally I told him to spend a hundred bucks a month on hosted Exchange service, and get on with his law business. Everything is running pretty smoothly in that office now.

Hope Microsoft gave you a nice large commission. I've been making my money recently migrating clients *AWAY* from hosted exchange services to Yahoo small business.

If your core apps run on Windows...

[slk]

Then you probably need to be running Windows, at least on the client.

I have a day job as the head system administrator for a medium sized but very high-tech non-profit. We run Macintosh (OSX) clients and Linux servers because they do what we need to do, and do it well. I have also been working with Linux and various other forms of Unix since 1994 (this includes using Linux and/or FreeBSD as a primary desktop OS since 1994. LaTeX works fine as a word processor if you know what you're doing.)

I also do consulting work for several smallish companies, and they all run Windows. It's really simple - if you need good 2D CAD software, you need Windows. If you need a modern multi-user accounting package that can do strange things like payroll and integrate with direct deposit, you need Windows. If you need a *good* spreadsheet (no, OOo calc doesn't count), you need Windows or OSX. If you want to run all of this on one desktop operating system, you need Windows. Crossover Office, WINE, VMWare, etc. aren't going to convert many small businesses; they want less complexity, not more. (some of these clients have Linux servers - network edge, multiprotocol file and print services, web apps, etc. - but they are close to 100% Windows on the desktop)

I think that you could convert a LOT of small businesses over if you could get a Peachtree or Quickbooks port for Linux. However, for small business, you don't stand a chance until you get *good* accounting software. OOo calc not sucking would really help too; lots of businesses make very heavy use of spreadsheets. (OOo Writer sucks, but so does Word. OOo Impress is adequate, as it's all pretty much PowerPointless anyway.)

If you're looking for long-term savings, I'd suggest considering Windows TS clients (use your old XP machines/licenses/etc), and a Windows 2k3 server terminal server. It won't be all that cheap to setup initially, but you will be able to significantly reduce your maintenance headaches.

Look at the business needs, and pick technologies that meet the business needs. Make technology work FOR your business; I've see what happens when you flip that around, and it isn't pretty.

Re:Real world vs. fanboy fantasies

[Anonymous Coward]

shhh... you had me at boxen.

Almost total Linux shop with 1000+ employees

[SQLz]

I actually don't work for the group in charge of maintaining the systems, but I know a few things about how they are maintained. Basically, all systems have the same exact same RH4 image and sync up against an internal yum repository for software updates. There is basically zero maintenance for each machine besides that. Users can't write to the hard drive, all data is stored on netapp filers. When you are hired, you get really basic classes on how to use KDE, the internal wiki, Open Office, get on mailing lists, etc. A caveman could pass these classes.

We have over 7000 linux machines and 4 people to maintain them, plus 1000+ technical and non technical employees. Using Linux saves us millions of dollars, which pays for a couple of those netapps. The thing is, Linux just works, not to mention the vast amount of free software that is available for it.

Truthfully, and its a sad truth for some people, anyone who says Linux isn't ready for the corporate world has no idea what they are talking about. Its been there for while.

You guys just don't get it

[ClosedSource]

The vast majority of small businesses aren't going to be able or willing to write a single line of a PHP script let alone writing custom code to glue it all the together (which is a pretty ugly way to design a system anyway). Most of those people have as much interest in computer programming as they do with the finer points of ball-bearing design.

If the F/OSS community follows your philosophy, proprietary software will remain dominant in the small business sector for many, many years to come.

Re:You guys just don't get it

[pogson]

When writing any large piece of software, one would be crazy to re-invent the wheel. Just identify the tasks needed doing, match available software and supply the missing pieces. I have high school students do this to make dynamic webpages. It takes less time to do it than to discuss it. It just works.

An example: A student of mine has to do a project to fulfill the requirements for a credit course in designing dynamic websites. He chose to make a search engine for "Anime" (a genre of animation popular in Japan and spreading rapidly). If he started from scratch, he would be writing a million lines of code and spending years of his life on the task. However, the basic tasks he identified were:

• select a representative sample of Anime-centric sites
• make an index of every word and link in those sites obtained by running wget followed by Swish-e
• write a webpage with a form to submit specifying search terms and giving the visitor and Google a pleasant visit with graphics, search tips and meta-information
• link the webpage to Swish-e with a PHP script placed on the server along with the index

The student instructed Swish-e to index data gleaned from spidering the Anime sites. His dynamic site works. Years of work is replaced with a small page of PHP and available open-source software. Everyone of my students has a personal webpage on the server. The student placed his stuff in it and everything worked. Learning to do all the steps took a few weeks. The actual doing of it took less than one week. Gathering necessary information and software took an hour on the web. Why can you guys not get that re-using FLOSS is a better way to do things?

Software developed this way is easily re-usable and is platform independent to the extent that the user can be on any platform with a web browser and the server can be on any of a dozen different architectures for which Linux is ported or even any OS with a server that can run PHP or CGI. Lots of businesses have custom-made websites. They can use similar technology to run web-applications with data collection, analysis/processing, storage/database. The web application does not need to be written from scratch except for logos and such. Everything else is simple standard code linking existing applications into a system.

Costs are low compared to some proprietary licence fees even for a one-off system. The system can be built with off-the-shelf components.

Re:You guys just don't get it

[ClosedSource]

I guess you are responding on my comment about ugliness of design, not the average business person's disinterest in programming.

Sure, when you're creating a kind of boilerplate application that is similar to millions of others, there's a lot to leverage to get the job done, but when your application doesn't quite fall along the well-beaten path, things aren't so easy. Even for the common application patterns there are often well defined frameworks that eliminate much of the "glue" code from your project which results in a cleaner design.

I don't know why some F/OSS supporters seem to believe that code libraries and code reuse originated with GNU. Code libraries have been around for more than 30 years.

Re:You guys just don't get it

[jimicus]

See, this is where so many assumptions fall over. In this case, the assumption is "It doesn't need to take more than a week or so".

This student of yours presumably had relatively little else to occupy them over the course of that week, or if they did it was relatively easy to divide their time such that they could get a good few hours at a time to look at the problem. This isn't true for someone running a small business, who's busy serving customers, preparing accounts, dealing with suppliers, paying staff, checking inventory, spending quality time with the family. Add in some time to sleep, eat, shit and shower and before you know it the old adage about "not enough hours in the day" is true.

If it's a choice between "Buy off the shelf software and pay someone 1 or 2 days consultancy to set it up" and "Spend weeks investigating open-source solutions, ultimately cobbling together various things which were never meant to be cobbled together, and then paying for a months' consultancy to write software which ties together the final loose ends", you'd have to be off your nut (or seriously anti-microsoft) to choose the latter.

Re:You guys just don't get it

[masdog]

Why can't it be hire a consultant to evaluate off-the-shelf and open source software and set it up for you?

Re:You guys just don't get it

[jimicus]

Because the consultant charges by the hour, and your solution involves many more hours for what is not perceived by most people to be a substantial benefit.

"Your information is locked into proprietary formats". Big deal. Most small business owners don't know what that means, all they know is that regardless of what the format is, they'll have to pay some computer person to get the data out if their normal program stops working. Meantime, it can just carry on working.

Last summer I took my car to a mechanic. He had a nice shiny modern PC and an equally shiny laptop, with some swanky software which gave step by step instructions and expected time to complete for more or less any common task on any vehicle you could thing of. When he came to invoice me, he fired up an elderly clone of Sage from back when Sage was a DOS application (called "Page"). So the data's in a proprietary format? Who cares, the program still works. Even if it was in something like XML, he'd have to pay someone to turn a bunch of XML into a usable application - which would cost a lot more money than just buy a more modern program which does the same job. Just as easy (and rather cheaper) that if his next PC (which will doubtless run Vista) won't run the program, to put all new customer information into some new program and keep the old one hanging around on an old PC until the information is no longer needed.

You guys just don't get it-$$$$$

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually what I think they want is for him to hire THEM. The money still flows out of his business, but into their pockets instead of MS or some other proprietary vendor. No moral high-ground. Just plain me! me!

Philosophy != Good

[ClosedSource]

"Saying philosophy has no place in business if it doesn't pay off over night is idiotic"

I agree, which is why I never made such a statement. All philosophies are not equal, however, in an ethical or in a business sense. It's hard to imagine how avoiding vendor lock-in could be a key philosophy that would make the difference between being successful or being a failure.

"Many businesses exist today because they had or have some philosophy behind them and many have fallen or are falling due to lack of them."

I agree, but many of those philsophies that helped companies succeed are ones that you might very well disapprove of. No doubt MS has a philosophy that has made it very successful.

Why do bits need replaced?

[Anonymous Coward]

For a group that knows all about bits.* You all certainly do a one-eighty when it comes to fulfilling RMS's dream. The question still remains regardless of what software is being talked about.

*See any "/." dealing with IP.

Re:Real world vs. fanboy fantasies

[Viceroy Potatohead]

I read the parent post and assumed he either yanked it from some joke website or some particularly incompetent marketing department.

Then I looked into his posting history, and discovered it's regular, identical boilerplate. Squirting arbitrary and unsubstantiated statistics incessantly doesn't strike me as particularly reliable.

Many companies and organizations have made the shift to OSS, and have found the results beneficial. Whether or not any individual company can gain from that approach is determined by their particular needs, not by (at best) the fanatical biases of a corporate fanboy.

Only suggestion I can offer

[petrus4]

Although I don't have direct experience with such things, the only thing I would offer is this site:-

http://www.infrastructures.org/

since it seems to describe setting up a very reliable open source-based network infrastructure in a lot of detail.
I also wish you luck with this. Although I have some knowledge which I had thought could help with such things, normally when I make suggestions here I get reprimanded for being impractical if I advocate doing anything other than going to a vendor and simply letting them take care of a given problem.

Explore replacing it all with a Web application

[beachdog]

Some of the previous posts surely will get you going on your initial question asking if there are emulation and terminal server pathways for a business to adopt some Linux.

Now, as Monty Python says, for something quite different:

Why not look at re-implementing your basic business tasks in a high level web programming language like Ruby on Rails?

No need to risk millions of dollars, just buy the Dave Thomas Rails book (or something similar) and give yourself three weekends to sketch and try something on your own home Linux box.

Rails leads to an application that runs on a server computer. Your users, initially connect to your application using a web browser. So your business data sits on the server. Your employees run any kind of computer with a Web browser.

So you sketch out on paper what this application will do. The problem will be to understand what specific things are the windows computer only magic stuff. You will have to explore ways to match that functionality or to push data at the magic application and catch the stuff that comes out of said magic application.

So I am basically saying: Try this as an exersize, a low risk and low cost way to determine if at this time you might be able to bypass the whole darn office full of expensive Windows only applications.

Re:Real world vs. fanboy fantasies

[mattpointblank]

We had 3 full time IT people who had to support all the workstations, servers, and communications equipment.

        * The IT people reported that 80% of their support tickets were for the 20% Windows machines.

This is a little distorted though, since it's likely that the 80% of staff members using Unix were much more confident computer users who could probably solve their issues themselves. I'm not disputing that Unix is more reliable than Windows, but only in the hands of an experienced user.

Why am I replying to this?

[SethBrown]

At work, we use Linux for web, email, some database stuff. We have a Slackware server running the free VMWare server, hosting W2K. About 20 people use the W2K server via rdesktop on diskless workstations from http://www.disklessworkstations.com/ which boot Linux. They don't even know they're running Linux.

It's worked so well, that we've decided not to buy any more PCs, only diskless workstations. We've also changed the low-end PCs into diskless workstations as well.

We still have a WinNT PDC, so I can't answer about AD. We have a SQL Server 7 database server, which supports a mission critical app written in Visual Basic. I can't get rid of that.

But we have stopped writing reports and programs for the Windows environment a long time ago. We develop everything now for the web, using PHP/FreeTDS to query the database server.

End result. The business has benefited. Once you write an app for the web, it's instantly installed. There is no need to go around to each workstation to install anything. You just send out an email with the URL to the new app or report. Instant upgrade.

We have only 2 people in our IT dept. The other guy uses W2K as his desktop most of the time. I use only Slackware. If I have to do something in Windows, I'll rdesktop to a server to do it.

So yes, it's all possible. Is it good for the business? Yes. My boss is happy. He likes the idea of spending less on IT using open source.

There are probably much more complex scenarios than the one we have to deal with. But Linux + the web are making the desktop obsolete anyhow.

I think this is why Microsoft is concentrating so much on the gaming platform. They know the desktop is doomed. If you can get from the web what you used to get from the desktop, all you need is a light desktop.

This is why the server is so much more important than the desktop. And Linux excels on the server. So I'd go with the idea "convert the server first, the desktop will follow".

Why?-an artificial assumption.

[Anonymous Coward]

So in other words you've created a contrived situation based on questionable assumptions and call the whole mess a justification. Can I try that trick with open source, or would that piss you all off?

Re:Why?-an artificial assumption.

[sjames]

It's not all that contrived. Look at the data in one of the proprietary apps you use today. If you HAD to migrate, would it be nice and automated or would you have to dedicate your time (or staff) to manyally transcribing the data?

With open source (and particularly with well written Free software), if you HAVE to migrate, you can have a translator program written for less than the manual transcription will cost.

I've seen a number of cases where a business took the 'easy and less expensive' proprietary route ages ago and pays for it a few man-minutes at a time daily. If they had the source, any half competant programmer could make the minor mods they need for under $1000. The payback would be about 6 weeks. Unfortunatly, since that source isn't for sale at any price, they're stuck on the upgrade treadmill hoping for the day when the vendor decides that the features they want are worth implementing.

Re:Why?-an artificial assumption.

[advocate_one]

It's not contrived at all. My father's machine had a specialist speech recognition package complete with special hardware to handle the digitization offload. This was back in the days of win 3.1. His machine gave perfect service for several years until 1999 when it went belly up big time. He found his speech recognition package was not supported by the manufacturer on win 95 or win 98. He was expected to purchase the latest and greatest version and go through the hassle of retraining the new system. My father has no hands, and the speech recognition package performed a heck of a lot of his automation in recognizing windows commands in addition to actually inputting text.

To put it politely, he was fucking pissed off that a professional hardware/software package that cost him some £900 back in 1993 was now redundant.

Re:Real world vs. fanboy fantasies

[Aladrin]

The previous replier has a good point, and I'd like to add to it: You've got twice as many computers as people, and people share computers. I'm betting the computers they shared were all Windows computers, and not Unix. So the majority of the people are touching Windows machines, and those are the machines that had the most issues. If you replaced those machines with Unix, you'd probably see you had about the same amount of trouble with those same machines, PLUS a bunch of whiny windows-only people complaining about having to learn a new interface and that it doesn't have Office, or that Office doesn't run well. (Depending on how you set it up.)

No, I think the setup was pretty much spot-on at that company. The users were given the OS that makes them the most productive (Windows) and the 'real work' was done on very stable machines running Unix.

Re:Real world vs. fanboy fantasies

[altstadt]

Good point, however your assumption is incorrect. Most of the Windows machines were co-located with a Unix machine on the same desk, with a few more running dedicated Windows-only applications in the lab. Roughly 95-98% of the staff were regular Unix users. I can only think of three people who had only Windows machines at their desks. One admin assistant had started in the department using only a Unix machine for a few years (typing reports using *roff).

As I stated in the original comment, we didn't have root access, therefore we couldn't solve our own Unix issues. The IT people worked on 100% of the Unix issues which came up. Many of these issues were nothing more than getting a machine cleanly shut down so it could be moved.

Use Suse OES and Windows

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm for FOSS, but there are too many issues with software requirements and end users to go ahead and do an all FOSS switchover. I personally have moved my company (150 people at 5 sites, 200 people off site worldwide) over to Suse Open Enterprise Server (OES...it's different than Enterprise server). I got rid of our Win2k AD servers and are using Novell's eDirectory (fully LDAP compliant). I use the Samba plugin so that our accounting (Microsoft Dynamics SL...formerly Solomon) and HR software (Sage Abra) can authenticate users...it acts as an NT4 domain controller. I use the Novell client on the desktop to authenticate users to their computers and to map drives. All the users still use XP Pro on the desktop...they know how to use it and there's no extra training involved for me. If you need to link AD and eDir...Novell gives you a connection tool called Identity Manager which links directories.

Re:Real world vs. fanboy fantasies

[altstadt]

Bad bet. The machines which were shared were almost exclusively Unix machines, often with applications running for 3 or 4 different people (some remotely from their desks and some actually present in the lab). The few shared Windows machines in the lab were treated as appliances, with each dedicated to running a single specific Windows application, such as a PROM burner or a database app to track the equipment running around the lab. Most of the Windows machines were single user, sharing a desk with a Unix computer.

wine anyone?

[Anonymous Coward]

http://winehq.com/

Avoid lock-in in the first place

[Anonymous Coward]

If you still have "core applications" that run on Windows only, then the real question is: how did you end up locked into these apps? "Portable" should be one of the top priority necessary features for any app before you get locked in; it should be in the RFP. It's been apparent since at least 1989 (or 1994 (or 2001 (etc depending on your point of view))) that MS Windows needs to go. I can understand how someone might have a legacy app for MSDOS or "classic" (pre-X) MacOS, for anything bought in the last n years, if the vendor doesn't have a Linux version, then they shouldn't have qualified for the short list.

But what's done is done; some manager fucked up in the past and you're stuck with a legacy. This means maybe you just can't migrate. What you need to do, is not be the guy that someone in the future is going to curse. Give up and let the place remain a Windows-only shop, but for fuck's sake, don't deploy any more unportable software. Make it so that 10 years from now, your successor can say, "Well, all the stuff we've deployed in the last 10 years does have Linux/MacOSX/Windows/BSD/other versions available, so we can now run on whatever platform looks the best. Our only problem is this one program from the 1980s, but that will run just as well on dosemu as it does in the Windows dos session. And we're getting ready to replace that piece of junk anyway."

VMware Server performance hit?

[alizard]

Run a faster machine (I'm now on an Athlon 3500+) and do some post-install setup (install VMware Tools, install the e1000 Ethernet virtual driver to speed up guest-host intercommunication). If you're running SAMBA to interconnect the Windows install to files, experiment with send/receive buffer sizes. Defrag often (whether from inside Windoze or using the VMware management console depends on your setup. I'll have a how-to article up on techbuilder.com in a few weeks. I'll just say it's running fast enough that my "phase 2 upgrade plan", an X2 dual core Athlon and taking the memory from 1G to 2 or 3 are indefinite hold.



While even with this, I have yet to figure out how to make Quake 1 work on VMware Server, this shouldn't be a problem for a business installation.

As for LKM emulation... I have been unable to figure out whether or not it supports guest-host clipboard, anyone know?

you obviously haven't tried

[alizard]

VMware Server. The ONLY apps I haven't gotten to run so far are Quake 1 and Redneck Rampage, and I think an hour or so of digging through program stuff will get Redneck Rampage running. MS Office, Eudora, graphics software run with NO problems. What I've got is a fast, stable, malware-resistant Windoze setup behind a Linux firewall. I could justify this combination even if I didn't run ANY Linux apps. But since most of my working apps are Linux, I'm rather happy with this setup.

WINE isn't even installed on this rev of my workstation setup. With real emulation, I see no reason to bother with a Windoze setup that may or may not work with any program I feel like installing. WINE was a pain in the ass that I have no reason to deal with.

Re:you obviously haven't tried

[tftp]

I haven't tried VMware server, it was not free back then. What I tried is a Linux desktop for email/Web + RDP access to a Win2k3 server. This did not work well: OOo was screwing up our documents, and Firefox was unable to access some government web sites (that required JInitiator on Windows), and some Windows apps disliked being run through RDP, and forget about graphics work over RDP.

But there is little advantage in what you propose anyway. Now the user has to have TWO operating systems, not one, and he has to switch between them! I agree that Windows apps will run natively, but where are the cost savings? You still have to pay for the Windows licenses, and you need twice as much RAM, and what is the benefit? I see only one - the Windows machine is disconnected from the Internet and can't be [easily] contaminated. But still it can get viruses from the network drives (which it must access to exchange work files,) so you still have to have an AV solution on each virtual Windows box.

IMO, it is much more practical to just run Windows on clients, and have Linux (firewalls, servers etc.) on the boundary. This way the new hires can be just told "here is your computer, start working" and expected to actually do it - as opposed to a lengthy training course on which new apps work in which VM, and how to operate the whole cardhouse. You want to remove complexity from employees' desks, or else the company grinds to a halt very soon. What you do in the back office, though, is up to you, and that's where I keep Linux boxes.

corporate fanboy?

[alizard]

Your description sounds more like paid astroturfer to me. Or perhaps even a bot.

Whether or not any particular entity should migrate to Linux depends on specific circumstances, at this time there is no one-size-fits-all answer and the credibility and honesty (and in some cases, sanity) of anyone who says there is, whether pushing a Windows or a Linux solution, should be questioned.

your solution locks you into Windoze Forever...

[alizard]

mine gives me not only reduced maintenance, especially in the area of Windoze Internet Security, but an easy migration path to Linux, The complexity is in terms of setup, which presumably isn't going to be done by the end user. Though setup isn't that hard if you can get a good distro-specific how-to. Post-install setup is required to get the most out of it (i.e. if you want it to run like a bat out of hell), but I can't point you to the how-to yet because my techbuilder.com article isn't posted yet. I can replace my Windows apps with Linux apps easily as Linux apps with equal-better performance appear. All I have to do is ... stop using a Windoze app and start using the Linux app. Graphics is just about there. Actually, if I had time to sit down with Krita or Xara Xtreme, I'd probably find that it is ready for prime time, at least for paint-raster stuff. I'm waiting for Eudora to get rolled into Thunderbird.

You get to be locked into the MS upgrade treadmill. I've got a couple of years worth of not having to worry much about my hardware or base OS... I'm running W98SE on VMware Server, and am completely unmotivated about upgrading. As for upgrading Debian, I can do that automatically, including upgrade to the next version if I feel like it.

The question of "which apps run on guest/host" is a red herring, most office users only work with a handful of apps on a daily basis, though the number appears greater for Mac users. A person who can't keep track of where a handful of apps are probably isn't somebody you want in your workplace. As for "training" ... by and large, GUI apps are GUI apps whether they're for Linux, Opera, or Mac. The only problem I ever had switching between, say, word processor apps on these platform were differences in the menus, and I'd probably have the same problem if I were doing version upgrades on the same word processor.

On a day to day basis, I strongly prefer Opera for Linux over Firefox.

As for memory/CPU use, I'm running 1G of DDR2, run VMware Server and a major app or two in Linux practically all the time. I haven't used the swap file since I upgraded to the current system, and unless I'm running a game in Windows, the only time I ever see the CPU go to 100% is when I'm booting VMware Server... typical is under 5% and I spend a lot of time running 1%.

Re:your solution locks you into Windoze Forever...

[tftp]

You get to be locked into the MS upgrade treadmill

But why? XP is what I have, and I don't intend to use Vista at all, ever. So if I even wanted to upgrade I couldn't - there is nothing to upgrade to. As many people indicated, software does not wear out.

The complexity is in terms of setup, which presumably isn't going to be done by the end user.

Well, then it has to be done by me - no, thanks, I have other things to do :-)

A person who can't keep track of where a handful of apps are probably isn't somebody you want in your workplace.

I wish it was that easy. But it isn't. There are good engineers who don't understand computers. They would be searching for a button, and if they don't find it they will tell you "this $hit does not work, take it away, I have work to do!" And you can't do anything about that because you don't understand their field of work. And besides, I can not afford to sit with him for half a day and walk him through OpenOffice configuration tabs and explain how that matches the MS Office configuration. It's too expensive, and he will forget everything in a couple of days. And when he forgets and screws up a job he will blame it on OO and on you personally, and that will not earn you any bonus points in anybody's eyes. Companies hire people that can do the job, and not necessarily people who understand computers (though that helps.) An opinion of sysadmin wrt hiring of a specialist in a finite element method does not matter; the guy will be good in linear algebra and may be worse than a child if I tell him to chmod a file.

The only problem I ever had switching between, say, word processor apps on these platform were differences in the menus, and I'd probably have the same problem if I were doing version upgrades on the same word processor.

Believe it or not, when I tried to introduce OpenOffice this was one of first major issues. Again, most people are computer-illiterate, and they are practically trained like a dog to look for a picture and click on it. If they don't see the familiar picture they freak out. That's why MS makes sure that older versions of the UI are available in new products. VS 2005 comes with three GUI setups, for example, and XP still provides the Win95 theme and the start menu. (I myself hate the "new" start menu, and so I disabled it through the domain policy.)

As for memory/CPU use, I'm running 1G of DDR2

Most of our computers run on 512MB, and only some have 1GB - and all of that memory is needed for work (we have CADs that take enormous amount of memory, like FPGA synthesis, mapping and placing.) No memory can be spared for another VM.

In any case, the executive summary is this: even if a sysadmin is Linux-capable, most users aren't. A small company can not afford a non-mainstream desktop, since it does not have training courses for new employees. MS had a monopoly on desktop since what, 1990, for 15 years? That resulted in all new hires coming in with Windows skills (see the button-clicking reflex above) and with utter lack of any flexibility. You can spend your time retraining employees (and even universities have hard time with that!) or you can spend that very time to develop your business, sell more products and hire more people. Which way is more advantageous?

Re:Real world vs. fanboy fantasies

[budgenator]

Anybody that can't jump on a modern Linux distro running KDE and be productive, wouldn't be productive in windows either; there are a lot of "windows users" that shouldn't be allowed near a computer.

Finally, someone who DOES get it!

[Anonymous Coward]

Technology is only a tool, not an end. Getting to the end benefit in the least amount of time ($$$) for the least cost ($$$) is what business is all about. Unless there are clear overrides in security or other customer issues, the tools deployed doesn't really matter.

The original poster didn't provide enough information for us to guess what they really need - as usual for any ask /. question. If simple file/print, then almost any Linux is a good bet. This saves CALs. OTOH if they don't want to become an expert in IMAP, LDIF, and MS-Office file formats, chances are they need to leave part of their tools on MS OS and products.

I believe Windows 2003 Server and included tools can be configured securely easier than any Linux solution. I run Linux tools for my consulting business (except Quickbooks), but I'd almost never suggest this to another small business that doesn't specifically request it. The required support costs would eat any margin on a fixed price bid. OTOH, if the customer wants Linux and I can bid an hourly rate, without a "not to exceed" clause in the agreement is a hint that I need to avoid the customer unless they are BIG - telco BIG.

Re:Real world vs. fanboy fantasies

[Anonymous Coward]

what about "opensores"?