Tales of Conversion - Using Ubuntu at Work

madgreek writes "Here is a short story about my switch to Ubuntu from XP at work. I have been Microsoft-free for 3 months now at a Microsoft heavy shop. Few people know I am using Open Office and Linux. I create countless documents that people open using Word, Excel, PPT and nobody can tell that they were created using Open Office. From the article: 'When I first started my experiment I was trying to keep it a secret out of fear of attacks from angry Microsoft worshipers (especially from the admins and desktop support). What I am finding out is that most of the folks that I was hiding from are sick and tired of supporting Windows and are proponents of Linux. Several of them are using Linux at home. One of the guys I talked to has Vista and XP installed on his laptop. He swaps out the hard drive when switching between OS's.'"

Comments

Me too

[PinkyDead]

I work for a large company who seem to be of the mindset that if big companies don't support each other that the world will end. Ergo, Microsoft good, anything else bad. I know that in certain geographical (unnamed) divisions the use of Firefox is a sackable offence - or certainly warrants a massive slap on the wrists.

Where I am it's not so bad - however, my (illegal) Xubuntu installation is on an external drive with the Grub RW CD for booting and I can pull the plug (literally) if there's a problem. Originally, I had a linux paritition but I've moved away from that and restored all my partitions to the way they were delivered. Although I use rsync to keep copies of my home directory on the D: drive just in case and I have dallied with the Linux swap on the Windows swap file (still working out the kinks). Xubuntu on an external drive is slow - but it's actually faster than Windows on the main drive.

Anyways, I would have two complaints from the point of view of someone sneaking Linux into the Workplace (Undermining the bastards from the inside!):

1. OpenOffice sucks. Now the response to this is the obvious 'Hey Stupid! OpenOffice isn't Linux'. To which I reply, 'Hey Nutjob! Wake up to the realities of the market you are trying to get in to'. It matters not that OpenOffice is not officially a part of Linux - it is a fundamental part of Linux in a business environment. OpenOffice is not able to handle the full array of rubbish that Microsoft Word produces leading to the inevitable - 'Oh that's strange I looks fine on my computer' {scramble to reissue document using Word in Wine} 'Try that version'. That said Word 97 works great under Wine, so I use that a lot - although I do prefer AbiWord.

2. It'd be nice to have a stealth Windows skin for Xubuntu. Needs to have all those nasty startup screens, skin the GDM, skin the window manager - and the big one, skin Xscreensaver especially so it can load 'corporate mandated screensavers' and ask for the password in a Windowsy way. Oh and some yoke that could be installed so that anyone enquiring from the outside using network tools etc (i.e. M$ Administrator), would be told 'Windows Machine - nothing to see here'.