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Jumping To Ubuntu At Work For Non-Linux Geeks

Posted by timothy on from the there's-no-ubuntu-topic dept.

twigles writes "I'm a network engineer, meaning I spend my days dealing with things like selective route advertisements, peering, and traffic engineering; I'm not a Linux admin or developer. About 6 months ago I finally got fed up enough with my experience on Windows XP to jump ship to Ubuntu 8.04, despite not having much Linux experience, particularly on the desktop. Read my ramblings for an engineer's take on taking what can be a pretty intimidating plunge for us Linux noobcakes."

6 of 181 comments (clear)

  1. A Flock Of Seagulls? by auric_dude · · Score: 3, Informative

    Submit an article. Get people to view your hair style. Profit ??

  2. No SFTP? by dvice_null · · Score: 3, Informative

    From TFA: "Also, there's no SCP or SFTP feature that I can find comparable to SecureCRT."

    I don't know what SecureCRT is like, but you can use the file manager as SFTP client and bookmark pages if you want to. Or you can install Filezilla (the new version can handle SFTP also). Not sure what version comes with Ubuntu 8.04.

  3. For password management try using KeePassX by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    For password management try using KeePassX http://www.keepassx.org/
    It's free and cross platform.

  4. Re:How would you replace Visio? by markdavis · · Score: 3, Informative

    As far as I am aware, no, you cannot directly use Visio objects in OpenOffice. However, there are lots of objects available if you don't want to draw them yourself. For example:

    http://openoffice.blogs.com/openoffice/2006/10/custom_openoffi.html
    http://lautman.net/mark/coo/index.html

    Or, you can convert many Visio VSS files into objects that *can* be read by other programs, such as OpenOffice. For example:

    http://www.gnome.ru/fileformats/stencils.html

    Will hardware vendors release their objects/stencils in something non-proprietary? As you said- not likely for now. But that doesn't mean OpenOffice Draw isn't perfectly capable of creating nice diagrams. In fact, people tend to grossly underestimate what can be done in OpenOffice Draw; mostly because many of the powerful features aren't immediately obvious and/or it is positioned more as a vector drawing program and not a diagramming program.

  5. Sshfs is your friend. by Kjellander · · Score: 4, Informative

    It's so much easier to just mount the remote dir with fuse, that to use any client.

    sudo apt-get install sshfs
    sshfs user@host:dir/ dest/

    And you're done. Use the normal file handler after that.

    Don't want to type in passwords? Use ssh-keygen and ssh-add. Don't wanna type in the mount line? Just put them all in a bash script and mount them all first time you log in. Or get the old ones with 'history | grep sshfs' and tun it by typing in the number in front of the command after an exclamation mark, like so: '!679'

  6. Re:My troubles switching to Ubuntu at Work by TheNarrator · · Score: 3, Informative

    We almost got roped into exchange at my job but I made them go with Zimbra. Zimbra acts like Exchange and windows users can't really tell the difference when using outlook. Now the windows people are happy and the Linux people are happy.

    I think if we got an Exchange server it would have eventually sucked the whole company's IT infrastructure into Microsoft proprietary only. If there's one thing you can do at a new startup to save money it's to avoid MS Exchange and go with Zimbra. That's because once the camel's nose is under the tent the whole IT infrastructure gets sucked into the MS black hole and you're paying the yearly Microsoft tax on every component of your IT infrastructure. Zimbra helps limit the bottom line damage that the obligatory windows licenses create.