Apart from poor formatting and errors in spelling etc, I have to agree with this.
Having done many such reports (as an independant "audit" process), I just have to add one thing that goes against the general flow of the postings so far. Don't dumb-down the report - people who have management roles are generally literate and have active brain cells. They need to make their own call on how important things are, they are looking for your narrow technical viewpoint and will add that to the other narrow viewpoints from the rest of the organisation.
So you need to make the important issues clear and upfront and with some kind of cost of not-doing. I've never written a report with $ costs, just in expected down-time to fix etc. I've always found this quite effective in getting the point across - there is the list of critical must-do's and then the should-do's with rough time-and-materials costings.
I think most of my "should-do's" were done and the must-do's scared the pants off some of the managers - on the basis that the costs for the lower priority items were so high.
Have run Mandrake/Mandriva on all the laptops I've had since....well, a long time. No problems at all. Never done dual boot - has always been Linux only.
I second the advice about Knoppix. Take a CD with you and see if you can convince them to let it boot. Very revealing. The only issue you might have is some laptops (the Fujitsu range for example) don't want to boot off USB. Stupid, but true. This can be an issue with the ultra lights (which tend to have removable media bays).
I think many folk who are giving the "be cautious" advice are beeing a bit too pedestrian - I actually haven't had any significant problems getting Linux to boot and operate painlessly. I don't think Mandrake is peculiar in this - pretty much any modern distro would work, I think. I bought the S-2020 when it was first released - early mobile AMD processor, new ATI chipset etc. Just worked:-)
I'm also unsure why people are down on ATI GPUs. This Fujitsu laptop has one, and it just works out of the box. No problems, no issues. Of course, I don't play games - so this might be the issue.
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Apart from poor formatting and errors in spelling etc, I have to agree with this.
Having done many such reports (as an independant "audit" process), I just have to add one thing that goes against the general flow of the postings so far. Don't dumb-down the report - people who have management roles are generally literate and have active brain cells. They need to make their own call on how important things are, they are looking for your narrow technical viewpoint and will add that to the other narrow viewpoints from the rest of the organisation.
So you need to make the important issues clear and upfront and with some kind of cost of not-doing. I've never written a report with $ costs, just in expected down-time to fix etc. I've always found this quite effective in getting the point across - there is the list of critical must-do's and then the should-do's with rough time-and-materials costings.
I think most of my "should-do's" were done and the must-do's scared the pants off some of the managers - on the basis that the costs for the lower priority items were so high.
Have run Mandrake/Mandriva on all the laptops I've had since....well, a long time. No problems at all. Never done dual boot - has always been Linux only.
:-)
Currently: Fujitsu S-2020 (1GB/100GB disk/WiFi/everything..) a lovely light laptop
Dell Inspiron 2200
Dell Inspiron 6000 (antique..)
I second the advice about Knoppix. Take a CD with you and see if you can convince them to let it boot. Very revealing. The only issue you might have is some laptops (the Fujitsu range for example) don't want to boot off USB. Stupid, but true. This can be an issue with the ultra lights (which tend to have removable media bays).
I think many folk who are giving the "be cautious" advice are beeing a bit too pedestrian - I actually haven't had any significant problems getting Linux to boot and operate painlessly. I don't think Mandrake is peculiar in this - pretty much any modern distro would work, I think. I bought the S-2020 when it was first released - early mobile AMD processor, new ATI chipset etc. Just worked
I'm also unsure why people are down on ATI GPUs. This Fujitsu laptop has one, and it just works out of the box. No problems, no issues. Of course, I don't play games - so this might be the issue.