At my company, my friend and I run IT and use a Win2k domain. Another guy runs our public servers and uses a mixed *nix set.
I'm a BSD man at heart and use a BSD machine as my primary workstation for coding, managing the network, and I use X2VNC from it to connect to a Windows workstation just for using the "computer management" tool on the domain and a few other Windows centric tools.
Since I started using a FreeBSD machine on the LAN, a few others have asked me if they could too including our NOC and my other IT guy. This is great for us unix and network junkies, but what about the common corporate desktop user?
With the help of the other two guys I mentioned above, I've started a project of setting up a linux desktop that any of the employees can use. I'd love to give some of the more experienced computer users the option to try it for a few weeks and teach them about unix at the same time.
We've got some Windows apps that are used quite heavily (and were priced heavily too) that I have to contend with. For starters, and my nemesis thus far, Interactive Intelligence (I3) Client for our Cisco IP Phone system. I've managed to get it working with WineX but not so stable with Wine. Next on the list of course is Outlook and the MS Office suite. I haven't seen anything nearly as tight as the Office suite and certainly not compatible with it. Yes yes people say "open office, evolution, etc" but my experiences have proven that the average corporate bonehead doesn't want or need the hassles I've had with these apps when Office integrates them so smoothly. I'm not dismissing open office and evo, but they aren't there yet.
All the other apps we use I've managed to squirrel away into Citrix. The citrix ica client for linux is great (but seems to have probs with xinerama btw). I've taken apps that we never intended or needed to be on citrix and put them on it just for easy use in linux. I'm still not quite sure how licensing will work with those apps but I'd say that if your citrix server(s) can handle it, get your windows apps on there and linux desktops are cake.
I read a post, maybe on./ one day, of someone saying they rolled out linux desktops at work and to manage application installs on workstations they made everyone mount/home and/usr/local via NFS. That way all they did was pump out a basic image with some/etc tweaks and everyone mounted their homes and applications via NFS so setting up a new workstation was incredibly painless. I'm a huge fan of this idea and definately want to try it.
Another idea lulling around was the linux terminal server project. We tested it on a 100mb lan with an AMDk-2 500 w/ 256mb ram as the terminal server and the same machines as clients and it was pretty darn quick, almost no noticible lag. I'd have to say with a beefy server we could support a good number of people off it.
There is no reason to throw out what is otherwise the right tool for the job.
Agreed! A book is the right tool in some cases, an e-book is the right tool in others. Neither is perfect for all occasions. Instead of getting rid of books altogether, supply both.
Students will have PDAs. The library can give a good old fashion book that you need as well as a digital copy for use on the PDA. You can carry the book around and use it as you like. You can also load up the digital copy and use that too.
I'm not a big fan of digital versions of books and dont like reading them. But I would have loved to have gotten a digital copy of "The Prince" when I bought/borrowed the book so that I could lookup a quote from it I wanted to use.
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At my company, my friend and I run IT and use a Win2k domain. Another guy runs our public servers and uses a mixed *nix set.
./ one day, of someone saying they rolled out linux desktops at work and to manage application installs on workstations they made everyone mount /home and /usr/local via NFS. That way all they did was pump out a basic image with some /etc tweaks and everyone mounted their homes and applications via NFS so setting up a new workstation was incredibly painless. I'm a huge fan of this idea and definately want to try it.
I'm a BSD man at heart and use a BSD machine as my primary workstation for coding, managing the network, and I use X2VNC from it to connect to a Windows workstation just for using the "computer management" tool on the domain and a few other Windows centric tools.
Since I started using a FreeBSD machine on the LAN, a few others have asked me if they could too including our NOC and my other IT guy. This is great for us unix and network junkies, but what about the common corporate desktop user?
With the help of the other two guys I mentioned above, I've started a project of setting up a linux desktop that any of the employees can use. I'd love to give some of the more experienced computer users the option to try it for a few weeks and teach them about unix at the same time.
We've got some Windows apps that are used quite heavily (and were priced heavily too) that I have to contend with. For starters, and my nemesis thus far, Interactive Intelligence (I3) Client for our Cisco IP Phone system. I've managed to get it working with WineX but not so stable with Wine.
Next on the list of course is Outlook and the MS Office suite. I haven't seen anything nearly as tight as the Office suite and certainly not compatible with it. Yes yes people say "open office, evolution, etc" but my experiences have proven that the average corporate bonehead doesn't want or need the hassles I've had with these apps when Office integrates them so smoothly. I'm not dismissing open office and evo, but they aren't there yet.
All the other apps we use I've managed to squirrel away into Citrix. The citrix ica client for linux is great (but seems to have probs with xinerama btw). I've taken apps that we never intended or needed to be on citrix and put them on it just for easy use in linux. I'm still not quite sure how licensing will work with those apps but I'd say that if your citrix server(s) can handle it, get your windows apps on there and linux desktops are cake.
I read a post, maybe on
Another idea lulling around was the linux terminal server project. We tested it on a 100mb lan with an AMDk-2 500 w/ 256mb ram as the terminal server and the same machines as clients and it was pretty darn quick, almost no noticible lag. I'd have to say with a beefy server we could support a good number of people off it.
Students will have PDAs. The library can give a good old fashion book that you need as well as a digital copy for use on the PDA. You can carry the book around and use it as you like. You can also load up the digital copy and use that too.
I'm not a big fan of digital versions of books and dont like reading them. But I would have loved to have gotten a digital copy of "The Prince" when I bought/borrowed the book so that I could lookup a quote from it I wanted to use.
-snaf
No, you don't click on things here$G