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Linux Desktop Migration Cookbook from IBM

Posted by michael on Fri Dec 17, 2004 03:48 PM
from the rated-u-for-useful dept.
Software IBM Linux Business Linux
almondjoy writes "I was project leader for publication of this recent IBM Redbook, available for free download here: Linux Client Migration Cookbook: A Practical Planning and Implementation Guide for Migrating to Desktop Linux. At this point, I'm gathering input for what we could improve on, and what additional topics should be covered in a second version of the book. I realize this is a broad topic to cover in a rapidly changing environment. And because these books are developed by IBM there are some content limitations. Nonetheless, in the next version we want to continue making the book as useful as possible for anyone considering a migration to Linux on the desktop."
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  • Scanning through it... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by JossiRossi (840900) on Friday December 17 2004, @03:54PM (#11119712) Homepage
    A quick scan of it shows that it's relativly simple (It had pictures!). And seemed easy to understand. But it seems a bit too much for the average user. I mean it feels a bit like preaching to the choir. The guide will be most popular among people that already have the ability and desire to move to linux, not necesarily the average joe who is dipping his feet in the water to explore.

    • Re:Scanning through it... (Score:5, Informative)

      by qbzzt (11136) on Friday December 17 2004, @04:02PM (#11119802)
      Hi,

      But it seems a bit too much for the average user. I mean it feels a bit like preaching to the choir. The guide will be most popular among people that already have the ability and desire to move to linux, not necesarily the average joe who is dipping his feet in the water to explore.

      I don't think it's meant for Joe user. Instead, it is meant for Jack CTO and Jane SysAdmin who will be the ones moving Joe user from Windows to Linux.
    • You skimmed too fast, this booklet is obviously aimed at the Enterprise support. Unless of course you meant that to say typical MSCEs will find it too complex. ;)
    • But it's not really aimed at the average users. It's aimed at the system administrator dudes to migrate other people's desktops in such a way that they won't moan too much.

  • Step 1 (Score:5, Funny)

    by Nom du Keyboard (633989) on Friday December 17 2004, @03:59PM (#11119773)
    Step 1: Don't tell SCO.
  • And do they mention that migrating must be done in december - show the users xsnow and they'll forget windows in a second...
    • so which, according to IBM, is teh leetest disto? [sic]

      The one that gets sold on an IBM server with an IBM support contract.

    • "so which, according to IBM, is teh leetest disto?"

      I think the real answer is "because these books are developed by IBM there are some content limitations." IBM does a pretty good job of not participating in the distribution wars. In the section titled "1.6 Linux overview and distribution choices" the only mention of distributions by name is this sentance: "Some of the most well-known distributions include Red Hat, SuSE, Debian, Mandrake, etc." IBM has technology aliances with both Red Hat and SuSE so t

  • >And because these books are developed by IBM there are some content limitations.

    Please refine further what you mean by that.

    • IBM is a company that develops software. Independents, putting together a similar guide, could say things like 'Postgre SQL is a stable, enterprise ready database that is available for free', but if IBM said that, it could hurt DB2 sales.

  • Suggestion (Score:5, Funny)

    by antiMStroll (664213) on Friday December 17 2004, @04:08PM (#11119856)
    "At this point, I'm gathering input for what we could improve on.."

    How about a chapter entiltled "McAfee and Norton: Terminating Enterprise Contracts with no Hard Feelings"?

  • So (Score:5, Funny)

    by pete-classic (75983) <hutnick@gmail.com> on Friday December 17 2004, @04:13PM (#11119905) Homepage Journal
    You want feedback on a book so you ask the folks at a site where they never read the articles they post about.

    You're job is in jeopardy, my friend.

    -Peter

  • Excel (Score:5, Informative)

    by chris_mahan (256577) <chris.mahan@gmail.com> on Friday December 17 2004, @04:14PM (#11119920) Homepage
    I notice that you leave out the potentially greatest problem: Very Complex Excel spreadsheets migration to OO.org.

    This, for most companies, and especially for financial companies, will be an enormous deal-breaker.

    If the book is challenged on that point, then you will lose credibility.

    • Re:Excel (Score:2, Interesting)

      by stratjakt (596332)
      Forget Excel, think about all the Access, FoxPro, or Delphi databases/apps out there.

      The only person in our company who could switch to linux would be the front receptionist. And she'd need to dual boot so she can still do all the FedEx stuff.
      • Yeah, well, that's true.

        We have thousands (i kid you not, it's a zoo) of access databases. From 1-off forms to 500+meg extracts.

        oh, and visio. There's nothing in opensource land that opens a visio file correctly. (please someone prove me wrong).

    • Re:Excel (Score:3, Informative)

      by nfk (570056)
      They do address that point, when they say the following:

      "As for migration of office productivity suite applications, at this time we believe that the odds for migration success currently favor organizations or end users that do not rely heavily on use of advanced functions in Microsoft Office..."

      Or just read the grey box marked Important, in the second page of the introduction.

    • Re:Excel (Score:4, Informative)

      by IO ERROR (128968) * <error.ioerror@us> on Friday December 17 2004, @05:42PM (#11120738) Homepage Journal
      Keep your MS Office if you must; versions up to Office 2000 run just fine in Wine [winehq.com]. Wine is also VERY good at those little custom developed in-house vertical apps that all large companies seem to have lots of.

      For one phone company I know of, which has such a Windows app for their customer service representatives to work with customers' accounts, I demonstrated it running perfectly in Wine. I was able to access and make changes to accounts just the same as if it were running on Windows, with no trouble whatsoever.

      If it's not mentioned already, some discussion of Wine and its suitability for those types of applications definitely should be included.

    • I notice that you leave out the potentially greatest problem: Very Complex Excel spreadsheets migration to OO.org.

      Others have noted that this point is addressed. The author conservatively steers clear of such dissasters.

      "Very Complex Excel" migration is a failure, even if you stick to M$. OLE and calls to other functions are each invitations to something not being on the next version of Winblows. Worse, M$ changes their scripting so you can be sure you will have work to do no matter what. I know a guy

  • It's nice to see The GIMP given some recognition, in that it is broadcasted as a replacement for Paint Shop Pro, which is IMHO fair to both programs. I'm glad they didn't say the same thing of Photoshop, which would have been altogether a bad move. The other choices (Firefox, OpenOffice) are predictable.

    I'm not sure how I feel about seperating "Component Desktop Environment" from "Desktop Environment" from "Window Manager", but the seperation is arguable. (GNUStep! Whoohoo!) It's clear they're recommending

  • Good paper - glosses over multimedia (Score:4, Insightful)

    by csoto (220540) on Friday December 17 2004, @04:21PM (#11119979)
    The huge impediment for us implementing a Linux or Solaris-based thin client system has been the relatively crappy support for media streaming (primarily ISMA-compliant MPEG-4). Yes, there are lots of MPEG tools, but most of these are libraries, command line tools (essentially for ripping/stealing content), or "players" that lack any sort of polish, instead prefering to have "sci fi" interfaces or such nonsense.

    There is already a suitable alternative to the Windows desktop: Mac OS X. They get the whole media concept right.

    • Re:Good paper - glosses over multimedia (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I was thinking about that today actually. I'll share my thoughts.

      Today I had a movie split into two parts that I wanted to concatenate. I've done this in both windows and in linux. In windows, I had to download a program that if it was freeware it was crap, or it was commercial and I found a crack for it. Both situations are a pain in the ass.

      In linux, I emerged (gentoo speak for install from source) a small tool of about 100k of source that took about 30 seconds to compile. Then from the gentoo foru
    • What's wrong with Xine exactly?

      It does have a bitmapped interface, but it doesn't look any less professional than, say, Apple's QuckTime player.

      There is also a Gnome frontend to Xine which uses native widgets... I don't know how you can get less complaint-worthy than that.

  • I applaud IBM for this. (Score:5, Informative)

    by michael path (94586) * on Friday December 17 2004, @04:25PM (#11120025) Homepage Journal
    I applaud IBM for this Redbook. It is very detailed in terms of providing an IT Administrator the ammunition to begin a pilot project for a Linux migration.

    I've never seen a great book for migrating to Linux on the desktop for enterprise users. What really sets this book apart is its discussion on the ability to move Linux to the desktop while maintaining Microsoft products on the server side. While most organizations start by adding Linux servers, and never migrate their clients, this provides a strong start point for desktop migration.

    IBM is very committed to Linux. For most of their server products, like WebSphere, Tivoli Access Manager, DB2, etc., Linux is certainly a preferred platform. This book, and the sale of their desktop division, confirms that they're trying to dethrone Microsoft from enterprise dominance and assert their place as a Linux (and AIX) software and services company.
  • You might perhaps include under the Application porting information about things like cygwin, vmware, crossover office, etc. for running windows tools under linux (and the other way around, i.e cygwin). I am still looking at the document so you may already have this, but it would be really really helpful if you could include resources for converting from various microsoft proprietary formats -> some other format as well. I am in the process of migrating people off of an exchange server (and probably even

  • Migration and Education (Score:4, Insightful)

    by tdhillman (839276) on Friday December 17 2004, @04:28PM (#11120044)
    The greatest impediment to migration remains the level of IT knowledge in the prospective user base. My superiors make their decisions based on information (and mis-information) given to them by Microsoft based vendors.

    There exists a compelling need to build the Lnux market (and awareness) within the educational community at all levels- if the book can tell not just an IT person, but also a non-IT person why Linux is truly a compelling choice, migration will make more and more sense. Students working on a Linux desktop will become the corporate users.

    So, any treatment of the subject would be enhanced by an awareness that the younger users will become the older users.

    I've got a cadre of students who have moved from Windows onto OpenBSD for educational purposes, and they are rapidly becoming advocates of open source and alternative desktop choices.

    Don't forget that education is an enterprise as well, often deploying thousands of desktops.
  • I've been thinking about this for a while. One of the big obsticles is that most companies have a horde of fat clients written specifically for .net/etc., or web-based relying on IE/activex. One of the other posters above mentioned really complex excel spreadsheets, too.

    The reality is that those things do exist and are show stoppers. I was thinking the way to tackle that is to have a citrix server/farm for people to connect to for those apps that require Windows. Over time, you can migrate away from t

  • I noticed at page 116, 6.1 Example client migration:

    6.1.2 "Identify important applications and infrastructure integration points"

    Since the user role for this workstation is primarily for writing books using Adobe FrameMaker, that most important application and the most important infrastructure components are printing and access to network file shares.

    The first thing to note about the Adobe FrameMaker application is that there is no Linux alternative. There is no Linux native version, and moving to another

  • or with no OS, will I believe that IBM is sincere.

    A few months ago I tried to buy a ThinkPad T41 with either Linux pre-installed, no OS, or at least a breakdown of how much the Windows OS contributes to the total price.

    I sent a very friendly email to the IBM customer support asking for either of the three options.

    I got a one line response:
    IBM ThinkPad's are not sold without Operating System. Thank you for your interest.
    (Or very similar in wording).

    Words are meaningless if not followed by actions. Of cou
  • Sorry, directed comment:

    This is all nice and well, IBM, but what's really a sticking point for my workplace is the fact that there's no native Lotus Notes client for Linux. So far, IBM's solution for Notes is to run it under WINE.

    I actually *despise* Notes. As a Notes developer I met said "It's great for lots of stuff, but email isn't one of them." Unfortunately, that's how most corporations I know of use it.

    So, until I can convince the powers that be that Notes royally stinks, I'm afraid, we're stuck

  • My suggestions: (Score:4, Informative)

    by Cat_Byte (621676) on Friday December 17 2004, @05:01PM (#11120355) Journal
    Page 27: using smbmount to map network resources. You could mention you can do this via a gui very similar to the network neighborhood thing if they are in Gnome or KDE.

    You might want to add Mac software to the list of *nix equivalents.

    Add a section on locking down the workstation. It won't take people long to figure out they can ssh to anyones box and start messing with people. Any users familiar with setting up windows shares can only share certain folders (barring administrator access to c$, etc), but they probably won't know that if they use a crappy password, someone can gain access to every folder they have. Which reminds me, mention password rulesets and how to implement on the authentication server solutions listed.

  • The redbook barely mentions WINE (Score:3, Insightful)

    by dudeman2 (88399) on Friday December 17 2004, @05:12PM (#11120465) Homepage
    I find this astonishing, especially since Codeweavers product provides excellent compatibility for MS Office and other Windows applications. Maybe this is what the author was referring to when he said "...there are some content limitations"?

    • Re:The redbook barely mentions WINE (Score:4, Interesting)

      by jeremy_white (598942) * on Friday December 17 2004, @05:47PM (#11120782) Homepage
      Yup. Wine is not a permitted topic for IBM; they had a nice Whitepaper on it get published a while back, and the author didn't realize that was against the rules, was slapped, and the paper is down now.

      The delicious irony of this is that they use Wine heavily internally to run Notes.

      I don't have any clear visibility into why this is; I get a lot of hemming and hawing about it, but no clear vision. I suspect some back room handshake agreement with the folks in Redmond, but have no real proof for that.

      They try to raise an argument about patents, but IBM themselves know that a proven monopolist cannot successfully prosecute a lawsuit over patents (which is why IBM prosecuted no such cases from 1935 until 1985, because they got slapped in 1935 for antitrust violations when they did so).

      A perhaps more straight forward explanation is that using Wine greatly reduces the amount of services that IBM can provide you with :-/.

  • I want to but can't (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ashitaka (27544) on Friday December 17 2004, @05:46PM (#11120776) Homepage
    180 user Law firm with:

    Large vertical-market accounting system (Elite) with .NET-based web time-entry interface that absolutely, positively requires IE.

    Word using Interwoven Desksite Content Management System. Call me when an Open Source CMS can intercept OpenOffice File-Save and File-Open to present a metadata profile dialog or folder structure that assigns metadata based on the folder in which the document is stored. No frickin uploads.

    Anything else could probably run in Wine.

    There is an effort to put together a Law firm Distribution (LAWnix) but right now it's just picking the best pieces.

    I would suspect more than a few companies are in this situation.

  • please ibm (Score:3, Interesting)

    by XO (250276) <{blade.eric} {at} {gmail.com}> on Friday December 17 2004, @08:06PM (#11121898) Homepage Journal
    Now, if only IBM would actually give us a useful Desktop, like.. oh.. PORT THE WORKPLACE SHELL TO RUN ON X11.. please? Give me the code, I'll do it, if you don't want to spare the resources.

    • Then why the hell did it sell it's desktop division?

      Because it dicovered that desktop multiplication is far more effective in producing high numbers of desktops.
    • Because they want you to pay them to MANAGE your infrastructure, not sell Microsoft licenses for boxes they make 2% profit on.

      Smart move that Novell, Red Hat and others are starting to figure out...

    • Re:If IBM gave two shits about the desktop (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      IBM selling its PC Division isn't about its position as a PC vendor in the USA. Its about their position as a PC vendor in China. A market with over 1.6 Billion people, that has recently signed a Free Trade Zone agreement with some neighbouring countries that comes into effect in 2010. Its about IBM positioning itself to sell to 50% of the world population whereas Dell is just USA. You ever read The Economist?
    • "Unlike Secure IE, both FireFox and Opera do not support these time saving features. You'll need to start over with your Favorites and they will not remember your logins."
      Ummm I thought FireFox imported my favorites but I have been using it so long I could be wrong. And yes it does rember my logins.

      " They also both don't use industry standard displays, which means lots of new quirks to get used to!"
      What the heck are you talking about industry standard displays!!!!
      You are not a paid shill you just play one
    • I don't think IBM is looking to bring an AOL linux client to the market. AOL isn't looking to support linux either. The OSS desktop needs something new, a new "killer app," maybe a variation of ITunes for linux. Unfortunately Apple has its own operating system. Frankly, I don't see much opportunity for desktop linux anywhere. Back to the drawing board.
    • Depends on one's needs. In the last 5 years I've gone from one of those rabid pro-linux people to one of more pragmatic in the last two years after I purchased my iBook.

      Why? In my case, OpenOffice was comming along, but wasn't there yet, GIMP's development had kinda stagnated. Didn't notice any difference much from 1998-2002. I never got everything working under linux the way it should and my time to play with such things was getting less and less. For server side things I was switching more and more

    • Why not? Ad hoc experiments done on non-technical friends indicate that for a managed desktop (ie where an admin sets it up and controls it) Linux is easier to use than OS X given zero training or familiarity with Windows. I'd say Linux is getting very ready very quickly.
    • Why is this modded at 0?
      Applications outside the norm (but inside what is standard for some Enterprise businesses) is exactly what this book should be covering.

      Most people can install linux. It's when you run into a corrupted video driver, or firewire not working, or WiFi not working that an inexperienced linux user will get throw their hands up. Add to that a big wig breathing down your neck to determine migration feasability and it gets pretty easy to answer 'Nope, not yet.'

      For example. I installed fed

      • Re:Preheat the oven... (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Amiga Trombone (592952) on Friday December 17 2004, @06:23PM (#11121073)
        I'm all for Linux but I'm interested in knowing what sort of things other companies are finding that are preventing them from switching.

        What makes this question such a stinker is that it usually isn't the big, common things that are the show stoppers, it's myriad little things.

        In my case, I can think of a couple off the top of my head. For one, the availability of a Nortel VPN client. Now, I know there's actually a Nortel client available, but my shop is already paying a flat fee for the Windows client. If they want the Linux client as well, they have to pay extra. Therefore, their position is that Linux is unsupported. Then there's the fact that there are a number of Access databases that we use, and nobody's in a big hurry to migrate them to something else. And of course, there's all the specialized, obscure little applications that create data in various proprietary formats, with no Linux version available from the vendor, and not of sufficiently large an audience that anyone in the open source community is going to be bothered to write an equivalent.

        I'd say that the big things, office suites, etc., Linux already has. But it's the little, obscure, PITA applications that have evolved within the Windows ecosystem throughout the years that can't be easily replaced.

        • Re:Preheat the oven... (Score:5, Informative)

          by IANAAC (692242) on Friday December 17 2004, @05:00PM (#11120344)
          Most of your Win apps-only stuff can be handled through Crossover Office. Does wmv videos, IExplorer, Notes/Sametime. Yes, it's basically Wine, but Crossover is optimized for precisely these things.
    • OK, I pointed this out elsewhere in the thread, but I was one of the guys who worked on adding Notes 6.5.1 support to Codeweavers Crossover and I know for a fact that we have plenty of happy customers - including IBM employees - using it in their daily business. Several of them have signed up for our advocate program and ranked Notes as a "Gold" app which means they think it works perfectly.

      Now, the NUL RPMs that IBM distribute internally are not produced by Wine developers. They are (as far as I'm aware)

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