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IBM Software Linux Business Linux

Linux Desktop Migration Cookbook from IBM 250

Posted by michael from the rated-u-for-useful dept.
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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Linux Desktop Migration Cookbook from IBM More

Linux Desktop Migration Cookbook from IBM

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  • Scanning through it... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by JossiRossi ( 840900 ) on Friday December 17, 2004 @04:54PM (#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.

  • Step 1 (Score:5, Funny)

    by Nom du Keyboard ( 633989 ) on Friday December 17, 2004 @04:59PM (#11119773)
    Step 1: Don't tell SCO.
    • Rule 1 for the Linux Desktop Migration Cookbook is... don't talk about the Linux Desktop Migration Cookbook.

    • Banning all religious displays "establishes" Atheism, an unfounded belief in the lack of any higher power.

      No it doesn't. It might just as well establish agnosticism, which is a healthy scepticism against anyone claiming to know everything.

  • so which, according to IBM, is teh leetest disto? (Score:3, Funny)

    by drxray ( 839725 ) on Friday December 17, 2004 @05:02PM (#11119805) Homepage
    And do they mention that migrating must be done in december - show the users xsnow and they'll forget windows in a second...
  • >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 @05:08PM (#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 @05:13PM (#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 @05:14PM (#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.
    • Or migrating very big speadsheets. In my experience no matter how much I hate excell it can open file with millions of entries. Same for gnumeric. OO will also open it, but it will be unusable starting from a few tens of thousands.

      I know that data of this size should not be kept as a spreadsheet. I do not keep it myself. A lot of people do though. In fact this is likely to be a bigger problem in SMBs then in large corporates which have databases for such things.
    • Or Excel spredsheets hooked into other applications like Hyperion or this wicked ugly budgeting app we used this year called Outlooksoft.

    • Re:Excel (Score:4, Informative)

      by IO ERROR ( 128968 ) * <errorNO@SPAMioerror.us> on Friday December 17, 2004 @06:42PM (#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.

      • Is this running from wine out of the box, or with some tweaking? I use crossover office (yeah, wine, I know) and it runs most applications I throw at it without any problems. However I haven't had much luck with wine running programs out of the box.

        So if it runs out of the box, then that's great. But if it required some tweaking, then that's an area of expertise that can't be expected from most people.
        • So if it runs out of the box, then that's great. But if it required some tweaking, then that's an area of expertise that can't be expected from most people.

          I run Gentoo, so it runs out of the box...once it's compiled. In a corporate setting, the sysadmins will be doing any necessary tweaking; the users won't have to worry about anything except filing trouble tickets if something breaks (which happens frequently enough on Windows that they all know how to do it).

    • 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

      • I agree with everything you said. And someone else did point out that the author had mentioned it.

        [Dream mode enabled--relatively off-topic]

        What I would really like is spreadsheet grids in a distributed computing envirnment, out on the net, with limitless bounds, and all the excel functions, supplemented by real programming on specific functions.

        To some extent, web services do provide some of this.
        [/deam mode tuned down (it's never really off)]

        What you point to, however, is that complex spreadsheet func

  • Comments (Score:2, Interesting)

    by quamaretto ( 666270 )

    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

    • "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. "

      Actually they did, in Table 4-2 Sample application survey. They list gimp as the only target for Adobe Photoshop 7.0 migration. I personally do not do a lot of graphic maniplulation, and do not use either of these applications so I cannot comment on how appr

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

    by csoto ( 220540 ) on Friday December 17, 2004 @05:21PM (#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
      • Pardon the naysaying but when a post is done anonymously, when it neglects to mention what the saves-the-day Linux tool was, when it is incredibly vague in every respect I become suspicious. I understand being vague when not anonymous and I understand being anonymous when mentioning specific tools in a negative light or when mentioning engaging in question behavior. But anon and vague smells fishy.

        Cancatenate two files. Surely this was not simply concatenating two binary files, as would be the case when a
    • 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 @05:25PM (#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 @05:28PM (#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

    • Yes, agreed. rdesktop for linux does just fine (watch out licensing costs for TS though).

      On ActiveX, the current Firefox trend should help. Developers who work on both the external and internal sites, having to target firefore more and more, will rely on activex less and less.

      Further, on .net, one should look at mono. (that too was mentioned in the book.)
      • rdesktop is better than nothing but it is still crap compared to TSC. My hat is off to the developers for making it work at all, but it usually doesn't work at all. In fact I built the latest and greatest so I could run it on my server on my XDMCP login from my iopener, and ended up having to run an older version included with m4i to connect to my winxp system. Neither version manages to give me a reliable connection over the LAN if I am running Cygwin/X, though TSC/RDC client have no problems. If rdesktop
  • 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

    • Something that could be useful in a situation like this is looking at OS X. OS X does run Framemaker (although it is getting a little long in the tooth) and is probably a better solution than trying to use Citrix. A look at when it is and is not a good idea to use a Mac OS X or other Unix compatible workstations would be very useful.

      Note: I have only glanced at the book in question. If there is already such a section, well then this can be ignored.

  • 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

  • Lotus Notes? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by slepzelt ( 120267 )
    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 @06:01PM (#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.

  • Here's an idea... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by decep ( 137319 )
    How about a Lotus Notes client for Linux? You cannot completely migrate to Linux even if you work for IBM.

    WINE is not the answer. I say this from experience. NUL (Notes under Linux) is complete crap. IBM does not even offer the web based solutions internally.
    • 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)

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

    by dudeman2 ( 88399 ) on Friday December 17, 2004 @06:12PM (#11120465)
    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 @06:47PM (#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 think a key result of the book could be to identify all the ways that developers can make the process easier for users. when you find something particularly egregious in the installation process, you could make a note of it in an appendix. that would help evolve linux to a position where you don't need to read a book to use it...
  • IBM *still* has a boatload of software that SHOULD run on Windows only. What I'd like to see in Version is words saying the following software is NATIVELY supported on Linux:
    * Lotus Notes
    * Sametime
    * SmartSuite

    If you're going to support Linux, support it completely, fer cryin' out loud!

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

    by ashitaka ( 27544 ) on Friday December 17, 2004 @06:46PM (#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.
    • 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.

      I really don't think it would be that hard to build a custom version of OO.o with a File->Save-to-CMS button and some code/scripts to handle that stuff. Sorry to hear about the non-standards-compliant web interface,

  • employee bonus (Score:2, Interesting)

    by zogger ( 617870 )
    when you are trying to rollout a new desktop, give them a hundred dollars and some slack. Say "yes, we know you might have to learn as few new things, but give it an honest try for a little while, and here's a bonus to help pay for your personal training".

    Cash talks, market speak BS boss orders walk.

    People are at YOUR work because they want to MAKE MONEY, not because it's a hobby for them, you are asking them to keep doing their jobs they are doing now PLUS learn an all new system to them (most likely),
  • On page 13, the author repeats the Marketshare Myth of Browser Security. "Another temporary advantage of open source browsers is their small marketshare relative to Internet Explorer on Microsoft Windows ... This advantage would diminish in the long run as more clients begin using alternative open source browsers." This and other arguments like it are demonstrably false for three reasons:
    1. Free browsers will never have monopoly marketshare. There are dozens of good browsers out there now. No one will ev

  • One word ... (Score:2, Informative)

    by dominic.laporte ( 306430 )
    Ubuntu !

  • please ibm (Score:3, Interesting)

    by XO ( 250276 ) <blade,eric&gmail,com> on Friday December 17, 2004 @09:06PM (#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.

  • What about IBM's own Lotus Notes? I know a number of companies that could convert a large number of desktops to Linux if only it ran Notes. IBM really needs to fix this if it wants people to take Linux on the desktop seriously.
  • Man, I certainly hope that with the money from the sales of their PC business IBM can finally afford to get a spell checker.

    I'm four chapters into this book. While there's a lot of great information and ideas, it reads like a rough draft. Given that I haven't seen a story on cnn.com with FEWER than 3 major spelling or grammar issue (most frequent error on cnn: Sentences that missing word! (yes, that's intentional)) in years, I suppose this book is not all that terrible. There are several pages so far th
  • Chapter 1, Page 7
    • Modified source code may have distribution restrictions. The license should explicitly allow the redistribution of derivative works. This cannot include the patched code, since patched code may not be considered derivative work.

    I'm not sure what they were trying to say here, but it's almost certainly wrong. It is at best misleading and/or confusing.

    What I would say (IANAL) is:

    1. You may limit the distribution of modified code to within your organization.
    2. If you redistribute code out

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