Jumping To Ubuntu At Work For Non-Linux Geeks

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."

Traffic Engineer?

Repeat after me, you are not an engineer.

Until you go through the same hell in college that degreed mechanical/electrical/aero/civil engineers go through in college and have a chance to obtain a PE, you are not an engineer.

Re:

He's also quite madly irresponsible, if he's advocating non-techie people switching to Linux in work without the support of a sympathetic admin. Sounds like a sure way to lose that promotion.

Titles

I've got some special insight into this argument since I've been on both sides of it.
  I've been through all of the hell that you described above and gotten my BS in Mechanical Engineering from an accredited university. I've now worked as a Civil Engineer for several years, and have recently taken the PE exam. (I'll be retaking it soon. My score was one point too low).
  Before I got my degree, I was working my way through college part-time as ...an engineer. (Note what I'm doing with Capitalization here). Specifically, I was a stationary engineer and a member of the International Union of Operating engineers. I served a four year apprenticeship in order to be a journeyman stationary engineer. There can be a certain amount of "hell" associated with that process too (that most academics would underestimate).
  The title is traditionally applied in two different (and probably more) senses. The first, Engineer, is given to a range of professions requiring a high degree of mathematical, scientific, and a well-rounded academic education, that is (supposed to be) typical of at least a four-year college degree. The second sense, engineer, is to refer to members of a range of vocational trades that branched out of heavy equipment operations, (especially steam-powered equipment) in the nineteenth century. Both of these traditional uses of the term have well-established precedent.
  Today the academic Engineers would like to restrict the use of the term to distinguish themselves from the vocational engineers. But the latter naturally object to the loss of the respected title. My take on this is that vocational side underestimates the expectations that the most recent use of the term Engineer evokes. I would continue to have considerable respect for current members of my former trade, if they were to use the titles of "technician" and "operator" instead. But I suspect that many of my current colleagues, i.e. Engineers, don't adequately appreciate the difficulties encountered in acquiring a skilled trade and don't have much respect such titles or vocations.

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I work in the same industry as you. IAAPE. I am "degreed" and I have a license, however it's not required for PLC programming, process control work, or even the general electrical design (though this should be done by an electrical engineer).

Since the entire system must meet the electrical code and pass an electrical inspection anyway, the only time we are required to get an engineer involved with an electrical control system is for the safety subsystem. In this case we need to get the safety system desi

A Flock Of Seagulls?

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

WTF?

FTFA:

my company had installed so many things on my laptop that it crashed or locked often, and booting took more than 20 minutes. There was no way around this while still on the domain, and if you run Windows here, you have to be on the domain

One of my goals was to have everything be as easy as Windows.

So, what he's looking for is how to make a boot in Ubuntu take more than 20 minutes?

No SFTP?

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.

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SecureCRT uses tabs in a window for each session you have open. You can open a new tab with a "sftp>" prompt and enter sftp commands, although I think that using filezilla or a file manager like you mention is much easier.

The best part about SecureCRT is that you can install the lrzsz package on your Linux boxes and then use sz and rz commands in the remote session to send and receive files to/from your local computer. No need to mess around with scp, sftp, or opening other windows or tabs. It's very

Sshfs is your friend.

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'

For password management try using KeePassX

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

My troubles switching to Ubuntu at Work

Two main problems that I'm trying to overcome:

Exchange support. Evolution just doesn't cut it. It won't load my global address list and it doesn't seem to handle the "location" field for meeting invites. That means when I get an invite or try to send one I have no clue where our meeting will be.

CVS. I really like TortoiseCVS and can't find an equivalent that is as easy to use. I guess it's not a big deal, I could go back to using the cli, but what can I say, I am lazy. :)

Everything else has been good so far.

Re:My troubles switching to Ubuntu at Work

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.

What about Linux users moving to Windows?

I've been a Linux user since 1993, when I was a student at university. Until 1998, I ran Linux as my primary OS, but kept a Windows partition on my home system to run some games. And since 2002 I've been fortunate enough to run Linux full-time at work. It has been a great experience so far. I didn't have any issues exchanging documents with others at work, and certainly my previous bosses didn't mind. But times change, I suppose.

I've been asked to move back to Windows, at least for work. The difference between Windows (XP) and Linux (Fedora 9) has been shocking, to say the least. Since you often see blogs or tech articles (like the parent post) when long-time Windows users experiment with Linux for the first time, I thought it might be equally interesting for this long-time Linux user to blog about my first experience running Windows in over 6 or 7 years:

Linux in Exile [umn.edu]

The short list of things I have run into in my first week of running Windows:

• hardware support is definitely not plug-and-play (had troubles getting a simple laptop mini-dock to get recognized, same with the external display.)
• programs look and act differently from each other (no common themes, inconsistent behavior, etc.)
• MS Office (2007) makes it hard for me to write the documents I need to create for work.
• Font rendering is poor.

I haven't written yet about program look-and-feel; I'll do that soon. But I have noticed that MS Office acts differently from Notepad, from Media Player, and from the Windows local file browser.

Also, ctrl-backspace is implemented differently just about everywhere - in some cases, it backspaces to the start of the word or field (what I expect) and elsewhere it only backspaces once, and in other cases it inserts a ctrl-backspace character!

Re:What about Linux users moving to Windows?

"MS Office (2007) makes it hard for me to write the documents I need to create for work."

Office 2007 makes it hard for EVERYONE to write the documents they need to create for work. It's very egalitarian in that way.

Everything except 'paste values' in Excel is one extra click away from where-ever you are than was the case in Excel 2003, because you have to click on the menu to get the correct ribbon, then drill down into the tiny little arrow to get the dialog that has what you want.

I actually do most of my word processing in Wordpad, as it lets me write without helpfully formatting everything the Ballmer Way. Then paste the text into the official company memo template, resave, and done.

Fortunately I have no need to use Powerpoint. For this boon I hold my employer in great regard.

Re:Not again

I think the guy's main point was "give it a try, you might just like it". It didn't sound in any way like he was trying to make you a convert, it was more for someone like him who as come to not exactly enjoy their windows experience due to all the bloat of modern day security apps business tend to require.

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But the curses are piling up...

How would you replace Visio?

I ain't a fan of Linux but even I can do more than this dufus.

The only things he told us that he ran on virtualized Windows were Microsoft Visio and the password manager. With a viable alternative to Visio, he might not have been tempted to set up virtualized Windows in the first place. What would you have used to replace Visio?

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>OOo Draw is like creating stick figures, its not even remotely a replacement for visio, any more than MS Paint is a replacement for visio.

Obviously you have not *really* USED OOo Draw's flowcart and diagramming features before; it is certainly no "Visio" but:

1) It is object oriented, and vector based
2) Objects can be labeled, grouped, scaled, etc
3) Objects can be connected with various connector types
4) Objects can be moved while retaining connections to other objects
5) Template objects can be created a

Re:How would you replace Visio?

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 [blogs.com]
http://lautman.net/mark/coo/index.html [lautman.net]

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 [gnome.ru]

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.

Re:Who is this guy?

Not only is he a nobody he offers little unique insight

GASP! Wow, I never thought about it. You're ABSOLUTELY RIGHT, Mr. Anonymous Coward!

Re:What's wrong with Dia

Why did he not replace Visio with Dia?

Because he was running late for his appointment at the hairdresser

Re:Linux will not "get there" until this happens

What to do when a developer distributes a .rpm but not a .deb, or the other way around?

Use Alien [softpedia.com].

alien does not work

I've never heard of anyone ever getting it to work with a real world program.

The problem is that different linux distros are *not* binary compatible with each other. Some of the core libraries like glibc are compatible, but most binaries link a ton of other stuff. You might as well try installing windows programs or osx programs.

Alien cannot fix ABI incompatibilities.

>What to do when a developer distributes a
>.rpm but not a .deb, or the other way around?

Install from source.

On the other hand proprietar

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Or, compile yourself and install via checkinstall [asic-linux.com.mx]. I'd think if you were halfways aware of how to administrate a Linux system, you already know how to compile a tarball. Checkinstall builds the package, .deb or .rpm, and installs it for you. Then, you can add the package to your local repository.

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There are a few reason I don't use Windows on my main box right now, and this hits the biggest of them.

Anyone who has ever tried to install a program in windows knows how much of a pain it can be. They don't have a centralized repository for you to download the package.

On Linux, if you get an installation CD you have a reasonable expectation of connecting to he repository for that distro and getting a wealth of software available from the click of a button. Sometimes you find a package that isn't in t