Constructing a Windows-Less Office

joewakeup writes "This article at CRN analyses why today is the best time to consider building a pure Linux information system, from servers to... desktop. Among all the arguments, one of the arguments is the low cost of Linux offerings compared to Windows based-solutions. Worth a read."

Seen it already.

[Nikau]

A company that I worked for earlier this year used Linux on the majority of its computers, servers included. The company (don't want to reveal too many details about what they do) designs chips for electronics, so there is a lot of CAD work involved for designing.

All but one of the servers they were using ran Linux (the remaining two were running Solaris and NT for software requirements). I worked under the network admin, and during the whole time I was there we never even had a glitch with the network.

All of the engineers were using Linux on their desktops and it worked beautifully. The remaining desktops were running Win98 for the HR, marketing and finance groups because the software they were using required it.

It's not quite the Windows-less office that the article was discussing, but it was pretty close. I've seen the wonders of the Linux-based network and I like it.

Re:Cheaper?

[c13v3rm0nk3y]

Sorry, but if I added up all my time spent fixing broken Windows, and compared it with the cheerful hacking I do on Linux or BSD, Windows would come out far more expensive.

Of course, YMMV, but in our 300-plus node network of Windows boxes, you can always guarantee one thing: they break when you need them most.

Personal computer systems are brittle as hell, and, as far as I'm concerned, running Windows is no guarantee that your day won't be wasted. Perhaps NT decided to blue screen because there wasn't a PS/2 mouse plugged in (true story).

My personal obsvervations indicate to me that it is a fallacy that Windows is easier to maintain. Tell that to our IT guys.

Re:A catch-22.

[Accipiter]

it's about twice as slow as Win2K/XP on the same hardware.

That really depends on what you're running.

I'll probably never hear the end of it if I say this, but I'm going to say it anyway: The most popular window managers for the XWS are also the most bloated.

Have you ever used Nautilus? It is a very pretty interface, but it is slow as all hell on a machine of reasonable specs. (PIII 500 / 256MB) Now take Gnome and Nautilus, plop it on to a system, and yeah... it's not going to perform as well as it should. Granted, the XWS isn't the best performing GUI out there, but the 4.x rewrites are solving a lot of those problems.

I've used Gnome/Nautilus as an example above, because I know less about the newer KDE releases with regard to frendliness, performance, and bloat. If someone would be kind enough to fill me in on how KDE is in these respects, I'd appreciate it.

Anyway. Gnome is a pretty hefty download, and tries to shove all of the crap they think you'll need into the package.

If you set your users up with something like AfterStep [afterstep.org] (which, by the way, can fit on a floppy), ditch the desktop pager, show them how to use Wharf and the Winlist, and install the apps they will need. Configure Wharf to make it easy to get the apps, then smack everything onto a kickstart server or something. Then whenever a new box enters the office, just kickstart the image on to the box and there you go. No configuring, and it would make administration much easier. (You could probably also hack in some cronjobs on the server and the workstations to automatically keep all packages up to date, but that's beyond the scope of this comment.)

This way, they have a fast, clean window environment, the apps they need, and the benefits of Linux.

Wrong

[schon]

"Linux is only cheaper than windows if you don't value your time"

Wrong. Both in the quote, and in your assertion that it's true.

The quote is actually something like "Linux is only free if you don't value your time."

Windows costs much, much more, both in initial purchase price, and in administration costs. (Downtime, fixing problems that shouldn't be there in the first place, etc.)

the real barrier to linux in the workplace...

[Anonymous Coward]

is getting it to work with all the hardware. by the time i got all my stuff configured on my own systems, my head was swimming. hunting down drivers on google and editing config files by hand was very educational, but not particularly speedy. when i imagine doing the same for every machine in even a small organization, my head wants to explode.

of course you could just buy a machine with linux pre-installed, but then you get the choice of a dell latitude model X, or dell latitude model X. and installing linux on a machine that came with windows on it rather mitigates the lower cost argument, since you've already paid for the windows license. or you could buy individual components that have linux support and form a santa's workshop to assemble machines. again, not particularly cheap or speedy.

so, it's not the lack of windows app alternatives that's holding linux back in the workplace, because staroffice, gimp, etc., cover 99% of what your average user would need to do. it's also not the vaunted inertia that everyone makes a big deal out of, because the interfaces for open source alternatives almost completely mimic their windows cousins. believe me, the learning curve is no higher for telling people how to use the OSS version of a spreadsheet program than the windows version itself.

imho, once it's as easy to get linux running on a given machine as it is windows, the major obstacle to moving your business platform from windows to linux will be gone. until then, all the security, stability, and financial arguments in the world are not going to outweigh the perceived headache of having all your tech staff running around for years trying to get the workstations config'd properly.

Re:A catch-22.

[Sj0]

I was using RedHat 6.0, but I don't know what version of KDE that uses. KDE does have a slider in the control panel which lets you turn off eye candy to scale to slower processors.

Re:What about MS Exchange?

[Erore]

Doesnt' Brick Level Backup destroy single instance storage? Meaning, I might have a 100GB .mbd file, but when I Brick Back it up, that might grow to 1000GB because all those single instance messages will get individually saved into each mailbox.

Backing up 1000GB could take a long time. Brick Level Backup is considered a Bad Thing by the gurus of the microsoft.public.exchange.admin list.

You are, however, 100% correct about Deleted Item Retention.

on X

[horster]

I think in general, Linux is more efficient and faster. X however is a different story, and it has nothing to do with the fact that it runs over a network.

X windows sends a refresh event every freaking time a damaged window is revealed. this doesn't make sense, and it means that switching windows and creating menus looks sluggish and cumbersome no matter how fast the hardware.

other window systems like plan9 simply store the overlapping layers and let the server (read the display) do the work rather than sending a refresh event.

now, there is work being done to resolve some of this. Keith Packard is implementing this in X as we speak, but it takes time, X is filled with a lot of cruft from years of being pulled in many directions.

unfortunately, for now - X is just not the best example of Linux's effeciency. so anything that runs on top of it is going to be slow and big, at least compared to windows. then again, the killer feature that windows simply , can't do, and it shops should drool over is the fact that you can run it over a network! so all in all, I think it is a fair trade off, though there could be a better solution, granted.

Re:A catch-22.

[Ivan Raikov]

It's interesting to note that three years ago I bought a Packard Hell with PII 266 MHz and 64 MB RAM, which ran Windows and small applications just fine, but really slowed down when I had MS Word 97, Netscape and an MP3 player running at the same time.

For the past 2.5 years, I've been running Linux on this machine, and I had to upgrade to 128MB this summer, when I decided to finally switch to XFree 4. Before that, the main applications I'm running -- Emacs, Netscape 4.7x, XMMS could co-exist peacefully under XFree 3.3.6 and Linux 2.2.x. So I don't think Windows has a smaller memory footprint than any of the big Linux distributions, contrary to what the astroturfers claim.

Re:A catch-22.

[Otter]

I'll probably never hear the end of it if I say this, but I'm going to say it anyway: The most popular window managers for the XWS are also the most bloated.

Sure, but that's the Catch-22 Fucky Badger (now there's a nick I wasn't expecting to see with a +5) was talking about. My 1200 MHz Athlon flies with WindowMaker and gcc running in a wterm. But that's giving up what's making Linux an alternative to Windows in the eyes of writers like these.

I've used Gnome/Nautilus as an example above, because I know less about the newer KDE releases with regard to frendliness, performance, and bloat. If someone would be kind enough to fill me in on how KDE is in these respects, I'd appreciate it.

The newer releases are definitely getting faster but you still need pretty recent hardware to get snappy performance. And it seems like because of the kdeinit hack, starting apps is considerably slower if you're not using the KDE desktop than if you are. Still, the load KDE imposes comes from the KDE 2.0 architecture. There's no major source of additional bloat in the near future and it's pretty clear how to make everything faster -- drastically improve the way a GNU system loads C++ apps.

At any rate, the best way to get Linux going faster is to buy new RAM. I understand why people don't run and out for new processors or hard drives but RAM is so cheap now $20-30 will liberate you from the misery of hitting your swap.

Re:A catch-22.

[jeffphil]

Linux in most default installations is a server not a desktop OS. That being said, I think if you are comparing W2K Server to Linux then they would be comparable. Sure the code for W2K server is exactly the same as W2K workstation, but the setup and services is the key. Here are some tips:

• • On W2K to make your GUI more responsive, change the environment to favor "Foreground" apps instead of "Background" apps.
  • On linux, renice your X to make foreground apps higher priority. Here's the command I put in my .xinitrc:sudo renice -10 -p `ps -aux | grep "[^grep].*X \(vt\|:0\)" | awk '{print $2;}'`
• • On W2K, turn off services that you don't need
  • Same thing for linux, lots of services get started -- but do you need them running all the time? (e.g. if you're not developing for your db app that day, turn off the DB server)
• For some reason, at least with RedHat, all of the apps and libraries are installed with debugging symbols. Who knows what their reasoning is, but that takes apps longer to load and slower to run. Have you ever run a "Checked Build" NT or W2K that includes all debugging symbols? The same thing happens. What I do is boot to my rescue CD and strip every file on a regular basis (which also frees a ton of HD space). Be careful with this because you have to run ldconfig from the rescue CD before booting back to your default -- and it requires using params to ldconfig to point to the right mounted directories and spitting the ld.so.cache to the right spot. If you do it wrong, you will not be able to boot except to rescue CD.
• Compile a new Kernel (preferably with the new VM) and take out all of the unneccesary items and compile as much as possible into the kernel instead of modules.

I'm sure there are a hundred others, but these seem to do the most for me with least effort.

Sun pushing Linux?

[non-poster]

"What's more, many potential clients simply haven't recognized Linux as a viable platform. But that is beginning to change. With major vendors such as IBM and Sun Microsystems touting Linux's capabilities, solution providers now should be able to demonstrate the platform's practicality to customers."

I don't remember hearing Sun push Linux more than Solaris. I actually thought that Sun was more interested in selling it's own Unix products...

Re:What about MS Exchange?

[Chang]

Brick level backup doesn't destroy single instance storage until you restore something. Then a new instance is created for the restored items.

Re:No *nix AutoCAD?

[Zapdos]

In less then 5 minutes I find.

Qcad http://www.ribbonsoft.com/index.php3
CYCAS CAD http://www.cycas.de/
Jcad http://jcad.gnuchina.org/
OCTREE-CAD http://www.octree.de/
VariCAD http://www.varicad.com/index1.php

Given: Openoffice Impress, kpresenter

[Moritz Moeller - Her]

Both OpenOffice Impress and kpresenter are stable mature applications that can do most things a rational person would ever expect in a presentation.

So if you write
" There's no open-source software replacement for PowerPoint."
you are right. There is not one, there are TWO GPL apps to replace powerpoint.

Now if I look at the fact that SVG is a vector format (not a presentation format) and the fact that openoffice641 opens all ridiculous powerpoint stuff I get mailed by people, I think you should look harder before you propoese new projects to other people.

See http://www.openoffice.org and http://www.koffice.org for the apps.

Re:File compatibility

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, so I should use Microsoft Office because the other company uses it. Isn't that the same as saying you cannot dictate what they use? So, what about all those law firms that use Wordperfect? I guess they are just going out of business left and right because they can't communicate with their clients running Microsoft office.

Why don't use address the real issue of file compatibility? Microsoft doesn't really want anyone to have true file compatibility with their products.

As to your final comment. Pure BS. StarOffice works fine on my RedHat 7.2 K6-III 400 MHz 256MB box. So what if it sucks up 75MB of ram to run, if the OS is stable and the app is stable it can use 200 MB for all I care.

The community isn't huge but it's definitely there

[CoughDropAddict]

I work in an electronic music studio. I'd love to use Linux, but the apps just aren't there.
The fact that there's almost no development community addressing this potentially enormous market amazes me to no end.

On the linux-audio-dev [linuxaudiodev.org] mailing list, many things are discussed and software developed such as Ardour [sourceforge.net], digital audio workstation software for Linux, JACK [sourceforge.net] (JACK Audio Connection Kit), a low-latency infrastructure for connecting audio applications, and several [sourceforge.net] wave [sourceforge.net] editors [stanford.edu]. Dave Phillips maintains a list of Linux sound applications [condorow.net]--many are not that advanced but some are.

Work in this area is progressing, and many smart people are involved. In particular, Paul Barton-Davis, author of Ardour and the main force behind JACK, seems to be pursuing commercial possibilities of selling linux-based sound workstations under a company named Linux Audio Systems [op.net]. You can read Paul's slashdot comments [slashdot.org] to see some of his opinions on the situation of Linux audio.

Re:Linux installation experience

[kcbrown]

And the system (now an Tbird-1.33) is still slower than Windows 2K (ex., the mouse gets jerky when my apps thrash the disk).

The mouse jerkiness probably happens because your system isn't using DMA to talk to the disks.

This is easy to fix from the command line (until the next reboot) but really should be something that the OS installer just gets right the first time.

To turn on DMA to your hard drive, do this as root:

# hdparm -d 1 /dev/hda

Now, that presupposes that your hard drive is /dev/hda. The following command, while rather a bit more complicated, will turn DMA on all of your currently mounted drives:

# hdparm -d 1 `df | awk '{print $1}' | grep '^/dev/hd' | sed 's/[0-9][0-9]*$//' | sort -u`

A brief explanation of the latter command:

1. The output of the command between the backticks is substituted for the backticked portion of the command. The command between the backticks does the following:
   1. df gets a list of all of the filesystems that are currently mounted. The output consists of the device name, the size of the device, the amount of space used on it, the amount of free space, the percentage of space used, and where the device is mounted. This output is handed to...
   2. awk, which gives us the contents of the first column (hence the $1) and hands that to...
   3. grep, which gives us only those entries that begin with /dev/hd, which are IDE hard drives, and hands it to...
   4. sed, which removes any trailing numbers from the input it was handed. So now /dev/hda3 becomes /dev/hda. Anyway, the output is then handed to...
   5. sort, which has a -u option which tells it to produce only unique results. So if the input consists of multiple lines that are /dev/hda, sort will give us only one such line.

   Now, the output from this is in the form of a list of hard disk device specifiers, which are the devices we want to turn on DMA to.

2. hdparm -d 1 turns on DMA to the devices that are listed. The command in the backticks gave us those devices.