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Linux Business IBM Software Linux

IBM Desktop Linux Pledge, One Year Later 589

Posted by timothy from the work-in-progress dept.
Blue writes "It's been more than a year since the bold announcement from IBM that they planned on dumping Windows for Linux throughout the company. InfoWorld is reporting that not all is well with IBM's desktop Linux push. What went wrong?"
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IBM Desktop Linux Pledge, One Year Later More

IBM Desktop Linux Pledge, One Year Later

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  • IBM wrote a redbook on the topic (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Dancin_Santa ( 265275 ) <DancinSanta@gmail.com> on Tuesday January 25, 2005 @09:40PM (#11475804) Journal
    The redbook is about 200 pages, but it talks mostly about the migration of desktops by discussing server administration techniques rather than focusing on enabling users to upgrade painlessly.

    Linux (nay, any OS) migration is tough work for the administrators *and* the users whom it affects.

    It's not a surprise that they weren't able to do it.

  • I know I know!! (Score:3, Funny)

    by rainman_bc ( 735332 ) on Tuesday January 25, 2005 @09:40PM (#11475806)
    IBM Users have been complaining they cannot install those fabulous search toolbars they've come to enjoy on their windowz boxen!

    =D

  • How Disappointing (Score:5, Insightful)

    by bigtallmofo ( 695287 ) on Tuesday January 25, 2005 @09:42PM (#11475827)
    If IBM of all companies is developing their internal applications to require Internet-Explorer dependent technologies like ActiveX... What does this say about their commitment to Linux?

    Hopefully this is just a case of a huge company's left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing. But still, this is very disappointing.

    • Re:How Disappointing (Score:4, Insightful)

      by fm6 ( 162816 ) on Tuesday January 25, 2005 @09:59PM (#11475959) Homepage Journal
      It's not so much right hand not communicating with left hand. The Linux mandate came from the very top, and all hands are supposed to say, "Sir! Yes Sir!" But many hands (this metaphor is out of control, but you know what I mean) resisted, and either managment lacked the will to overcome resistance or (and this is my guess) couldn't face the necessary disruption that a total retooling would cause.
      • Or maybe retooling actually takes time, and they are in the progress of retooling. IBM is a very large company. The fact that they have not migrated 100% to Linux yet does not surprise me at all. I think they just gave a grossly overzealous estimate of when they could have this done.

        • Re:How Disappointing (Score:3, Informative)

          by hbo ( 62590 ) *
          Time and money.

          In a company the size of IBM, with many, many years of technology legacy, a conversion to any set of standards, open, closed or half ajar is bound to be fabulously expensive. I mean, there are still app front-ends running on the mainframes, although I haven't had to use many since I started two years ago. Not Firefox, not IE, tn3270 . 8)

    • Re:How Disappointing (Score:5, Informative)

      by Greyfox ( 87712 ) on Tuesday January 25, 2005 @10:11PM (#11476049) Homepage Journal
      I never saw any ActiveX components in the company. Mind you, I was a contractor and didn't have to access the assorted things that the regulars had to use. However, the internal development platform seems to be either Lotus Notes or Websphere/JSP. A couple of the more necessary apps were implemented in Java and ran just fine on Linux.

      Lotus Notes seems to be by far the biggest thorn in everyone's side. While it does run(ish) on Wine, most people who would be adopting Linux early prefer to handle their E-Mail themselves, and no one could ever convince IT to enable the imap servers on the Notes servers.

      The thing no one seems to understand about IBM is that they tend to work in 5 year cycles. All the platform planning that's going on now won't be deployed for 4 or 5 more years. That means that the Linux push, which is only a year or two old, still has some time to go before it reaches maturity. Getting a company of 200,000+ people to change course is not a quick process. I would not be surprised to see a huge deployment of Linux company-wide in about 3 years. They'll probably still be running Notes using Wine then, though.

    • Re:How Disappointing (Score:3, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Actually, my personal experience in running Linux exclusively at IBM is different. I haven't had any issues running Firefox for well over a year for all of my internal intranet stuff (POs, boss reviews, web classes, web certification, training, etc.).

      The problem is that as far as I can tell, none (or very few) of the stand-alone apps I use* have been ported to Linux. I run Notes on Wine (which is fine -- it's slower but not enough to be a problem on my work machine, a 1.8 Ghz PC), but occasionally have t

    • Re:How Disappointing (Score:3, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      If IBM of all companies is developing their internal applications to require Internet-Explorer dependent technologies like ActiveX... What does this say about their commitment to Linux?

      Is developing? Nope.

      How about legacy apps and small internal projects that grew beyond their original scope? Some of it might be IE-only, but most of the intranet works fine with Firefox -- I use it every day. The only problems I have are with applets and that's because I don't want to install Sun's JVM. When I hit an appl

    • Re:How Disappointing (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Sloppy ( 14984 ) * on Tuesday January 25, 2005 @10:35PM (#11476246) Homepage Journal
      If IBM of all companies is developing their internal applications to require Internet-Explorer dependent technologies like ActiveX... What does this say about their commitment to Linux?
      Forget that, what does it say about their overall sanity? Linux isn't the only platform that ActiveX doesn't run on -- it hardly runs on anything at all. They could have been trying to upgrade to MacOS or BSD or (heh) AIX or anything, and they would have trouble. They could have tried to eat their own dog food on hardware, by say, switching to PPC 970 machines or something like that, and even if they got a MS Windows port to that hardware, the ActiveX crap would have given them grief. When you lock yourself into this kind of shit, you're saying No to all possible futures, where Linux is just one little face in the crowd.

      The really sad thing is that ActiveX has only been around about 10 years. It's not like this used to be a good idea that fell out of fashion, but then it was too late because they were trapped in a legacy -- it was always dumb, from day 1. This story isn't about Linux, it's about how IBM fucked themselves by not thinking. It's about how they didn't fire some idiot in time to prevent long-lasting damage.

      • Re:How Disappointing (Score:5, Insightful)

        by fm6 ( 162816 ) on Wednesday January 26, 2005 @01:13AM (#11477317) Homepage Journal
        Linux isn't the only platform that ActiveX doesn't run on -- it hardly runs on anything at all.
        Except that "hardly anything" is 95% of the users!
        This story isn't about Linux, it's about how IBM fucked themselves by not thinking.
        Sure, they've done stupid shit in the past. Before Gerstner, upper management even refused to use email. But that's kind of beside the point. We're all stuck with an overdependence of Microsoft products. IBM, at least, is trying to make the change. And the difficulty of doing that is what we should focus on, not pointing fingers for past mistakes.

    • Re:How Disappointing (Score:4, Insightful)

      by johnlcallaway ( 165670 ) on Tuesday January 25, 2005 @11:20PM (#11476569)
      Writing web pages for specific browsers is asking for problems. Writing simple web pages, and being able to not have to use all the javascript/ active-X/ embedded objects/ flash the marketing department wanted meant the pages loaded fast and always worked. (by flash I don't mean Macromedia, I man snazzle, pop, eye-candy.)

      Our site didn't have flashy menus that rolled down or snazzy Macromedia flash presentations, but they did what they were supposed to do cleanly, efficiently, and with far less user support and maintenance headaches than the fancy ones. All the glitz and glammer was limited to animated gifs and well selected colors schemes. I have seen web pages that were over 100K of text because of all the javascript and css included in them, pages that are more code than content.

      Javascript can be a great tool to help a user (calendar pop-ups, form field validation, etc.), but does one really need all the overhead for roll-over buttons and menus when a well designed navigation scheme would eliminate it? It's one thing to add a few lines of code to a drop-down box to auto-load the next page, it's another to do it at the expense of taking off the submit button (my personal pet peeve).

      My opinion is that using the fancy features is driven by lack of creativity or by marketing types that are focused on sales rather than usage. It's easy to use fancy menus to make navigation easy, it's a lot tougher to design a web site so that the fewest clicks get you to the most used pages. Flash on a movie trailer site?? Go ahead, you want gimmicks there. Flash on a data entry site, I don't think so.

      All the fancy gimmicks and such are cool the first time, but for the users that actually use a web site and come back often, they fade into the background about the third time and they just want to get work done.

  • Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Tuesday January 25, 2005 @09:43PM (#11475834)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • Domino client won't run. Neither is a Sametime client available. Both were in heavy use in IBM Global Services, at least.

      That's assuming that IBM intends to keep up development of Domino; rumors have circulated for a while that there isn't going to be a Domino 7 (6.5.x is the latest). I've also gotten the impression from other IBM workers that Domino and Notes are as hated at IBM as they are everywhere else in the world; and Domino is definetely a monolithic, ugly beast. Sametime is perhaps its one redeem

    • Sametime (Score:4, Informative)

      by tjwhaynes ( 114792 ) on Tuesday January 25, 2005 @10:13PM (#11476059)

      I can honestly say that a lot would have to be done with their own internal applications to bring them to Linux. Domino client won't run. Neither is a Sametime client available. Both were in heavy use in IBM Global Services, at least.

      There are several linux Sametime clients available, ranging from Java to the Gaim meanwhile plugin. So that is not a problem (I run a different internal client which I find is superior to the Windows client).

      The Windows Lotus Notes client runs fine on standard WINE (as in available from www.winehq.com) and internally packaged versions are available for employees. That is not a problem either - indeed I believe that the almost flawless execution of the windows client running on WINE has removed any immediate need to port the client to Linux natively.

      As I still work for IBM, I see active communities of employees moving to Linux. I don't believe that the original pledge said that everyone would instantaneously move to Linux - for the most part, its a quiet revolution for us developers. I can't speak for other parts of the company. I do know that DB2 UDB continues to spread to more and more Linux platforms (x86, x86_64, IA64, PPC, z/OS) and that is clearly an area where IBM is pushing hard for complete coverage. Both my key productivity machines are 100% linux and I do not have to use Windows unless I am debugging Windows problems.

      Cheers,
      Toby Haynes

    • Re:having worked for IBM (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Amiga Trombone ( 592952 ) on Tuesday January 25, 2005 @10:36PM (#11476258)
      I can honestly say that a lot would have to be done with their own internal applications to bring them to Linux. Domino client won't run. Neither is a Sametime client available. Both were in heavy use in IBM Global Services, at least.

      I don't understand the unwillingness to port these two desktop pieces (both being on Linux would be handy where I am now), but between that and the web apps, they have a lot of work ahead if they want to fulfill a Linux desktop.

      When the original story was posted about a year ago I got into a long discussion with another IBMer about why this just wasn't gonna fly. Not only are there not suitable versions of all of IBM's internal applications available, if you work in Global Services at a customer site, chances are pretty good that the customer is going to be using application that you can't easily replace, either.

      Anyway, things have changed a little since the original initiative. For one, IBM no longer owns a desktop PC company, and has little incentive for pushing Intel-based Linux boxes on the desktop anymore.

      And considering that these days, a Macintosh has more IBM parts in it than most so-called "IBM compatibles", you can't help but wonder if that might be The Next Big Thing they choose to push. It's certainly a friendlier desktop, it's got MS Office (and IBM has a licensing arrangement for the Mac version as well as Windows) and a Notes client available for it, and if worse comes to worse, you can run your Windows software on Virtual PC (which they also have a licensing arrangement for). Considering IBM has nothing to gain by pushing Intel desktops anymore, you can only wonder what might be in the works behind the scenes.

  • what went wrong? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by alizard ( 107678 ) <alizard&ecis,com> on Tuesday January 25, 2005 @09:45PM (#11475842) Homepage
    The Open Source development community hasn't solved the usability problems, particularly software and hardware installation.

    Yum and apt-get are largely superior software installation solutions to anything MS has, why isn't the last step in releasing a new software package to put it on the yum / apt-get / urpmi repositories?

    Why hasn't a method for using Windows installation information directly been found for scanners and printers?

    IMHO, this is in part because the community is still in denial that this problem exists.

    While Linux is a superior server solution, IBM's best desktop move would probably be remarketing the Mac-mini, which is a *nix environment on which even end users can install hardware and software NOW, not hopefully next year.

    • Re:what went wrong? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Stevyn ( 691306 ) on Tuesday January 25, 2005 @09:53PM (#11475919)
      Well, the article talked about problems of trying to convert people used to IE and Lotus over to a platform that doesn't run that software well.

      What they should have done first is switch everyone over to firefox/mozilla and find an alternative to lotus that runs on windows and linux. Then after people are comfortable with that, try to switch to linux.

      I think a switch of this magnitude must be done slowly, or else tech support isn't going to know what to do or be able to handle the "where's my icon" problems for tens of thousands of people.

      • Re:what went wrong? (Score:3, Insightful)

        by avalys ( 221114 ) *
        find an alternative to lotus that runs on windows and linux
        What are you, nuts? Do you know who makes Lotus?
        • Hence, why didn't IBM port it?

        • Re:what went wrong? (Score:3, Interesting)

          by Stevyn ( 691306 )
          I'm aware that IBM makes lotus. I have no idea the costs or time to port it to linux, but my point was IBM would have been better off if they looked at that more closely before trying to switch to linux.

          A bonus, if successful, would be to sell that to other companies as part of a way for them to help in their linux migration. It would set a good example that their customers can trust the software works well because IBM themselves use it. Again, I don't want to assume anything and I don't want to say IBM

    • Re:what went wrong? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by El Gordo Motoneta ( 821753 ) on Tuesday January 25, 2005 @10:00PM (#11475964)
      Have you even read the article?

      Do you REALLY believe that a *corporate desktop* computer
      needs to "easily install software" or "configure printers"?

      I, for one, would cut off your fingers if i caught you installing
      crap on one of my company's workstations.

      Having seen more than one medium-sized company deploy desktops,
      I'm positive that all computers are already configured to run
      anything they need to run and print anywhere they need to print
      *before* they are presented to the user.

      No. The problem is (as you might have learned if you R the FA)
      is at the application level. They are running into problem with
      web-based applications that were geared towards Internet Explorer.
      They are running applications on Wine (which they list as a
      temporary workaround themselves).

      So, you are right in that there are problems yet to be fixed,
      but completely failed to put your finger on what it is that needs
      fixing.

    • The Open Source development community hasn't solved the usability problems, particularly software and hardware installation.

      This is not a problem in large companies, because they have full-time professional IT staff who can install and configure Linux.

      Yum and apt-get are largely superior software installation solutions to anything MS has, why isn't the last step in releasing a new software package to put it on the yum / apt-get / urpmi repositories?

      Because building and testing packages for every Linux
    • Running scanner TWAIN drivers under Linux is a reasonable job for Wine. Of course, most of them are garbage. I have never used even a microsoft application that crashes as much as even ostensibly high-quality scanner drivers, such as those from umax, canon, and hp. (I do love my Canon lide scanner, though.) It's probably pretty hard to get most of them to work under any circumstances :P Also, you would have to be able to load actual windows drivers for USB scanners, although I imagine that emulating enough
  • FTA:

    users may experience problems running IBM's internal Web applications. Most of those applications are written for the Internet Explorer browser, which has not been ported to Linux. Internet Explorer is the only browser supported by IBM's internal support desk, according to another IBMer.

    "If you don't use Internet Explorer, you might not get very far with them helping you with the problem," he said.

    IBM has lots of friends and goodwill here. All they have to do is "ask slashdot" :-)

  • IE!!!??? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by sensate_mass ( 171138 ) on Tuesday January 25, 2005 @09:47PM (#11475858)
    OMFG. The only thing they use is IE. That's the only thing their help desk is, uh, helpful with. I'm sure that's not where all their problems are coming from, but it speaks of an organization that isn't at all agile.

    I love a lot of the things that IBM does and comes up with, but if your organization isn't flexible enough to work with more than one browser, you've got some serious problems.

    Sounds like the Microsoft Lifetime Employment Program has deep roots at IBM.

  • People don't fear change (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Kipsaysso ( 828105 ) on Tuesday January 25, 2005 @09:48PM (#11475871) Homepage Journal
    People fear loss. What is stopping people from making the switch is the fear of losing the control of their computer that they have taken so very long to cultivate. Not to mention all the internal documents that probably have been created over the last few years using the .doc extention. Who wants to go through years of porting old files?
    • But a little bird tells me that IBM have created an OpenOffice filter which imports MSWord files absolutely perfectly. Without doubt IBM could set up a server to do the conversion of the .doc files everybody has on their PCs. The same bird tells that they are terrified of releasing the filter, because the full flight of Redmond leagles would come screaming out of their eyrie. One war at a time is sufficient to keep any organization on its toes.
  • Hmm... computer is an IBM Netvista. Thats pretty much expected.

    Now for the OS... Windows XP Professional. Damnit.
  • Two of the drawbacks mentioned were having to run Lotus Notes under Wine and IBM Web services only supporting IE. But Novell has a Groupwise client that runs very nicely under Linux and most of their recent web apps work well with Mozilla and Firefox under both Windows and Linux. They also have NetWare file services running on Linux (I think its in open beta now). There is a good open source NCP client as well as rumours of an official Novell client for Linux.

  • Complex Problems...... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by tdhillman ( 839276 ) * on Tuesday January 25, 2005 @09:50PM (#11475885)
    Complex problems have complex answers- more complex than IBM is going to answer quickly.

    Deployment of open source software is one thing, success at doing so is another. Even for IBM, the challenge is daunting. The number of individuals that just don't get the "why" of open source is simply overwhelming.

    There is too much hype surrounding Linux- we want the answer too fast. Windows dominates, and knocking it off its tower its no small task.

    Only when there is a more facile solution than Windows will the tower be toppled. But topple it will.

  • All is not lost! (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Wayne247 ( 183933 ) <slashdot@laurent.ca> on Tuesday January 25, 2005 @09:50PM (#11475886) Homepage
    IBM probably just miscalculated the complexity of such a project. Like the article states, a good portion of the problem is not "windows vs linux" itself, it'S that they've written quite a bunch of essential web based apps that run, possibly, as ActiveX components in IE.

    If such is the case, they might want to take a look at the Mozilla ActiveX project, which might help them fix their IE modules to work in Mozilla, while they rewrite it with something better than ActiveX (like, Java possibly).

    Replacing Windows with Linux was a very ambitious idea to begin with; hats off to IBM for having set themselves such a high goal, instead of just trailing with the crowd and keeping windows boxes forever.

    After all, isn't a big part of the reason why corporations keep windows is because it's just less painful than to actually *work* on a migration to anything else? Sure the windows problems are huge, but companies like to see short term. And in the short term, fixing windows is easier. IBM is seeing long-term.

    Let them the time to migrate what they didn't really think of when they called the project, and then we'll see.
  • The two biggest issues holding back desktop Linux migrations are the compatability with MS-proprietary formats: MS Office docs (.doc, .xls, .ppt, etc) and IE's slightly non-standard take on HTML. Linux doesn't offer very good compatability.

    I run into this all the time at work: OO does a pretty good job of opening simple documents, but has problems with those containing embedded tables, hyperlinks, custom header/footer, etc. How many legacy documents in the IBM repositories contain complex format MS Off

  • Kaplan (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Omniscientist ( 806841 ) * <matt@nOspAm.badecho.com> on Tuesday January 25, 2005 @09:53PM (#11475913) Homepage
    "There are people using Linux and nobody is telling them to stop," she [Nancy Kaplan] said.

    She almost sounds a little dismayed, perhaps even slightly frightened, by that fact.

  • Webapps suck. Burn them all.

  • Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Tuesday January 25, 2005 @09:57PM (#11475947)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Linux is popular but Windows rules (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    In my little corner of IBM the push for Linux on the desktop is slim to non-existant. It's pretty much limited to the techies who already have a penchant for Linux and most of those who have converted spend a big part of their day in a Windows vmware image. I don't even run Linux on my ThinkPad and I'm a Linux certified geek!

    Linux gets tons of lip service, no doubt, and is praised as a server OS. Some of the internal tools run on Linux but much of the intranet (i.e. the expense report tool, the travel t

  • Emulator (Score:3, Interesting)

    by spac3manspiff ( 839454 ) <spac3manspiff@gmail.com> on Tuesday January 25, 2005 @09:59PM (#11475958) Journal
    the company's internal use of the open-source Windows operating system emulator did not translate into a ringing endorsement...

    In other new, WINE is now an emulator dispite its name.

  • Maybe 'cause they can't read Slashdot (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Pedrito ( 94783 ) on Tuesday January 25, 2005 @10:01PM (#11475977)
    Here I am using Firefox to TRY to read the comments of other posters, but the comments bleed over into the sections list and comment separator bars are partway over the text above and below and I can't tell what people wrote.

    I would think that Slashdot, being such an open-source advocate, would at least make their page render properly with the most popular open source browser.

    But if Slashdot can't be bothered to do it to their page, which is their entire business, how can people expect IBM to do their web-based internal help support which isn't really a source of income for them?
  • ... put his money where his mouth is. If he wants open standards based computing, then he had better start mandating that all web applications are developed so that all relevant browsers can use them.

    Converting everything would take forever, but they ahve to start with the new stuff and work backwards. They shouldn't be using Internet Explorer anyway... companies don't have time or money to dick around with spyware-bloated computers.

    It's just a matter of time for them, but it has to come from the top, and

    • Internal standards (Score:5, Insightful)

      by tjwhaynes ( 114792 ) on Tuesday January 25, 2005 @10:17PM (#11476099)
      If he wants open standards based computing, then he had better start mandating that all web applications are developed so that all relevant browsers can use them.

      Actually thats precisely what the internal standards do say. I find that waving them under the nose of the respective developer is quite instructive. And occassionally successful - several web apps which used to be IE only work seamlessly under Firefox/Mozilla these days. The number of web apps which are IE-only is shrinking fast.

      Cheers,
      Toby Haynes

  • Three main inhibitors... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by shanen ( 462549 ) on Tuesday January 25, 2005 @10:09PM (#11476036) Homepage Journal
    First the disclaimer. I'm not IBM, but just sub of a sub. However, my perspective is that there are three major drags.

    I think the most important resisting factor is actually the customers. As much as IBM likes to lead, they can't leave the customers behind, and the customers are mostly locked into Microsoft's "tender" embrace. A lot of that could be addressed alternatives that use compatible file formats, but even there Microsoft has a high measure of control.

    The drag of support problems has already been mentioned. That actually involves several parts. The easier part creating is installable versions of various programs and the OS itself. The real problem there is that Linux is not so monolithic, whereas defining a set of "official" software is essentially a monolithic task. The other side is help desk support, and IMO no one has that down pat for Linux.

    Drag #3 is the migration path. I think there has to be an overlap period, but how to do that is tricky. Give people two machines? Use something like VMware?

  • In other words, it's the same old IBM! (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anita Coney ( 648748 ) on Tuesday January 25, 2005 @10:11PM (#11476044) Homepage
    Over a decade ago IBM was hyping its OS/2. However, IBM's desktop sales department refused to sell OS/2 preloaded and went with Windows.

    Now IBM is hyping Linux, but IBM's support and web development groups are sticking with Windows.

    IBM refused to make a choice with OS/2 and lost big times. It's going to have to make a choice with Linux. Let's hope the powers that be at IBM chose wisely.

  • Same old song. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Garg ( 35772 ) on Tuesday January 25, 2005 @10:36PM (#11476256) Homepage
    In 1994, I was working for a hospital trying to deploy OS/2. We'd had some success (most notably with the medical library), but we had challenges too.

    In particular, there was a DOS-based package that we needed the workstations to access. OS/2 supposedly ran DOS apps as well as Windows, but this one froze up randomly. It was written in dBase or FoxPro, one of those database/language platforms.

    The vendor (basically, the guy who wrote the code with a few people as a support staff) practically bent over backward trying to get it to work. He offered to give IBM the source code, if they would only sign a non-disclosure agreement. Remember, at this time nobody showed source for a commercial product; it was like giving away the crown jewels.

    And IBM wouldn't do it.

    That was the straw that broke the camel's back. OS/2 hung on for a while there, but the day the IBM rep called me and said they would make no further effort to get the package to work, its fate was sealed.

    The problem was, while IBM promoted OS/2 publicly, there were all sorts of people there who knew Windows, liked Windows, and undercut OS/2 at every opportunity (in typical passive-aggressive fashion). Maybe they were Windows experts and didn't want to learn new things. Maybe they thought Windows looked better on their resume. Maybe they used OS/2 1.0 and never got over their initial negative reaction. But whatever the reason, corporate fiat couldn't win the hearts and minds of a lot of their employees. The same thing may be happening here. (They only support IE? WTF?!!)

    I wish IBM well in their Linux effort. Maybe they'll eventually pull it off. But it's gonna take more than a decree from on high.

    Garg

  • Tried to drink the blue koolaid… (Score:3, Interesting)

    by (H)elix1 ( 231155 ) <slashdot.helix@nOSPaM.gmail.com> on Tuesday January 25, 2005 @10:59PM (#11476409) Homepage Journal
    Well, I spend a lot of quality time with Linux and a chuck of the IBM stack, so I tried to move over about a year or so ago.

    Learned more about the innards of Linux than I ever cared to trying to get the OS to work on one of the higher end IBM thinkpads. SuSE SLES 8, more or less the standard for the WebSphere stack I work with, had a kernel that did not see the Ethernet port and the video was a mess. Due to a how-to and forum support on the Gentoo side, it was the first distro I got the xwindows and the wifi card working on! With a bruised forehead and a better understanding I went back to SuSE and got it to work as well on another HDD. Life was good. Problem was I suck as an installer, and getting the base to work (because I don't know the underlying details) was far worse (for me) than the development I was trying to do on it.

    Eventually I tried the new SuSE Enterprise 9 (and desktop version) with the new 2.6 kernel. OS worked like a charm - many of the things I googled and dug through forums to figure out 'just worked'. Even Gentoo packaged up the hard bits to update. Unfortunately, it would seem that DB2 needed tweaking to get up and running, WebSphere was far from stable, and WSAD was a wreck. Same when I updated the Gentoo drive as well. With an extra six months, more config tricks, and a few helpful service packs it sort of works. This is my daily driver, however, so I reverted back to the older kernel.

    So to sum up - it took about three months to get the hardware working, about the same to get the apps working, and a lot of work to do in between where I really should not have messed around with the system. My boss would die if he knew how much time I spent coding versus trying to just get the app server to install. I know the *nix gurus out there would laugh at my bonehead moves trying to get 1400x1050 to work (and then 3d acceleration), but I'm the type who had to hit the man pages to add users! So much easier today now that the hardware is a bit more mainstream. I'd say it was a year too early if they were gunning for the unwashed masses (like me).

    • Re:Tried to drink the blue koolaid… (Score:4, Insightful)

      by dedazo ( 737510 ) on Tuesday January 25, 2005 @11:10PM (#11476503) Journal
      We recently had one of our in-house developers set up a Linux workstation (Debian unstable) to test a PHP/MySQL application that was primarily developed for Windows. He was gung-ho at first, and then as the weeks passed and no updates to the bug tracker were made I went to talk to him. He was frustrated beyond belief. He couldn't get Apache to work quite right and he was having a lot of problems getting MySQL to behave, never mind the fact that he had to use a plain text editor to work. CVS (running locally in his box) was a mess.

      Instead of fixing things for him I showed him what the problems were to the best of my ability - I'm a 6-year Linux "power user" if you will but far from an expert, so the rest of the stuff we just Googled. Eventually he got to the point where he was coding, doing his daily check-in and builds and demoing the app, which is working pretty well now. His changes are then backported to the main Windows trunk to ensure everything works. We're thinking of also supporting BSD at this point.

      It just takes time. Even the most savvy PC users will have problems. I can't believe IBM would be that different, especially when trying to move their less technical folks to a brand new environment. Just give them time.

  • Some truths... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by agraupe ( 769778 ) on Tuesday January 25, 2005 @11:09PM (#11476495) Journal
    This may seem like a troll, but it is truly not intended as such.

    First of all, I'm a Linux user and have been for some time. I run a Gentoo box, and am fairly comfortable with all system administration tasks. I have tried out many Linux distros, as well as the BSDs. I also have a full time Windows box (I use "second-generation" hardware for my linux box) for running games. I like Linux, and I use it as my main system. But even I, a vocal supporter of Linux, cannot overlook that there are some flaws. I know that when I attach a new piece of hardware, there will likely be some googling for a howto or drivers, or a kernel recompile. I know that a lot of programs that Windows users can take for granted (like Skype) can be a day's work to have working correctly on Linux. Now, I put up with it because it is free, stable, and has an excellent variety of software. I am sure that the more user-friendly distros, like suse and mandrake, or fedora, have many problems solved. In my mind, these distros are giving up some of what I like about Linux. I guess it all boils down to what level of control do you want, and what kind of user-friendliness do you need. Maybe I'm missing something, but no OS or distro has both on the desktop.

  • Its not the corporate apps (Score:4, Interesting)

    by RhettLivingston ( 544140 ) on Tuesday January 25, 2005 @11:30PM (#11476646) Journal
    that keep big technical corporations from moving. Its the 1000s of little apps written by engineers and departments to do very local, very special little tasks. It takes years to move all of these because the corporate big wigs will never recognize the problem and realize that they need to send 80% of the transition funding to the people that wrote the invisible 80%+ of the applications. If they were a non-technical company where every geek didn't have their own set of apps that needed porting, the transition would actually be easier.
  • Some people say that the linux desktop will never happen. And to be honest, sometimes, when the latest version of Gnome or KDE comes about and screws everything up, I almost agree with them.

    But just take a look at OSX. Unix, that Mac users can use!? Surely you're joking Mr Jobs. But he's not.

    What's the difference here? Why is apple able to make a usable gui interface for unix, and yet, after years of development Gnome and KDE have not? Which is not to say that advances haven't been made. Far from it. Linux is more usable now than ever. But it still isn't as usable as it could be. Linus is not yet at the stage where developers can sit back and say "Ahhh! Now there's a usable system". Dispite all efforts Aunt Tillie still cannot use Linux! Why is this? What is the reason for Linux's failure and OSx's success. This question needs to be addressed.

    If I had to guess, I'd say it's that Microsoft and Apple take a wholistic view of the OS and Gui, changing fundamental configurations in the OS layer to better facilitate GUI use and administration. Whereas linux window managers are just that. They must change themselves to fit the linux OS paradigms, which may not fit so well to the GUI paradigm. Gnome and KDE cannot change fundamental aspects of the OS and so must work around them, where as Microsoft and Apple can change one to fit the other. Well, that's my best guess anyway.

  • Have been recently at IBM (Score:3, Interesting)

    by MemoryDragon ( 544441 ) on Wednesday January 26, 2005 @03:00AM (#11477781)
    at a presentation.... what struck me was that they used Windows left and right on the clients... I still had the announcement in mind...

  • It was not a pledge... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by rdean400 ( 322321 ) on Wednesday January 26, 2005 @04:10AM (#11478033)
    Palmisano's challenge to the corporation was to be technically capable to switch to all-Linux on the IBM corporate desktop, not to actually do it. That's a big difference.

  • M$ Owns The Business Desktop (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Naum ( 166466 ) on Wednesday January 26, 2005 @10:35AM (#11479660) Homepage Journal
    And this is not likely to change, no matter how many public pronouncements from IBM executives. Ironically, some issues that would preclude OS transformation in the workplace are indeed no longer valid restraints -- for instance, the notion of being able to run the same OS at home as at the office, considering that many corporate environments only permit (officially) company owned (or leased) machines to connect to the network. Basically, in much of the corporate world, to do work you must work from a box provided by your work. That takes care of the argument that you need to have the same setup as you do at work...

    However, the past 10 years has seen M$ firmly implant itself in the corporate desktop suite and it would take the next ten years to dislodge it. Not just the M$ Office applications (REAL programmers don't use spreadsheets or even a word processor...), which for many users, there is no suitable substitute -- I'm looking at the parade upon parade of dorky, kludgy, awkward third party Windows applications that now have pervade the business environment, both in IT and general business users. Another strong irony is that a good bit of this stuff is now Java based, which was touted as "write-once, run anywhere" but totally dependent on Windows to run. Either via custom Windows desktop client software, or piggybacked on MSIE or through proprietary database requirements that alternative OS usage was never ever factored in by the vendor selling. Go stroll through the software suite of any large corporation (most all of which are IBM clients) and it's heavily laden with gooberish offerings totally reliant on the Windows platform. Even the server software will have frontends unusable without IE and/or Windows.

    Even if the software and hardware fulfilled the bill of need for business usage, users would still resent and resist change from familiar work patterns. This will always occur, even if the change is an obvious beneficial move of immense proportions. To a business user, even those computer savvy, it's a learning challenge hoisted on top of an already filled worklog platter. A mandate has to come down from above, that a change has been blessed and sanctioned, and that there is no choice in the deal.

    In my view, most firms would profit hugely from a switch, at least those entities not dependent upon special software not available in alternative OS (including Mac OS X along with Linux) -- more stable, less virus/malware/spyware concerns, less employee "goofing off" factor (most games are Windows only), etc.... ...but then, expecting a large company to behave in a cost sensible fashion is folly, as they'd rather pay someone else to guarantee the deal or take the blame when things go south... ...at the shop I presently work, I've heard the network and system support engineers (and their managers) bemoan the existence of Linux and FOSS at our company, that they'd much prefer it all was HP/IBM/MS stuff, so they could simply "open a ticket" to the vendor to fix a problem......and it fits in with the "let's move it to India" instead of hiring a few good people and letting them manage the systems... ...but then I've drifted into another rant here...

  • Business inertia and expertise (Score:3, Insightful)

    by blugeoned ( 677452 ) on Wednesday January 26, 2005 @10:35AM (#11479661)

    I deal with a number of areas within IBM as a customer of theirs. I see two things working against their moving platforms internally.

    First, I work in a Microsoft shop. IBM suplies a good deal of software to us (3270 emulator, Rational Robot, PC migration tools, etc.) and I expect IBM to support them and be experts in those areas. It would be difficult for them to provide the level of service we require while their people are trying to do their primary functions on a linux box. As an administrator, I have tried switching to a linux desktop to administer a Windows environment. With the help of Citrix, I was able to perform a great deal of my job function, but no where near all of it. I have no doubt that they are in the same boat.

    In a slightly related situation, I know a few of their subject experts who have taken years to get where they are. I am sure they would not like to see all of their hard work washed away and being returned to a novice status by having their support area replaced.

    Second, I see this as simple matter of time and money. Sure a mainframe support person could switch his desktop from Windows to Linux if all of his tools were available, but who has time for that? He has critical tickets to remediate. Something as trivial as switching desktops is probably not very high on his priority list. It does not matter that a high ranking offical stated that they would like to see him switch platforms. What manager wants to pay for the down-time it is going to take to make the cut-over and re-educate the user? As long as his job performance is based on other metrics, he is going to ignore the directive until it is convenient for him to follow it.

  • Painful to use (Score:3, Interesting)

    by exp(pi*sqrt(163)) ( 613870 ) on Wednesday January 26, 2005 @02:00PM (#11482330) Journal
    I've used Linux at home for quite a while - since my first Yggdrasil disk with 0.99. In the early days it was really clunky, but I didn't mind because, hell, it was a real live Unix machine running in my own home. Over the years I used used Irix at work, then Windows, and now I actually have to use Linux. What a shock. So many things that were wrong with Linux simply haven't changed since years ago. What were once charming quirks of my geeky hacker's PC at home are now major annoyances all day long at work. Some simple examples of things that don't work well:
    1. The goddamn backspace key. It seems to be impossible to tweak it satisfactorily so that my .cshrc works across different distros and in every application.
    2. Copy and paste. I've no idea what's going on here. Different applications use completely independent cut/paste buffers. Simply copy-and-pasting from my web browser into a text window can be a headache requiring me to paste temporarily into an intermediate application.
    3. Shared libraries. I can run plenty of old Win 95 apps on a modern Windows XP box. Plenty of old Linux binaries will fail to run on a modern distribution. Downloading third party apps like RealPlayer is a real nightmare.
    4. Focus. Many applications pop up windows but they fail to get focus. Nothing is more annoying than doing a search in acrobat reader, say, and having to actually click on the search window to bring it into focus.
    The fact is - all of these problems are soluble. But I'm no longer that single young kid who thought it was cool to spend all night hacking away to fix the most trivial problems. I now just want these things to work. They do under Windows, they do under MacOSX. No doubt some smart young Linux zealot wil tell be how to solve the above problems. But that's completely missing the point.

    Just so it's not all negative: it's a pleasure to have a working command line again. CMD.EXE is so, so, broken.

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