Moving to the Linux Business Desktop 211
| Moving to the Linux Business Desktop | |
| author | Marcel Gagné |
| pages | 696 |
| publisher | Addison-Wesley |
| rating | 9/10 |
| reviewer | Raymond Lodato |
| ISBN | 0131421921 |
| summary | Very valuable guide for business user of Linux. |
M. Gagné, a writer for The Linux Journal, does not assume you're going to use any specific distro for Linux. He gives instructions and examples for the most common ones: Fedora (Red Hat), Mandrake, SUSE, Debian, etc. KDE is the primary desktop, but GNOME is covered fairly well, too. I have to admit that, as a long-time Red Hat user, I was well entrenched in the GNOME world. However, after reading Marcel's book, I've make KDE my default environment, and I've been very happy with it.
This book is broken up into three major parts: Getting to Know Linux, Administration and Deployment, and The Linux Business Desktop. Each part is packed with information in an easy-to-follow format. In fact, I found it hard to just read and not fire up my Linux to follow along.
Part One (Getting to Know Linux) covers the essentials of installing Linux and customizing your desktop. As I remarked earlier, Marcel covers multiple distros. He includes instructions on how to install using Mandrake, Fedora Core 1, and SUSE. For those of you who just can't wipe Windows from your hard drive completely, M. Gagné covers setting up a dual-boot environment clearly enough that you will be able to have the best of both worlds.
The second part (Administration and Deployment) assists in setting up a fully functional business environment. In Chapter 7 (Installing New Applications), Marcel covers the various installation programs available across the distros. SUSE's YaST2 installer, Mandrake's urpmi, Kpackage (from the K Desktop Environment), rpm (the shell program), dpkg (Debian's package manager) and apt-get are all covered. In addition, he gives a clearly written explanation of how to build from source (The Extract and Build Five-Step -- page 124) that dispels any anxiety a newbie to Linux might have.
The next chapter covers the device support in Linux. When I started using Linux, device support was spotty at best. Now it's tremendously improved. Marcel shows you the basic of Linux's support. He then goes on to explain about network and Internet connections. Unfortunately, there is one major piece of errata in this area of the book. During his explanation of the difference between Class A, B, and C IP addresses, the information for class A was inadvertantly switched with the class C info. I've been informed that the errata is corrected on his website (www.marcelgagne.com) and in future editions of the book. Outside of that one unfortunate error, the rest of the book is pretty clean.
Later chapters dig into the topics of Backup and Restore (the most important and most underutilized functions), printing, email, web servers, file sharing (both Windows-like with Samba and Unix-like with NFS), thin clients (server-side and client-side) and desktop remote control. He even includes a chapter on installing and configuring LDAP (something rarely written about, but becoming more and more important).
The third and final part of the book covers the usual business applications. Email, arguably the "killer app" for office environments, is addressed first. Focusing on KDE, Kmail gets the lion's share of the coverage, with Evolution following behind. Desktop organizers come next, with Korganizer the favorite and Evolution (again!) nipping at Korganizer's heels.
The web-browsing chapter focuses on Konquerer, KDE's jack-of-all-trades application, and Mozilla. Most notably, significant coverage is given in the next three chapters to OpenOffice and its basic applications Writer, Calc, and Impress. For working with images, digital cameras and USB scanners are covered, with The GIMP as the preferred image editor. On-demand contact via instant messaging and video conferencing rounds out this marvelous book. Kopete and GAIM are discussed in depth for the IM arena, and GnomeMeeting for the VC work.
As with most Linux books, a CD is supplied. However, this book does not give you a specific distro for installation. Instead, Marcel chose to include a branded copy of Knoppix, the CD-bootable Linux. The idea is to let you play around with the various aspects of Linux using Knoppix before committing yourself to the actual installation.
All in all, this is a valuable book, covering most of the areas a business user wants to address. Notably lacking was coverage on how to try to run Windows applications under Linux. At the top of the review, I mentioned I keep trying to steer away from Windows as much as I can. Unfortunately, I usually have a couple of applications that I need but don't come in a Linux version. Even though VMWare, Win4Lin, and Wine were mentioned briefly, I would have liked to have read some examples of running a Windows application using them. In addition, the major snafu with the IP address space marred an otherwise excellent book.
You can purchase Moving To the Linux Business Desktop from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
Linux workstation (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Easy to do (Score:5, Interesting)
However, the department I was in was almost entirely into *nix development, but we would have to do some kinda stuff related to Windows from time to time.
We also learnt that it's quite useful for you to have some kinda virtual machine like VMWare [vmware.com] on your box, to boot into alternate OSes. Really really useful.
And the problem is that it's really hard being in the development industry with only Linux -- sooner or later, you're going to run into some client who'd ask you for development on the Windows platform. And it's not as simple as saying, sorry, we don't do Windows
Good resource (Score:3, Interesting)
Great work; Almost there. (Score:5, Interesting)
The one business application that isn't so well worked out is PowerPoint. OpenOffice's Impress is wonderful by itself, but it doesn't do so good with reading Microsoft generated powerpoints, especially with fancy stuff in them. I had to give a presentation recently on what my team did for the New Mexico Supercomputing Challenge, and I had to transfer the presentation to some long-outdated Mac powerbook to work with it because OpenOffice would just freeze when I tried to read the file.
On the otherhand, I haven't had any trouble reading OpenOffice
But otherwise, I don't see any advantage windows affords. I mean, if I have critical data on my machine, the number one issue for me is going to be stability, which is not one of windows' strongpoints. (And no, Rome Total War is not a business application.
Re:Linux is fine on the business desktop (Score:3, Interesting)
I can't remember the last time I saw printer that couldn't handle one of PCL and PostScript.
Re:Great work; Almost there. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Ummmm.... (Score:3, Interesting)
It's the oddities that cause problems. For example, we have a check-printer here that comes with windows drivers, and despite spending a LOT of time (even had RedHat support try), we were unable to get Linux to cooperate...
When the CFO can't print a check, you can't use Linux on his desktop (or his assistant's). You can, though, put it in engineering (depending on the company, in reception, and in many of the administrative offices).
The key, we've found, is to do it department-by-department rather than company-by-company. Transitioning individual departments allows for easy bookkeeping, still saves money, and allows for the occasional exception due to application/hardware lockins.
fancier stuff (Score:3, Interesting)
It's a human problem, not a technical problem (Score:2, Interesting)
There are basically 2 types of people in my company: there are those, when presented with all the facts and numbers that Linux will save us a lot of money, still insist that they want to hold on to their Windows machine, even if it means they need to start maintaining their own laptops. And then there are those simply and don't care one way or the other what OS we use (or don't know the difference).
I still get some users that come to me and complain: "I am a Windows guy, what is this Linux machine doing on my desk?" To which I now reply: "Your boss told me to put it there." These are usually users who are comfortable of running their own Windows machines at home, and they feel like I have yanked them out of their comfort zone by putting them on an unfamiliar desktop.
The hardest part was perhaps getting some of the managers to support the idea. In fact, none of our managers like the idea of switching to an "inferior" OS, but our Chief Financial Officer loved the idea that he can cut loose tens of thousands of dollars in Windows licenses per year, so he gave us full support.
Document Management, Time and Billing apps? (Score:4, Interesting)
Open Source Law Office --- the elusive dream! (Score:3, Interesting)
As a result, I run XP Pro so that I can run emergency versions of Word and WordPerfect.
That said, I am very pleased to report that my primary office suite is Open Office. My brother helped me create a template with pleading lines, and all of my legal forms and correspondence are created using Open Office. Its terrific!
Firefox is my browser, Thunderbird is my mail client and I have Knoppix for data recovery in the event of crashes.
I've searched for a long time, but I've never found any reference on a bookshelf, on the web or anywhere else that devoted sufficient attention to translating, creating and formatting legal forms with Open Office or rescuing formatting disasters when documents created with Word or WordPerfect have to be translated into Open Office format. I have to create my forms from plain text format and then add all of the formatting. It may not sound hard, but trust me, its a nightmare.
There are also problems related to proprietary case management software and accounting packages that are necessary to a law practice but which don't play as well as is desirable with the Open Office Suite, Linux or Firefox. I use Gavel & Gown Amicus Attorney at work, and I cannot find a viable open source substitute for it. I keep trying to convince my brother to write one, but apparently that would be an enormous project.
If these problems were adequately addressed, I believe that many lawyers would gladly give up their licensing fees and switch to Linux and Open Office.