Approximately six years ago, Promeheon was awarded the opportunity to pilot a Redhat Linux driven type desktop to replace Windows. The promise, I anxiously told my customer, was that they would have an easy to use, virus free, malware free desktop, that was faster to use and cost a lot less to support that a Microsoft Windows desktop. Much to the consternation of the IT Director who allowed me to speak to her boss, this meant staff reductions, which, although good the company, were bad for her. As a result, the pilot was a disaster as it was setup to fail. Standard ways to access email, such as IMAP, were not permitted in the pilot (her best friend was the Notes administrator) and worst of all, Open Office was in it’s 1.0 stage and the suite was terribly slow on the hardware of the day, never mind the fact that it didn’t translate Office XP documents with great accuracy, and Codeweaver’s Wine was as advertised: Not ready for use in the enterprise to run Office on Linux. Not surprisingly, the pilot was a disaster, and I almost lost this rather large company as a customer. Linux was definitely not ready for the desktop unless the end customer saw enough value to make a big change when it came to such things as Microsoft’s Office suite and use non-proprietary programs to access email. Although I’ve yet to hear one person say they enjoy using Lotus Notes, Microsoft Office is a different story. As many in IT know, everyone has Microsoft Office because everyone has Microsoft Office. Hope is gentle, however, as Google has throw it’s hat into the ring with an online version to complete with Microsoft Office. Coupled with the fact that few organizations are opting to upgrade to Office 2007, alternatives like Google Docs and Open Office have become a more viable option.
Enter Ubuntu Gusty Gibbon. Ubuntu has been around for some time and it’s primarily a Linux desktop distribution based on Debian. This seventh release of Ubuntu, called Gusty Gibbon, is the most polished Linux desktop I’ve ever encountered. After trying Microsoft’s Vista on our home computer and being appalled at the slow performance, the annoying, counter productive security controls, software incompatibilities and a whole litany of other annoyances too numerous to list here, it was time to give Linux on the desktop another whirl. My was skeptical, as she is a power user when it comes to Microsoft Office, however, she’s been pleased with most of the open source applications I’ve had her try for work.
Installation
Installation of Gusty Gibbon was a snap. I simply downloaded the ISO, burned it onto a CD, popped the disc in our Dell Latitude D400, and began the guided installation. I opted use reiserfs on the /boot partition and xfs on the / partition. XFS is a high performance filesystem developed and open sourced by that former Silicon Valley darling SGI. Once installation was complete, I restarted and was to a login window in almost 30 seconds. This is due to the fact that Ubuntu uses a kernel that boots all processes in parallel. Also, there is a nice, friendly boot-up screen to cover up the init process at bootup, instead of the old, ugly, confusing, non-user-friendly scrolling text.
First Use
I’ll cover more here later on, as this is where Gusty Gibbon really shines. Wireless was always a pain with Linux, but not anymore! Gusty Gibbon detected my Broadcom wireless card right away, and installed the “Restricted Driver” immeadiately allowing me to connect to our home Linksys-N router, WPA2 encrypted network. There does seem to be a performance lag in wireless speed. It’s not clear whether this is due to the fact that I’m using an N router, or because this is a less than perfect driver. I’ll post more details as I do more research into the issue.