GNU/Linux as a Desktop OS

Goals

• Stability
• Remote Administration
• Cost Savings
• Longer, Better Use of Hardware
• Excellent Office Tools

Features

• KDE is the GUI I use. It is a standard GUI desktop like other proprietary Operating Systems.
  
  
  
  KDE Features
  • Click once to start a icon program on the desktop.
  • Click on the BIG K - click on Internet - click on KMail to start the mail program.
  • Taskbar shows active programs.
  • Up to 16 Virtual Desktops - I use 8.
  • Clock and Calendar and Clipboard and Control-Panel
  • Explorer Program named Konqueror
  
  
  KDE 3.0 is featured in an eWEEK cover story 8-April-2002.
  
  
• Gnome is another viable, stable, popular X-Windows Desktop GUI.
  
  
• Office Suites are quite stable and useable (Star Office by Sun is my current choice). It is likely that Sun will charge for Star Office in the future. Sun's Press Release

  StarOffice 6.0 also will be offered to end-users through various retail channels. The retail package will include the software CD and user manual, Web-based training, a bundled support incident certificate and availability on Linux, Solaris and Windows platforms. It will continue to be priced under $100. The education market, which will be handled by the Sun Education line of business, will pay only for the cost of the media (CD-ROM) and shipping.

  
  
  Open Office has received most of the Star Office 6.0 source code and is developing a free (always free) version that is similar to Star Office.
  
  Open Office is missing several proprietary Star Office features, like the Adabas database, fonts and thesaurus.
  
  Applixware is now renamed Anyware and is available from Vistasource at $99 a copy.
  
  The Gnome Project has an Office Suite as does KDE.
  
  
• Free mail and calendar programs are of good quality. UVA uses Corporate Time for calendar services with a central server with multiple nodes. Corporate Time is available in Windows and Linux versions.
  
  UVA uses a cluster of Sun machines for Central Mail Services (CMS) and you can get mail with a POP or IMAP client or a web browser.
  
  I use good-ole character based Pine in Linux from U. Washington for e-mail because it is nearly impossible to make one wrong click and get a virus. When you combine a Pine client and an IMAP mail server and an LDAP directory server, you get folders and addressbook and LDAP lookup on the central server. Pine is available in Windows and Linux versions.
  
  
• Graphics and data imaging and symbolic math are handled by GIMP, xfig, gnuplot, Tecplot, Matlab, Mathematica, IDL, opendx (data explorer), and Star/Open Office.
  
  
• XFree86 V4.0 includes 3-D OpenGL X-Windows emulation. They publish a list of supported video cards. X-Windows makes a plain RH 7.2 workstation with a good 3-D video card a work-alike for Hummingbird Exceed and Exceed 3-D for Windows ($200 plus).
  
  This allows you to run X-windows programs on another CPU and display the program on your console.
  
  
• Adobe Illustrator, Framemaker and Pagemaker are not available. Adobe released a beta test copy of Framemaker, but decided to withdraw it. Scribus is a PageMaker work-alike on Linux. GIMP is a Adobe Photoshop work-alike. Ghostview has a moudle called ps2pdf which will convert a postscript file to a PDF file (Acrobat work alike).
  
  
• Support

  The support for linux has always been very good, IMHO. I found the answers to more problems through newsgroups and HOWTO documents then Microsoft could ever post. Also, the people who use linux are (on average) very helpful to people asking questions. Maybe you'd want to mention this.

System Administration Stuff

• A workgroup printer attached to a Linux workstation can be accessed from all other Linux workstations.
  
  
• A workgroup printer with a HP Jetdirect card can be easily accessed from all other Linux workstations.
  
  
• Security is handled by turning off all services and running tcp-wrappers and doing automatic nightly updates with the Red Hat program up2date.
  
  
• Remote admin and remote installation are sure and simple.
  
  
• Installation and upgrades can be automated from a common NFS mount on a Linux/Unix server.
  
  
• Workstations can logon from a user/password directory on a central unix machine. The user could be validated via NIS and her home directory made available as an NFS mount.
  
  Install ypserv 1.3 and ypbind from the RH distribution on the NIS server and install ypbind on all client W/S's and run authconfig to set up NIS logins.
  
  Add +:::::: to the bottom of /etc/passwd
  
  Make a valid home directory for all remotely validated users
  
  Do all the stuff in section 7 and section 9 of the NIS howto.
  
  
• You can authorize remote execution from a small group of tape backup machines. UVA backs up Unix/Linux machines remotely to several central tape robots.
  
  
• Linux can mount NTFS or FAT32 disk partitions so you can share OS's on one PC and dual boot.
  
  
• Excellent stability - no corrupted anything
  
  Linux uses the Read-Only INI file model.

  
  # text file init file
  #comment
  token1=valueX
  token2=valueY
  
  

  The system files are all kept in the /etc directory tree and a program's machine defaults kept in a read-only directory.
  
  For example, the default info for GIMP is kept in /etc/gimp/1.2/gimprc and gimprc_user.
  Each user would have personal preferences kept in /home/userid/.gimprc. These would override system-wide defaults.
  
  

• Administration
• Applications
• Security
• Support

Who is Contributing to GNU/Linux

• companies
• programmers
• ole-guys like me
• Third World Countries who do not want to pay $100+ per seat for a WinTel OS and Office Suite

Resources