Episode: 337
Title: HPR0337: Linux at Work
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0337/hpr0337.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-07 16:41:47

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I don't know, please go ahead.
Hey there, Hacker Public Radio.
My name is Nightwise, you can find me on Nightwise.com or KNIGHTWISE.com, and I'm very
honored and happy to be doing another episode of Hacker Public Radio.
I am in the moment, at the moment, cruising through the country of Belgium on my way home,
on my dearly commute, underneath a beautiful blue sky with a beautiful bright sun and
19 degrees Celsius outside, which is a very, very good temperature for the month of April.
Yep, it's only April, and still we have this great weather outside, so I'm really happy.
But there are other people that are also happy because it's April.
Now they don't really care about the weather.
For the sake, it could be minus 34 degrees, raining liquid nitrogen as they would be standing
outside dressed only in pink pajamas.
They wouldn't care because April is a good month and a nice month for a totally different
reason for them.
And we all might even have an inkling why that is, because Ubuntu is the fourth month
of the year, and the fourth month of the year does not only herald spring, so that's
the third month of the year, but it heralds a new release into Ubuntu release cycle.
Over this month, Ubuntu jaunti jackalope is coming your way, and that is a great reason
to rejoice.
So it's always a nice time of year, it doesn't matter what weather it is.
It's sunshine, so that's a bonus.
Now whenever the new release of Ubuntu is coming up, you start seeing articles pop up
all over the place on dig, or on slash dot, or on various blogs, opposing us one question,
is Ubuntu Linux ready for the desktop?
Well, that's a good and a valid question, and there has been a lot of debate about that.
A lot of people have been on the forums and on blogs and commenting about whether or
not Ubuntu Linux is ready for the desktop.
Well, 50% of those people would be probably making those comments using a Windows machine,
so I don't think that these people really count as valid votes.
The question whether or not Ubuntu is ready for the desktop can only be answered by the
fact that you will use Ubuntu on your desktop, and for go any other operating systems on
that machine.
That's the only way that you can try it, that's the only way that you can test it, and
that's the only way that you can give a valid answer to the question, is Ubuntu ready
for the desktop?
So a lot of armchair strategists will sit there in their Windows powered environments going
like Ubuntu is not ready for the desktop.
Yeah, if you tried it, have you tried really hard, did you look?
I mean, there's a lot of debate going on about that, and every release Ubuntu Linux will
come a little bit closer to being ready for the desktop, but for me personally, Ubuntu
is ready for the desktop.
I've been using Ubuntu as a desktop system for, I think, about a year now, and since I think
yeah, I've been using it for two years now, and since one year I have well eradicated
all Windows systems from my home, and I am working only with Ubuntu systems and the
occasional nagging here and there.
So to me, the question has been answered for me, Ubuntu is ready for the desktop, whether
or not we're going to have John T. at the end of the month, it's ready for me.
But there's one more question, is Ubuntu Linux ready for the corporate desktop?
Okay, it's ready for you at home, you know, basically surfing and sending emails and doing
some photo editing and stuff like that, and having hours and hours of time to rummage
through forums to get things working, and not really giving a damn if the whole thing
crashes four times in one night, that's not really a problem, but the question is, how
about the corporate environment, is Ubuntu Linux ready for the company?
To that question I have when I went out and sought an answer, because to me it was important.
The place where I work, I'm an IT consultant, we have a desktop policy that basically says
everybody's responsible for his or her own desktop, you can put on there what you want,
you can do with it what you want, as long as you abide to company rules, don't install
of being a software, make sure that you're running that kind of virus scanner and don't
just come pestering the help desk if you have support.
If you go to the help desk in my company, they give you the recovery CDs of your laptop
and you are off, I mean, that's the level of support that you get, we get a high degree
of responsibility over our own systems, a high degree of independence and creativity in
using our computers, but if something is worked up, we have to fix it ourselves.
So, I was at the water cooler talking to a colleague of mine, when suddenly he mentioned
that he was using mandrival Linux on his system as a primary computer, as a primary operating
system.
So I asked him, are you allowed to do that?
You're sure we're allowed to do that, as long as you can get your stuff done and have
everything, have all the documents available to you that you want available to you and
you can basically get a working day, working day's work done in one working day, well that's
okay, it doesn't matter what you use.
So our chief uses a Mac and we have some Vista users out there and we had one Linux guy.
So I decided I couldn't leave it up to him, I asked my boss and I asked him whether
or not it would be cool for me to run Ubuntu Linux.
I would give them a dual boot scenario, so I could always switch back, should I have
any problems, because I need to get my work done, that's the most important part, but
for them that was okay.
So started the great experiment of running Ubuntu Linux in a corporate environment.
Now there are some prerequisites to all of this.
If you want to go ahead and do this, make sure that you have some things really, really
worked out.
Okay, make sure that you know what you do during a working day.
Make sure that you know, for me that's personally a lot of email, instant messaging, being
able to access our web portals and basically processing office documents like Word and Excel
and stuff like that, pretty basic stuff.
Now make a good analysis of what you do and if anything that you have to do in your daily
routine does not fall into the category that is immediately doable using Linux, forget
about it.
For me, I went over the whole thing that I did, I said like, okay, I've got a connection
to exchange.
Can I do that?
Yes, you can.
I need a connection to our LDAP server with the whole directory access.
Can I do that?
Yes, I can.
I need to be able to connect to some somba shares.
Can I do that?
Yes, I can.
I need to work with office documents.
Can I do that?
Well, they're Doc X and XLS format.
Okay, open office 3.0 can do that.
And so I ticked off the list of everything that I needed to do and I went looking for a
solution whether or not it would be doable using Linux.
Now there were one or two things that I didn't know right away because I was doing all
of this research before I even inserted any CD of Ubuntu into my company computer.
So I took a good look at it and I had one or two things that I wasn't able to work out.
One of these things was how I was going to print on our multifunctional machines.
And I think I also had a problem with connecting to our VPN.
Now in order to get this fixed, I went to my colleague and asked for some help and looked
online and looked around for some help.
It turned out that installing the company multifunctional printers was a pretty daunting task,
but that had been a task that had already been resolved by my colleague.
So that wasn't really a problem.
And the other part was that our VPN needed to work our company VPN.
We have an SSL VPN and the software that we use was also compatible using Linux.
So I had a pretty good idea of whether or not I was going to be able to pull it off.
Now here comes major item number two, ask your superior.
I mean the one thing that you don't want to do is become unprofessional.
Your working place is your working place.
It is not your personal computer laboratory like you have that at home and you cannot
afford or it's not ethical to spend hours and hours tinkering and tankering with Linux
to get stuff working while otherwise if you would be just using XP, you would have
been up and added and out of the building 10 minutes later.
You can't wiggle around on opening up a Word document and work on that for two hours
straight while the only thing that you need to do is open up the Word document and make
sure that you get your work done.
If you do need to tink a tanker to get your basic stuff working, make sure that you do
it during your lunch hour or during your free time.
I actually came in at work an hour early for three days to have the experience of working
in the corporate network but not being on company time because I just thought you know this
is my experiment and this is something I want to do and that was okay with my boss.
If you have a really cool boss and you can sell him the idea that look, I'm going to
take a look at running free software here, see if we can do it and I might be able to
save us a lot of money if you expand this little experiment to other users.
Well that's great, that's a great selling point you get to play with Ubuntu and you also
get to you know promote Ubuntu through the rest but make sure that your company is able
to support all that, don't fall into the trap that suddenly you're going to become the
only geek who knows about this new toy and everybody is going to come to you for support.
If you're the only help desk in the building that's okay but if you also have other tasks
to run you don't want to do that.
So I kind of you know looked at everything and looked at the whole big picture about
what was it that I needed to do?
Was I able to do all this and how was I going to do all this?
So I came to all the points where I basically had worked out that everything that I would
be having to do, everything that I needed to do would be doable in Linux on to chapter
two.
We were looking at my work laptop, I took my work laptop home and I installed Ubuntu Linux
on it.
Now there's not really a problem there and if you just want to you know blow away your
Windows Vista installation and install Ubuntu but in my case I went looking for a fallback
scenario.
Should the need arrive where I should be able to encounter software that was not compatible
with my Ubuntu installation, I needed a fallback scenario to fall back to the you know the
main herd of Windows users.
Now make sure that if you are going to try something special like this and you're going
to say to the flock, you know what flock, you're all using XP and you're all using Windows
but I'm going to use something different.
If you're going to do that that's cocky and you better know what you're doing and you
better know that you need a fallback scenario should something go wrong.
You just cannot go up to your boss and say like I'm sorry I couldn't get that and that
and that done because it doesn't run on Linux.
I'm sorry I'm running an operating system that's not standard that is not actually you
know abundant in the company and that is not supported and because of this little cocky
experiment that I set up I was unable to do my job.
Make sure that you're always able to do your job so have a fallback scenario that lets
you you know run back to the flock even to do this very tiny tiny thing or open up this
certain type of document that you are unable to open up otherwise if you're using only Linux.
So I installed a dual boot on my company laptop and it started the way that I did this
is together with some help from a colleague of mine it's very ingenious because he thought
it up he said like you know if I want to work in my Windows system I want to have my
data at my fingertips.
If I then dual boot into Linux I want to have that same data at my fingertips.
So what he actually did is he set up a Windows system partition.
He set up a Linux system partition and a Linux swap partition and he set up a third
common home partition on which he stored his data.
So I inserted the Ubuntu CD rebooted to system and I had I booted into the live CD and
I started G parted.
Now I had my hard drive my hard drive is a hundred gigabytes I had Vista on there it ate
up a hundred giga the partition was a hundred gigabytes large.
So what I did using G parted I resized the Vista partition to about 50 gigabytes which
should be enough you know you need to give Windows some some chance to grow and swell
and blow it so I gave it about 15 gigabytes more of space than it was already using.
And then I may I had 50 gigabytes remaining I made a system partition you know a standard
EXT 3 partition of about 10 gigabytes.
The second partition I made was a swap partition of about 2 gigabytes and the remaining 38 gigabytes
I turned into an EXT 3 partition as well.
Now I rebooted and again booted from the live CD started the graphical install of Ubuntu
and manually selected my partitions.
I set the root partition to the 10 gigabyte EXT 3 partition that I just that I just mentioned.
Then I set the swap space to the 2 gigabyte swap space that I just mentioned and I mounted
the home drive onto the 38 gigabyte EXT 3 partition that I also made a little bit earlier.
The dual boot boot loader the grout boot boot loader is of course set in the master boot
record so I didn't have to worry about that and I rebooted I installed and rebooted the
system.
Now Ubuntu was installed in a system partition it had a swap partition and it added separate
partitions for its home drive and that's all fine and dandy now I still had my data my
Windows data on my Windows machine and a nice application called EXT 2IFS that's EXT 2IFS
that's the Windows application that allows Windows to read EXT 3 file partitions.
You can do it the other way around you can say like okay I'm running a Ubuntu system
and I'm going to enable Ubuntu to read and TFS but I was going to go the other way I was
going to enable XP or Fista to read EXT 3.
Now with EXT 2IFS you can mount EXT 3 partitions in Windows I installed the application and it
immediately asked me which EXT 3 partition I wanted to mount in my Windows partition.
So I selected the partition that I used for the home drive you know the 38GB EXT 3 partition
where I had mounted my home drive that's all fine and dandy I attached I mounted that
drive to the Z drive of my XP system and there was my home drive nothing wrong with that.
I saw a folder in there with my username because I had already logged into my Ubuntu system
and clicked on it and I was inside my Linux home folder using Windows.
Now all I needed to do was remap the my documents folder to that very directory.
So the my documents of my Windows partition were now actually resided into the data into
the home folder of my Linux partition all of that using EXT 2IFS.
So that way no matter if I log into my Windows partition or my Windows system or I log
into my Linux system I am always looking at the same data partition that's a good thing
because I now can easily reinstall my system and my Linux system or my Windows system should
I need to because all of my data is on a separate partition.
Now with the Windows part set up I kind of thought okay it's time to forget about all that
and go into Linux.
I booted into Ubuntu and I configured all of the updates and all of the upgrades and
I broke my system because one of the latest upgrades in NOME at the moment kind of broke
my evolution.
My evolution needs to connect to our exchange server and one of the updates kind of broke
that so I was unable to send out any emails using our exchange server.
So I had to rebuild the Ubuntu system but because I held on to the different home partition
I didn't need to swipe my data.
So I went back and I reinstalled the Ubuntu system and I didn't do any updates.
Now I know I can do the security updates and I know that if I deselect everything that
has to do with evolution and everything that has to do with NOME I can basically do all
of the other updates but quite frankly I wasn't really that interested.
I think I'm going to wait a little bit with upgrading because you are really working
with a production machine and it couldn't go wrong really really wrong really really fast.
I mean I was I installed my Ubuntu system configured evolution and I was very proud then
I did all the updates and then evolution didn't work anymore so I think if there's one
thing that's holding Ubuntu back from the corporate environment it's a good mail client
that connects to exchange because basically a lot of people are using exchange and Ubuntu
should find a great client that just works with that.
Now some of you might be shouting like it's not it's not evolution's fault it's NOME's
fault or it's not NOME's fault it's evolution's fault or it's this or that fault.
I don't really care for me basically I was somebody who was trying to run Ubuntu in
a corporate environment and with the only program that was available to me that could
properly connect to the exchange protocol isn't really the best and furthest developed
application in the Linux environment now is it now if they just would fix evolution
or really pimp it out to make it you know really really decent it will be awesome.
That was the one thing that I need to work with the most it didn't work just as good as
I wanted it to so now I'm running a Ubuntu 8.10 out of the box and I'm unable or unwilling
to do any updates so far might not be a good idea but I just you know I need to get my
work done I need to send emails I need to receive emails and I you know if I want to continue
this experiment of working with Ubuntu in my office I need you know get work done with
Ubuntu in my office otherwise it's not going to work at all and this entire experiment
is going to fail as for printers we have two multifunctionals to Nashwotech multifunctionals
at work and they all worked with some kind of legacy laser jet driver and they work pretty
nicely I installed the Fumatic printer drivers to get the printer working and that worked
nice that was absolutely not a problem Ubuntu was even smart enough to look for the
printers on my network and I just connected to them select that the right drivers and
that worked right out of the box now as for office a lot of people in our office already
work with Windows 2000 office 2007 and I don't like office 2007 I don't like the ribbon I can't
get used to it call me old fashioned call me an old fart call me a conservative I don't
care I don't like it when I even like less is the doc X format we have had the doc format
for so many years suddenly we need to change and you know how it is you have to mail something
out to a client and before you know it you forget to save it as a dot dark extension and the
client sends you an email back saying like I can't read this we don't have office 2007 blah blah blah
so I decided that for me personally the doc X standard is a step back in time it's a step
back away from the standards so what I did I installed open office 3.0 which works like a
charm which is able to open doc X format but I have set the default to save to just dot
doc format so that way if I push out documents they are readable by everybody if people are
running office 97 if people are running office 95 if people are running office 2007 if people
are running open office it doesn't matter they can get the documents that I send them they
can open them read them edit them and do whatever they want with them that is open standards me
personally as a statement I will not send out documents in a proprietary format like doc X don't
do it I don't send them out as odf either because this is the corporate environment it is not open
source in open source Richard Stollman Lala land where everybody is going we're only going to
use free as in beer and nothing proprietary blah blah blah blah blah no no I need to get my
work done okay so I send it out in doc doc format might not just might not ring right with Mr
Stollman and I'm sorry Richard but you know that's the real world out there and I can be very
happy that I'm using open source software as it is instead of using proprietary Fista or God knows
what I what else I would have to use to get my work done now basically I was doing what everybody
in the office was doing I mean I could read PDF so I could read word documents in Excel I could
save an edit Excel and word documents I could chat to my friends I used a pigeon instead of I am
we use a lot of I am at work and I was also able to connect to our exchange server I was able to
connect to our LDAP server because pretty good evolution did do a pretty good job there I just
gave it the IP and the configuration address of our exchange server and it immediately found the
LDAP directory with all the contacts and stuff so that was that was pretty good stuff so I was
really happy and I decided to take it a little step further because you know you can say I'm
using something different on a work past year laptop and they say like oh what are you using I'm
using Ubuntu Linux with that it's Linux oh it's different yeah sure it's different but you can
also say look it's better so what did what did I do I installed the no PDF reader so which is
a basic no PDF writer which basically is a grub printer that lets you print to PDF so I installed
that and now I actually had a printer that would allow me to print documents straight to PDF
just like you would when you would using would be using a Mac now my PC friends had a hell of a
time to get this working I mean they had to install Adobe Acrobat writer and they had to take a
look at the light and sing and stuff like that and I was tapping my chief on the shoulder going like
hey look PDF you know how much that cost you nothing so make sure that if you are using
open-source software point out the fact that hey I'm saving you I'm saving that you're saving
your boss some money these tough economic times that will surely ring a bell because if you are
using open source technology and you're using it in such a visible way as being the only brown
coat if I can call it like that serenity pun being the only brown coat in a you know in a blue
colored windows world you're representing your community and you have to make sure that you do it
right so the other thing that I installed was a compass and the compass control manager now I could
you know switch really cool between all of my desktops and have my desktop effects enabled I
didn't make it too bling it still had to resemble a company laptop but you know it was a little
bit more advanced than the stuff that the other guys had I have somebody sitting next to me was
using windows 2000 well if you look at him you know going through his open windows and you look
and you look at me you know sipping the cube and stuff it looks like I've got an operating system
from the 24th century or something and that it's what that's what it's all about so that's a nice
nice experience to do and if you get the chance to do so I would surely advise you to try it out
for me personally you can say well and I wise you might be a little bit of a you button to
advocate oh maybe I am but for me my motives are very personal I mean I don't really like windows
vista I'm very sorry but I just don't I think because I only have one gigabytes of ram on my laptop
of network vista isn't the fastest operating system on the planet so using it wasn't really
a nice experience I really had to tone it down and put it away the arrow glass or whatever it's
called and basically be stuck with a well nagging version of windows 2000 do you want to do this
do you want to do that and I didn't really like it now since I'm using Ubuntu Linux
hey I have a faster system too with the virtual desktops and all of the nice things like
gnome do and stuff like that I am much more productive than on my windows system and three I
learn a lot I mean I get a chance to learn a lot and I have made a little promise to myself that
if I have a problem and I don't know how to fix it I fix it in my own time because for me I learned
stuff and I don't want my boss to pay company time when it comes down to me looking out for new
Linux solutions but on the other hand for the community I am hopefully doing something I am
not a programmer I am not a bug tracker I am not a bug fixer I am not somebody who is omnipotent
and omnipresent in the forums I just do my bit and I do what I do best I run my mouth off so I am
the only brown coat in a windows colored world running Ubuntu Linux in a corporate environment
and doing everything the other kids are doing and doing a little bit more but most importantly
doing it a little bit cooler and that is what it's all about so if you want to promote
open source software and open source technology make sure that you know what you're doing
make sure that you you know do it well and make sure that you sell it to the rest because quite
frankly it's a very very satisfying experience and I absolutely loved doing it I have a great job
I get to work on computers all day well that's okay that's Biffy that's great but I get to work
on Ubuntu all day long any great okay that's about all I have time for on this episode of HPR I
hope you enjoyed my little rant about using Ubuntu in the corporate environment if you want to
get in touch with me you can visit my website www.nightwise.com that's K-N-I-G-H-T-W-I-S-E.com I do
the nightcast podcast which is a podcast about tuning technology into your way of life there is
also the nightcast screencast I do a video screencast and a video tutorial of using technology
and open source technology in your daily lives and there is also the doke you cost which is a series
of PDF how-tos that actually show you how it's done in a well easy to read through manner the
blogs there as well I read I regularly post articles and you can subscribe to all the content
using the feed that is posted on the website or if you're using iTunes you can look for the
nightcast in iTunes if you want to get in touch with me nightwise at nightwise.com is my email
address and you can find me on Twitter www.twitter.com slash nightwise at nightwise it's spelled K-N-I-G-H-T-W-I-S-E.com
well that's about it have a great day see ya
thank you for listening to H.P.R. sponsored by caro.net so head on over to C-A-R-O dot N-E-C for all of us in the
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