This morning I came in to find a whole office of aprox 15 co workers not
working. We depend on 3 things to work, Email, various browser based programs
running on our intranet and various browser based programs running on the
public internet . Of course, my computer (Suse 8.0 KDE 3.0 desktop) was
fully functional and all my colleagues were mystified. They all lined up to
take turns at my workstation doing their most time criticle functions.
This was a great opportunity because I wanted them to experience how great the
multiple virtual desktop aspect of linux is as we each have at minimum 4
separate functions, each requiring multiple programs and browser windows.
That was a real hit.
Just Monday, I was talking with our general manager and she was asking what
the real practical aspects of linux were and I was explaining about the
avoidance of Microsoft licensing issues, the added reliability and the
virtual desktop idea. She was real receptive.
This morning the owner gave me an old PC to use for linux terminal server
experimentation.
The root cause of the problem this morning was actually only indirectly a
windows problem. We have a SonicWall that isolates the windows workstations
behind it and something broke down in the communication between it and the
Cisco router. But perhaps if windows workstations were not so vulnerable to
viruses etc, then wouldn't have had the problem in the first place.
Anyway linux came through again and several users who had never used a linux
workstation were impressed as was management.
(text/plain)