Linux At Work

[charlie bullen]

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.

Later

Charlie