Linux has been around for several years and I have tried using it as a desktop platform many times in the past.  Each time having the system fail in one way or another.  Sometimes these failures were technical and other times they were simply because the platform was not user friendly.  Either way it has been at least a couple of years since I last tried to switch to a more open source platform like Linux.

For those of you who don’t know, Linux is a operating system that is an alternative to Microsoft Windows or Apple’s Mac OS.  There are many different distributions of Linux each with their own setup, but all based on the same underlying system core called the Linux kernel.  What makes each distribution different is the philosophies of system setup, software to include and update/release schedules.  For the most part though you can get the same software on all versions of Linux with a few exceptions.

Like I mentioned previously, I recently decided to give Linux another try.  This time I decided to go with a new distribution that I have never used before called Ubuntu.  The idea behind the Ubuntu distribution is to create a user friendly desktop platform for the masses based on the gnome desktop manager.  HUH?  That’s probably more then you wanted to know.  The important part of that is “Ubuntu” and “User Friendly Desktop Platform”.  So Lets see how they did…

During the install I was prompted with a few basic questions such as my timezone, keyboard layout, default language and my name.  Seems simple so far.  The install process also asked about how I wanted my hard drives setup/partitioned and being a advanced user I set them up manually.  For the beginners there was a simple “use entire hard drive” option they could choose.

Upon answering all the questions and giving the system a password for my login, it proceeded to format the hard drive and install the Ubuntu system.  There was a total of five screens that asked questions during the install and it worked very similar to a wizard setup screen in Windows.  This is great to help make it easy to convert the less advanced users from Microsoft.

Once the installation was complete the system rebooted and I was prompted to login with the user name and password I setup during the installation.  When I was finally able to enter those correctly (too many passwords in my head), the system dropped me to my new Linux desktop.

After the desktop loaded I looked around and was very surprised to find that all of my hardware was configured and working perfectly.  At this point I took a couple of minutes to poke around the system and menus to familiarize myself with the platform.  I was amazed at what I found.  All of the software a basic home user would need was here pre-installed on the system.  This is what I found:

• Calculator Application – Not a great program but it’s invaluable when missing.
• CD/DVD Creator – CD and DVD burning software ready to go.  Burn data or music directly to discs.
• Screen Shots – Allows you to take a picture of whats on your screen and save it.
• Text Editor – Equivalent to notepad in windows.  Stupid program but I use it everyday.
• F-Spot Photo Manager – A photo album program to organize and keep track of digital images.  The rise in popularity of digital cameras make this handy.
• GIMP Image Editor – Much better then Microsoft’s paint program.  More between the Paint Shop and Photo Shop programs.
• OpenOffice.org Drawing – Another image editing software.
• XSane image scanning software – Scan pictures and documents and save them on your computer.
• Dictionary – A computer based dictionary software.  This will be handy!
• OpenOffice.org Office Suite – Word, Excel & Power Point equivalents.
• Movie Player – A video file player.
• Sound Recorder – Record sound into your computer.
• Firefox – A web browser.  Better then Internet Explorer.
• Evolution – A email client similar to Outlook or Thunderbird.
• Pidgin Internet Messenger – A instant messaging client that can connect to Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL, IRC and Jabber networks.

Wow!  Look at all that.  It’s everything a normal person would use for day to day activities.  This is great!  From this point I starting setting up my personal options for software I have used before such as Pidgin and Firefox.  Once I was done I continued to play with the system and use it for my day to day work activities.  In fact I am writing this post using Linux right now.

I must say I was very skeptical about moving to Linux when I starting thinking about it a week ago.  After all I have tried many times in the past and it never turned out good.  However this time it doesn’t seem so bad.  So far I have been able to find everything I need with a couple of clicks of the mouse and everything seems to be extremely user friendly.  I have installed a couple of extra pieces of software such as TweetDeck and Adobe Acrobat and even those installed with no issues.

At this point I can see no reason why I couldn’t continue to use this as my work desktop.  Really I can’t see a reason why I couldn’t load this on my home desktop that my wife and I share.

For those of you that want to try Linux on your machine but are too scared to make the jump, Ubuntu has a nice live CD that you can use to demo the OS.  Download the installation CD for Ubuntu from their site and record it to a CD.  When you reboot your computer with the CD in the drive select the option that says “Try Ubuntu with out installing on my computer”.  It’s certainly worth taking a look at.

What are your thoughts on using Linux as a desktop platform?  Do you think its close enough that the masses could easily use it as a Windows replacement?  Leave your comments below…

Well being the system admin part of my job is to come up with new things that can save the company money using technology.  If i can increase productivity while doing it, that’s all the better.  So I decided to give Google a shot on fixing our little licensing issue.

Google has a semi-new service available to users calld Google Apps, or Google Apps for Your Domain (GAFYD).  The service includes access to Gmail for your email, Google Sites, Google Docs, Google Contacts and Google Calendar.  All of which are fairly good services. Here’s a quick run down of what each does:

• GMail – Google’s email service.  Works via a website, commonly referred to as web mail.
• Google Sites – Allows users to quickly make websites and publish them on the net.  Lots of options for security, not overly flexible.
• Google Docs – An on-line document editing and storage system.  It’s like having a watered down version of Word, Excel and Power Point on the internet.
• Google Contacts – A simple yet effective contact management system.  It is integrated with Gmail so you can easily have a address book of email addresses.
• Google Calendar – A easy to use task & time management interface.  Schedule events and appointments via the web interface and it will email you reminders of upcoming tasks.

The great thing about the Google Apps service is that your able to use all of these systems with your own domain.  This means that your email address can still be rob@robertrolfe.com instead of rob12424@gmail.com.   This is especially great if you want to use the Google Apps service for your company communications, as having your own domain for email looks much better and more professional.

As I mentioned above the Google Docs system is a little watered down on features.  Due to this we were unable to solely use that part of the system for our tests.  To supplement this problem we decided to use OpenOffice.org as a office suite, which has far more features then Google Docs does at this point.  It is also much more compatible with Microsoft Office which is currently the gold standard.

So I gathered together a group of about 6 users in the office and moved them all over to this new experimental system to see if it could indeed replace the Microsoft software we were using at that time.  Well, It didn’t and in about two weeks time we ended up moving all the users back to the Microsoft based platform except one other user and Myself.

What ended up being the downfall was the Word document’s.  Microsoft Word has many different features in it that OpenOffice.org was unable to work with in a fully compatible manner.  Things like embedded documents inside of other embedded documents in a Word document didn’t work properly.  We also had 1 document that the OpenOffice.org program was completely unable to open at all.

Now this wasn’t completely the fault of the Google platform or the OpenOffice.org software.  Most of the problems that we ran into were extremely stupid things that users who sent us the document did.  Who really embeds a document inside of a document and then embeds that into another document?  Things like that should never be done, but Microsoft Word was still able to open it and operate properly.

It just comes down to the fact that no matter how good you make your software, and OpenOffice.org is good software, it still can’t compensate for stupid users.  The Google aspect of the experiment did however work perfectly.  All of the users were getting used to using Gmail rather then Outlook and there were no real problems with that.  However due to the Office documents not working properly, we still had to move back to Microsoft.

The cost savings to buy Office without Outlook combined with the cost savings of not purchasing new licenses for Exchange were not great enough to justify the cost of paying Google for the Apps server.  Especially not after adding the costs to make the email switch for all the users and teaching them the new interface.

As for me and the other user, we are both happily still using Google in favor of Outlook & Exchange.  We both use OpenOffice.org for managing our documents and have little to no issues.  In fact for me it has actually increased my daily productivity greatly.  We are able to still be using this platform because we are more open minded when it comes to technology then the others in the office.  We also don’t deal with the same level of users on the other end of our communications stream as the rest of the office staff does.

So as long as your open minded you could easily switch your personal or business communications to Google Apps and OpenOffice.org instead of Microsoft Office and Exchange.  You simply need to look at your past communications and see if users who send you documents use any really proprietary features that words provides.  If they simply send you basic work documents with text and some pictures, it will be no big deal.  However don’t expect that things will be exactly the same as the interfaces are different and the platforms react differently, but with a open mind you can easily overcome these things.

I know of a few businesses that currently use OpenOffice/Google as their standard for a business platform.  It seems to work very well for them and is currently working very well for me.  In fact it has been able to free me from Microsoft just slightly which I very much like.  When it comes to technology I very much prefer to keep my options open.

Are you using Google Apps?  How about OpenOffice.org?  How are they working for you?  Drop some comments below and let us know how its working out!