On Sunday 06 July 2003 12:30, expatriate wrote:
Hello My wife is considering "upgrading" all of her company's PCs to Linux instead of continuing on the Microsoft wagon. In order to test the impact on the average user, she requested I convert her home machine to dual-boot so she could experience the issues. Her home machine is an ASUS P2BF with a Pentium III 450MHz , 128MB RAM , 120GB 7200rpm IBM HD (33MHz ATA though on the Motherboard) and a Diamond Viper V770 (NVidia2 TNT2). I chose KDE since I have many niggling issues with GNOME. Her first impressions so far are: "It is slower to boot" "It does not start up applications as quickly as W2K" (OpenOffice definitely loads more slowly than Office2000) "Repaints take longer" (When shifting windows around)
Mind you, she has an MSEE and is definitely not a Microsoft drone having studied UNIX in college. However, she is concerned that her organisation will have trouble adapting to a ""less responsive" OS on the older machines that are now running Windows 97 and 2000.
Does anyone have a different experience?
TIA & cheers
You need to optimize some settings, just like windows with other issues. Has your wife kept all the default windows settings since she first used windows way back when? For openoffice.org, http://newsforge.com had a short article a while back on OpenOffice tips. Try searching around the time when the latest release came out. A few of the tips including getting rid of the splash screen on startup, and allocating more memory to OpenOffice. I implemented some of the tips, and the startup was much faster. The memory settings can be adjusted by going to Tools -> Options -> OpenOffice.org -> Memory -> and increasing the amounts in several of the fields, and lowering the "remove from memory after" to less than the default. Using the OpenOffice.org quickloader should gain her additional startup speed. But be aware that it also uses up some ram. Don't know how much. 128 MB of ram? How many users on the box? Just one? Should be passable, but how much is another 128 mb of ram? $10? $15? I'm looking at $50 for 512 mb of ram. A PIII-450, with 128 mb of ram? If your wife decides to continue on the ms bandwagon, which release is she going to install on this box? win2000? winxp? On this box? Really? Bootup is too slow? Add advanced server, and a half dozen other servers, along with all the related maintenance scripts and cron jobs to windowsxp, and see how long the bootup is. Or simply eliminate the unnecessary services that are running during the gnu/linux startup. Your wife or the tech would be doing this during the company roll out of windows right? Wouldn't she do the same for another operating system? Repaints take longer? Why move screens around? My 8.0 setup had 10 desktops under kde, which I increased when I was particularly loaded with work. Once she gets used to the multiple desktops, she won't be moving screens around. Is the box hitting the swap partition/file when running OpenOffice.org? When repainting screens? She should know how to solve that problem - ram. As most of the users here, I've used windows prior to gnu/linux. So I have plenty of experience with blue screens, and losing data while using ms office. I can also tell you that I have since had 100's of days of uptime with gnu/linux powered desktops and servers, including suse 7.3 and 8.0 Are all of the computers at your wife's business PIII-450's? All of them? Are there no faster servers? I set up a friend's business with a PIII-450 box. It had 128 mb ram, but we added more. It is also dual processor capable, but it's running on one processor right now. It's a file/print server, and application server running OpenOffice.org, Kmail, Konqueror, MySQL, and a few other apps. It's a small office, with only two to four concurrent users at a time, but it works faster than what they had previously. The box has been running 24/7 since I set it up last year. The next upgrade is going to be one of the $220 TigerDirect Lindows boxes (wiping lindows, installing another gnu/linux distro). I have a few of the $220 boxes. When her business is in need of another box, this is money well spent. Add the OpenMosix patch, and your wife's business old computers will run as if on steroids, including OpenOffice.org, as OOo can be set up to migrate to the faster of the boxes. As for a web development tool, I hope one of the other posters isn't talking about frontpage. I've used it in the past from the original beta version, to the office 2000 version, and it's a disaster when you look at what it does to the code. And dreamweaver may be better, but it still mangles code. If you are developing with coldfusion, dreamweaver may be your ticket. But if it's not cold fusion, Quanta Plus is great for web development. And for those missing wysiwyg (what I was missing when I went from dreamweaver to quanta), it's in the cvs tree, and has been announced on kde's site. Going forward, with php, xml, handhelds, and all the newer language/technology going into web development, Quanta Plus supports a wide range of the technology. Don't forget that OpenOffice.org can also be hooked to MySQL. There have been a few how-to's in the last six months on doing this, and if I can do it, she can do it. A tech news/linux web site had a how to, and one of the NYC linux groups also had one in their journal (available on the web). The links can be found (once again) somewhere in the archives of the last six months or so of Newsforge, http://newsforge.com Try adding up the costs. How many boxes? How many workstation licenses for windows? What's the cost of windows advanced server? What's the cost of ms office for each box that needs it? What's the cost of ms-sql server? Or is her company going to use the far less expandable access? Which means the pro version of ms office, right? What's the mail server, exchange? How much is that license? It's not a graphics arts business, or photoshop would have been mentioned immediately. So she doesn't require photoshop, gimp can be used instead when needed. What's the savings on a single photoshop license? How about blue screens? What's the value your wife places on data integrity? Lost time to crashes? Have her keep a log. Number of times a day/week/month desktops/server reboots are necessary. Number of times a day/week/month each desktop/server crashes. Were all the patches/service packs installed immediately? What was the stability after installation? Or did she wait for bugs to shake out prior to installation, and thereby not installing "critical", "semi-critical", "not-so-critical" security patches? Was she aware that ssl was broken for MONTHS on IE before it was patched? Or was she transmitting credit card numbers and passwords oblivious to the ssl problem? If your wife sets up the company network correctly, she'll only need one fast server, and one backup, for everything. The server will do file/print, as well as run applications including OpenOffice.org Then everything else can be simple terminals, including the PIII-450, or the $200-$250 Walmart/TigerDirect boxes. Remote forward X from the server, and you can run dozens to hundreds (google Largo Florida) of users off the one server. Add OpenMosix to the server and all the desktops, and she won't even have to go too heavy on the server. And Postfix makes good use of OpenMosix, as well as other applications on gnu/linux. From your post, you appear to be running gnu/linux as well. Apply the OpenMosix patch to your box as well as hers, put them on the same network if not already, then ask her to give you an update on performance. And when calculating the costs above, try doubling them to get a feel for what the next update cycle is going to cost in a few years time, and what she'll save with gnu/linux, then start figuring what hardware can be saved (now) with gnu/linux, vs. what hardware will have to be upgraded if/when moving to 95/98/2000/xp at work. And be honest with the figures. Should I mention audit compliance costs? Bing. -- All spam received is reported to SpamCop. http://spamcop.net/