On Friday 15 November 2002 12:47 pm, Peter Nixon wrote:
You COULD do this, but I wouldn't recommend it. I don't know how large the company is that you are working for, but there are reasons behind company rules. Not only could you end up looking stupid if you do something by stealth, you could end up getting fired. I DO run SuSE at home AND at work, but I am in charge of IT for my company. If you were in my company and I had a SOA (Standard Operating Environment) of Windows X/Office X/Custom App Y etc etc and you installed linux by stealth you would most definately NOT be in my good books.
Regardless of any relative merits between various operation systems you are paid to be at work to do a job, and you should be provided with tools to do the job. Whether you (or I) think they are the appropriate tools has no bearing on the matter unless you are prepared to put the arguement to your boss and have him sign off on a change of toolset.
You should convince your boss or your IT dept that linux is an alternative by legitimate means, not by going against their wishes.
Well far be it from me to lead some poor innocent astray! If there is an absolute embargo on anybody adding *anything* (software or hardware) to their work PCs, then clearly no worker should. No doubt there would be no need to either - in places with such superlative IT policies, software would never bomb or be allowed to obsolesce, systems would always be perfectly tuned for maximum efficiency, and if your PC went belly up it would be fixed within 2 hours. Why complain? But I suspect the reality is different for the vast majority of workers. Here, "supported apps" policies are mainly a way for IT to avoid having to spend precious maintenance cycles on weirdo apps that only one person uses, or some mess that someone got himself into. Although they may frown on "unsupported" software, it will hardly be a hanging offence. It was in that context (which in fact seems to be relevant to Damon's case) that I suggested "stealth" use - ie don't climb on a high horse about something when you'll have to dismount later; the key thing is to be sure you can do all your work on another platform before you start shouting about it. If you can, any sensible IT department would then be willing to give you a fair hearing. It's ironic, though, that "stealth" should be seen as such an undesirable term. Did all those servers which have spearheaded Linux' business adoption go through the normal "approved OS" hoops? I think not. Certainly, try to convince your managers by reasoned argument. Certainly, don't go against IT policies if they are writ in stone (though I think we can assume that Damon has enough nous to make his own decisions about that). But the best argument in favour of something is seeing it working, just as it was with all those servers. The desktop is no different. Kevin