I think with my budget as it stands, our sales department don't have much of a choice as to whether they want LTSP or not.
Essentially there isn't a good enough reason for them to need windows' fancy features, and plenty of good reasons for them to use LTSP.
Upper management are already on board (of-course they are, I'm saving them money!), so really it's just a case of trying to minimise confusion for my users.
What I've actually managed to accomplish since my original email is to convince a friend of mine who works in the sales department to just use an etherboot disk every now and again.
Since he's "linux-curious", he seemed quite happy to give it a go. So hopefully, I should get the receptionist effect here too!
My setup has changed wildly since my original mail thanks to everyone's replies.
Windowmanager is now qvwm - I found this to be excellent. It looks like win95, does ALT-TAB perfectly, taskbar works a treat, all the window behaviour is identical to MS, and everything is nicely configurable. Icons are a pain since you have to manually associate them to applications, but we're talking about a small amount of apps here, so it's not too much of a pain.
I changed browsers from konqueror (which I used to think was great) to Opera - the $30 cost per license is well worth it IMO, since it offers the best combination of useability (something I don't think mozilla ever fully achieved), and an ability to look at 90% of web-pages without getting totally confused. After a while of using konqueror I realised that it really isn't that stable yet (even in kde3), and its interpretation of some web-pages (including our own) is far from acceptable.
I've stuck with OpenOffice for the time being as it seems relatively fast (I had doubts about its speed, since I always found staroffice to be a bit of a snail), and I'm using mulberry for mail (www.cyrusoft.com) - for those of you that don't know it I urge you to give it a go.
I'm finally feeling like I can actually roll this out without too much fuss being made, and I'm confident that the users will actually appreciate the change now, as there are some definite improvements over windows.
Strangely, my LTSP setup seems faster than windows on the local machine - not complaining though!
Thanks to all,
L
--On Friday, January 17, 2003 17:11:10 +0000 John Ingleby <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Dear Louis, I've been working with LTSP (in fact K12LTSP) for nearly a year now, and couldn't resist checking your .co.uk web addresses. It turns out we're less than 10 miles apart!However, I don't have a magic answer to your question. I tend to take the path of least resistance: if it ain't broke don't fix it. In other words, if your sales people don't see good reasons to switch to Linux, maybe the time hasn't quite arrived. Sooner or later, PCs break down, fans wear out, hard disks need replacing, etc. When that happens, and there's no money around, then you stand a better chance of putting your case across. One success story I came across involved switching over just one high-profile user (reception), who told everyone else how easy and reliable her system is. Then it became much easier to get the financial case accepted. Please feel free to get in touch if you need any help, or even just for moral support! Regards, John Ingleby ************ www.coronet.co.uk
-- Louis Sabet - IT Manager http://www.mobiles.co.uk http://www.gadgets.co.uk ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Scholarships for Techies! Can't afford IT training? All 2003 ictp students receive scholarships. Get hands-on training in Microsoft, Cisco, Sun, Linux/UNIX, and more. www.ictp.com/training/sourceforge.asp _____________________________________________________________________ Ltsp-discuss mailing list. To un-subscribe, or change prefs, goto: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/ltsp-discuss For additional LTSP help, try #ltsp channel on irc.freenode.net
