On Wed, Mar 19, 2014 at 05:40:47PM +0000, Norrie McKinley wrote: > If anyone has moved small organisations over to LTSP from Windows could > you please tell me how the move went? Was there much kicking and > screaming from the users?
I moved over our business (a couple of Honda dealerships with about 50 desktops) over to LTSP from Windows. I had no issues with users at all, being a smallish business, users could see that spending 300 pounds sterling per user for them to have MS Office over OpenOffice was absurd. I would imagine larger businesses would not have that benefit, and users would be likely to feel resentful, but certainly at our size of business, users felt close enough to the business to see the sense. It also meant that we could provide all users with an office suite, whereas previously it was only provided to those that needed it. This ability to provide all software to everyone is a great advantage. The reliability and uptime have been simply staggering. We've had whole years with zero downtime. When you come from the Windows world of regular reboots and painful Windows Updates and anti-virus, this is a revelation. But there have been problems: 1. Internet Explorer It transpired that many of our suppliers have extranets that are based around Active-X and are thus Windows only. And don't believe the posts that tell you that you can get Active-X working in Firefox - that is a Windows-only solution, where Firefox uses IE to serve up IE pages within Firefox. And amazingly in 2014 this remains a substantial problem, as corporate extranets tend to be changed far less frequently than websites, it is not uncommon for extranets to last more than a decade, over which time a website may be replaced several times. Our solution was to have a virtual machine running Windows to which users could connect via RDP. It works pretty well, but potentially leaves you with all the costs of Windows. And no, telling critical suppliers to support other browsers is not realistic. 2. Office Documents OpenOffice and LibreOffice are good, but not perfect. If you receive documents with embedded macros, then these will almost certainly not work, and the lack of the latest Microsoft fonts could result in formatting of documents being a little off. Some of the more advanced Powerpoint presentations can be an issue as well. In short - if you receive a lot of sophisticated office documents, then you may have issues. And, on the subject of macros, if you need macros in documents, then you will need a tame programmer to write them for you - they are an order of magnitude more difficult than in MS Office. Mail-merge has also been something of a headache, although certainly possible, it seems to be that little bit more difficult. Over the years I have found the best way of doing it and it works fine - but difficult to delegate to less than expert users. 3. Quick and easy database applications This was a huge loss for us, having written quite a number of dirty Access applications, these proved impossible to migrate. I ended up replacing some of them with Ruby on Rails applications, but the extra work required was not rewarded with any significant benefit. I know people despise Access, but for writing a quick and usable application for non-programmers, it is great. 4. Upgrades The one thing that I thought would be easy under Linux proved a nightmare. Free upgrades forever, yay! Then the excellent KDE 3.5 was replaced by the completely unusable KDE 4.0, 4.1, 4.2, 4.3, until finally, there was the usable KDE 4.4, by which time the distro had evolved too far for there to be a simple upgrade path. The loss of support for Kiosk-tool for KDE centralised administration, has been the other issue in KDE 4.. > I would be quite keen to configure this for in fat client or mixed mode. We are all "thin" but I don't think users know that - as the performance feels "local". Only full screen video really needs fat clients, at least in our experience. Where users require full screen video, then this is provided via local apps - which seem to me to represent the best of both worlds. Chris. -- Chris Roberts http://chrisjrob.com/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Learn Graph Databases - Download FREE O'Reilly Book "Graph Databases" is the definitive new guide to graph databases and their applications. Written by three acclaimed leaders in the field, this first edition is now available. Download your free book today! http://p.sf.net/sfu/13534_NeoTech _____________________________________________________________________ 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
