My advice is to get professional help. The last thing Linux needs is another dissatisfied customer. If they really want to move to Linux on a large scale they need to figure out how much that's really going to cost them and then pay for it. It's never as simple as just reinstalling everything. I'm not suggesting any particular company but this is not a hobby project.
It sounds like they're a small business. They probably don't have a full time sysadmin and they probably shouldn't but you can guarantee they'll need someone there full time to hold their hands for the first several months if not years. Moving to Linux right after a colossal failure of Windows doesn't sound like a good business move anyway. They ought to wait until the fog clears and think about it rationally. Good business decisions aren't driven by fear. They also need to find out how well their windows apps run under wine before spending even a dime on a transition as that could be a deal-breaker. Sorry if that sounds anti-Linux, it's not. But I do think that Linux is hard to transition to and hard = expensive if time = money. So many bad things could come of this. I'm also going to guess that the real reason this whole thing happened is that they were trying not to pay for IT. Either they didn't have a sysadmin, they hired the cheapest one they could get, or someone in the company (possibly higher up in the company) thought they could do it themselves. Also someone trusted McAfee. Ha. Not knowing what their computing needs are is also very very suspicious. Okay, must. stop. rant. And definitely not Gentoo. Unless you've got an IT shop that specializes in supporting it at a fair price. /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
