Revelation with Red Hat 8.0 happened yesterday. At my new job, I just was given a very nice laptop computer. It's a Sager 5620 (2.53Ghz P4) with all the trimmings and 512MB of RAM. Of course, it was pre-loaded with Windows XP, but I was told I could load anything I wanted on it I felt was needed, including an OS, to get the job done. The company is a heavy user of VMware, so I proceeded to load up Red Hat 8.0, VMware for Linux and a few other goodies.
Red Hat runs great on it and recognized almost all of the hardware out of the box. The only thing that didn't work perfectly was the scrolling feature on the touchpad mouse (Ideas on how to make this go? The Intellimouse drivers make it go insane. The generic drivers work fine except for the scroll button). So, my boss starts working with me on a project he's given me to do and sees my Red Hat install. He is immediately extremely uncomfortable (actually short of breath). Despite saying he's a Pearl/BSD fan, he is obviously out of his element with the system - at least psychologically. It made me wonder if he has really used anything other than MS products in the last few years. A couple of hours later, he orders me to remove Red Hat from my notebook for the following reasons: 1) Even though we are officially not a Microsoft shop, we will now run only Microsoft software on company systems that customers *might* see because we are apparently trying to cozy up to the Redmonians. If a MS rep sees Red Hat on one of our systems, there would be problems. He actually said there would be "consequences". He noted that MS has done this to others. Moreover, if a customer sees Red Hat, they might tell Microsoft on us and then... 2) Our company's future is apparently tied to MS and the enterprise project management software they are marketing. My boss sees no future at all in this area for non-MS products and/or platforms. Apparently, only if MS somehow falters in the enterprise PM software market will we consider alternatives. He said he wasn't even going to argue the point about Red Hat being a better platform to operate from for what we were doing, implying he knew he would lose that one. Especially with our MS servers and platforms going up and down like yo-yos and nobody seems to know why. This is a business decision. I understand business and will do as I'm told, but this sounds like basically, to work as a MS partner, you bob their knob... He did say he would entertain investigating Linux on certain back-end systems in a test mode, but none of our customers or our partners should know about it. So, the threat of Microsoft screwing us and costing us lots of money in the process means I now can not run Red Hat on my laptop - even though I proved 100% compatibility for the projects it was intended for and showed is a better base to run from. The guy responsible for out IT systems said it was, "...a damn cool system". I might be able to sneak it onto through VMware. I might possibly even manage (negotiate) a dual-boot config. Otherwise, our non-Microsoft shop will run only Microsoft products. ...and, by the way, no games allowed. Anybody know of equivalent companies deploying enterprise-class project management server platforms that can compete with Project Server 2002 (uses Project 2002, SQL Server, IIS, SharePoint Team Services and technology from the old Enterprise Project product, which MS bought from E-labor.com)? I don't think there's anything else out there and it's probably a moot point anyway. Mr. Project only hopes to be this good someday. Felt like I was forced to bend over yesterday... If Red Hat reps are watching and want to confidentially discuss details, contact me off-line. I'm sure you're facing this with a lot of businesses. Cheers, Chris -- ==================================== "If you get to thinkin' you're a person of some influence, try orderin' someone else's dog around." --Cowboy Wisdom
