[wplug] Corporate Desktops

[John Harrold]

Sometime in June Vanco, Don assaulted the keyboard and produced:

| My best experience to date (particularly with non-computer literate end
| users) has been Lindows, the worst - Xandros (would not install on ANY of
| the 3 systems I attempted to install).  I would have to say that from a
| management / replication standpoint Red Hat is likely the leader by far.
| Don't know if he'll shime in or not, but my co-worker Jeremey has been
| battling SuSE for weeks (on an arguably Windows-centric corporate
| network) and it has been quite the arduous task getting to stable
| functionality.
|  
| You might consider looking at the Red Hat K-12 stuff (as well as other
| K-12 sites) - it's not just for kids anymore.  I would also say that from
| a deployment standpoint IBMs xCAT is pretty usefull too...

I've mucked around with this for a while. Since the EOL of Redhat 9, I've
been trying to come up with a solution to replace our Redhat 9 boxes. Our
needs are a little different. We're an academic research group and our
needs primarily involve numerical simulations and optimization (Matlab, C,
CPLEX, GAMS, Mathematica, etc.). Of course, we also need the standard stuff
(web browser, LaTeX, editors, compilers, etc).

Through my messings, I've decided on using Debian for our servers/dedicated
number crunching machines and Fedora for the workstations.  Ideally I'd
like to use the same distro everywhere, but the 6 month upgrade cycle of
Fedora is just too frequent for the servers. Also, try as I may, I havnt
found a very good way to make Debian user friendly, and I don't want to
monkey around with each individual computer to get the video, sound,
automount, and all the other happiness working. Fedora does a good job of
detecting all of this stuff. 

So for us it looks like Debian/Sarge for the headless machines and Fedora
for the workstations. Redhat and Fedora by extension are easy to install on
multiple computers with kickstart, so updating the workstations every 6
months or so isn't going to be much of a problem. I realize this would be
an issue in the typical 'corporate' environment, so it may not work out for
the original poster.

-- 
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