[wplug] Corporate Desktops

Vanco, Don don.vanco at agilysys.com
Thu Jun 3 09:27:40 EDT 2004


wplug-bounces+don.vanco=agilysys.com at wplug.org wrote:
> 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. 

	The availability of an upgrade doesn't necessarily mean you have
to use it.  Honestly, the customers that I deal with that match your
profile usually "set it and forget it" when it comes to the distro they
use (as opposed to following a frequent update schedule)

> Also, try as I may, I havnt
> found a very good way to make Debian user friendly, 
Knoppix?

> 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.
You sound like you might be a candidate for White Box Linux - the
"reverse engineered" (well, compiled) RHEL distro.  RH Professional
Workstation can provide all the stuff you need.




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