"Michael McGreevy" <MMcGreevy at xcedex.com> wrote: > I'm doing a survey on why Linux is having such success. I was > wondering if a number of the users in your organization would share > with me their comments and observations of Linux versus Microsoft > products. Why are they using Linux? Is it just for financial > reasons. Or are there other reasons, development, security etc... I find one of Linux's greatest strengths is the ability to automate system installation and maintenance with minimal effort and little capitol. The importance of automated software maintenance has never been so well illustrated as it has recently been by the Windows Internet worm, Blaster. The the exploit that the Blaster worm used has been known for quite some time, and the patch has been available on the Windows Update site long before the virus had a chance to propagate so swiftly. Why did it succeed in crippling both private and public networks? Naive or lazy Windows users who either didn't know it was their responsibility to keep their system up to date with the latest patches, or didn't care. Ask yourself whether or not a business manager should really have to care about whether or not his computers were secure? Should the telephone sales representative need to know that they need to visit the "Windows Update" site every day? No doubt there will be a flurry of phone calls from Windows software companies selling automated tools to keep business workstation systems up to date. Symantec will try to push their Nortan System Center software, and Microsoft will advise everyone to upgrade to the latest and greatest Windows Server 2003 with Active Directory, which totes a maintenance automation utility. Do you really want to be locked into the Microsoft loop of upgrading to incompatible operating systems? Where am I going with this? With Linux, the tools are already in place. Red Hat, Mandrake, and other RPM based systems use a simple tool called "kickstart" for automated and unattended installations. Debian has both the Progeny application called "autoinstall" and the Fully Automated Install (FAI) projects to use. Both RPM and DEB based systems have strong tools for package (software) installation, and maintenance, and configuration. Debian itself uses a command-line application called "apt" to download the latest software to your system automatically, and can be configured to install the software immediately or hold the software in a queue directory for later. apt has been so popular in handling DEB packages, that developers for the RPM-based packages have ported the tool to their systems. Ximian, a commercial company that develops and sells software for the Linux and UNIX platforms, has developed an automation system called Red Carpet. Progeny, a Debian GNU/Linux software and consulting company has developed their own network-wide system management tools for automating the maintenance and installation of multiple flavors of Linux. Part of this problem lies in the question of scalability. Will your Windows automated maintenance solutions scale as well as Linux? How will the cost to maintain these systems compare? As with any operating system, you can either purchase your software, or you can look to the Free Software and Open Software communities for support. And the software is rolling. I am amazed at the quality and quantity of software that is being released under open source licenses in recent years. The OpenOffice.org project, a child of StarOffice and a donation to the Open Source community by Sun, has really taken off in popularity. It provides a level of compatibility with the Word Document, Excel Spreadsheets, and PowerPoint presentation slingers of the world. If you're a fan of Visio, the flow-chart creation tool, Dia is available. For web application platforms, you have Java with Tomcat/Jakarta, Python with Zope and company, Perl with Mason, and you can run it all on top of Apache 2. There was a recent German(?) usability study comparing pre-installed Linux Desktop environment using OpenOffice.org and KDE (or was it Gnome) with Microsoft's XP Office. The people used in the study didn't have any experience with either platform, and although Linux didn't take first place, it didn't exactly loose either. Of course, there is the very basic comparisons between the Windows graphical captive environments, and Unix's ability to drop to the command line and perform more advanced scripting and automation tasks. Check out Mike Gancarz, "The Unix Philosophy" for a detailed explanation of "What is UNIX." It's a good, light read. So, once again, it comes back to automation and maintenance. With Linux, the tools are in place. With Windows, you'll either need to pay for them, or you'll have to create your own. I recently had a conversation at one of our TCLUG Beer Meetings with an employee of the Target corporation -- sorry if I forgot your name. They succeeded in creating and deploying an software installation system modeled after Debian's apt and dpkg infrastructure entirely in BATCH! The importance of unattended software installation was so great that these masochists used thousands of lines of DOS BATCH code to make their lives easier! If that doesn't illustrate motivation, nothing will. The bottom line is that you really need to listen to your systems administrators and engineers, the ones who have been in the trenches, the ones that have excelled because of it. Don't listen to the shell-shocked, unmotivated, paper-MCSE grunt. They're often too focused on their immediate problems than to be able to look at the bigger picture. Linux isn't the answer for everything, but Free Software is not something to overlook simply because it's free. Linux itself is proof of this concept. You will still have to invest money in your technical infrastructure, but if you take a look at the long-term picture, it is my opinion that you'll see Linux as more cost-effective, efficient, stable, and secure than most other solutions. -- Chad Walstrom <chewie at wookimus.net> http://www.wookimus.net/ assert(expired(knowledge)); /* core dump */ -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 240 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://shadowknight.real-time.com/pipermail/tclug-list/attachments/20030816/609cecf9/attachment.pgp