[plug] [link] big news - Tel$ra on Linux ?

[Craig Ringer]

> Dont count your chickens, guaranteed they are merely bucking for a licensing
> cost drop. Notice how they explicitly mention how much they want to save, and
> the overbearing positiveness the Telstra guys has.
> 
> Alas, their MS guy is probably crunching the numbers with Bill as we speak.

True enough. It's a provably effective technique, and one that MS seems 
to feel bound to respond to. They have to think they /could/ make such a 
move, though, or MS would be likely to laugh at them and give them a 
'take it or leave it, but stop bothering us' response. It's interesting, 
nonetheless.

Frankly, at this point I'm getting increasingly reluctant to reccomend 
Linux desktops to most people. A few could definitely benefit, if their 
users have quite restricted needs or they have tight budgets, but IMHO 
there's a lack of central manageability (especially in the big desktop 
environments, and the big apps like Mozilla and OpenOffice) and some 
code quality issues. I'm wasting too much time on Mozilla bugs to be 
able to say 'yeah, just go for it' to anybody. Maybe it'd be /better/ 
for larger companies who can afford to do a bit of bug-squashing, but 
it's a big downside for me at the POST. Overall, we've done well with 
our LTSP setup, and in terms of cost for functionality it's worked out 
much better than anything else, but stability and central configuration 
management does need to improve.

Still, there are really only a few niggling bugs affecting us at the 
POST, and most could be dealt with in a week or two by one fairly 
skilled OSS programmer.

The central config issues are simply application design limitations, but 
probably not too hard to overcome. Just:
(a) Avoid storing the username or home directory path in config files, 
so that they can easily be dropped in /etc/skel and such.
(b) have a config search path:
   app builtin defaults
   /etc/appname/userdefaults
   ~/.appname (or ideally ~/.config/appname
               - dotfile overload is getting silly)
   /etc/appname/override
     and inherit settings intelligently. Allow use of variables like 
$USER and $HOME in system-wide configs.

Those two alone would make it /vastly/ easier to make sensible default 
setups for things like Mozilla and OpenOffice, and reduce the amount of 
time wasted setting up apps for each user considerably. No more setup 
dialogs, the app 'just works' the first time it's launched, because 
configuration has been done in a global config file. What a nice 
thought. As it is, I have to go through OO.o setup, then the address 
book wizard, then the registration, fire up mozilla mail and enter the 
user details, run acrobat reader to agree to the darn license _again_, 
run GIMP setup, etc. Most of these involve clicking 'next' lots. Even 
something as simple as having /etc/openoffice/install-defaults would 
help - set it to run silently, and use the default entries provided. 
OO.o apparently has some kind of autoinstall, but I haven't found much 
info on it.

I just thought I'd bring up some of the ongoing issues I've seen in 
Linux deployment for business. If I'm totally missing obvous features of 
these apps, please tell me - I'd /love/ to know.

Overall, things do work very well - OO.o does a great job, as does 
Mozilla (except the Mozilla Mail bugs - *sigh*), and the underlayer of 
XFCE4, XFree86, LTSP, Linux, etc 'just works'. Half the frustration is 
in being so close to a zero-configuration-per-user system.

Hmm... I'm going to issuezilla and moz bugzilla now, just to make sure 
there are RFEs filed on the central config issue...

Craig Ringer