Things that go Wump in the Night..

Just because Digg is floundering under the weight of “I just switched to Linux” submissions, it doesn’t mean that Linux on the Desktop is making significant inroads in corporate adoption.

Here’s the kicker. Microsoft Exchange Server is a honking great MONSTOR of a standard in larger businesses, and for good reason. While I’d probably kill myself if I had to pay for it or maintain it, as an end user, there is much to love about what Exchange does.

Got a desktop and a laptop? No problem. Exchange server will sync your inbox, folders, contacts and calendar.

Use a mobile device? No big deal. Add a contact to your phone, and it will sync to exchange server, and that contact will be added to your outlook contacts.

Your PC died from virus infections? ( Well of course it did.. it’s running XP ).. Just get another one, configure outlook to your exchange server and bang, you’ve got all your stuff back.

Need to setup a meeting with someone? Find them with Exchange Servers central directory, and check out their calendar to find a good time for a meeting.

In summary, life is sweet when you connect your Microsoft OS PC or Microsoft OS mobile device to your Microsoft Exchange server, and crank up your Microsoft Outlook application. Even your Microsoft Office installed Mac can get in on the act with Entourage. How lovely.

Switch to Linux? You’re screwed.

You have three options:

1) Use Evolution Mail which supports the full Exchange feature set through the provided connector.. except that the connector is horrible! It’s buggy. It’s slow. It’s unreliable.. it will drive you nuts.

2) POP or IMAP to the exchange server. It’s better, but forget about calendaring and contacts integration. Calendar events arrive as emails and you loose a feature you’ve become very accustomed to. Group calendars? Forget it.

3) Depending on the security settings of your Exchange server, you might be able to connect using Outlook ( running under Wine emulation ), either directly or through a VPN.. Yuck.

So how do you solve the problem of connecting a Linux desktop to Exchange Server? You don’t.

The problem isn’t Linux, the problem is that you’re buying into the belief system that Microsofts has chosen for you. Not only are you spending out the wazoo for Exchange server, but as a knock on effect, you’re spending out multiple wazoos for MS Office so you can connect to exchange server! Then of course, you’re primarily sticking to Microsoft OS, because what choice do you have!

Dee-De-Dee!

Let’s look at MS Office first. You need it, right?

Wrong.

You need to be able to work on Word and Excel spreadsheets, but you don’t need Office for that. Suns OpenOffice can do all that for you. Available for Mac, PC and Linux, Open Office is a VERY MS Office compatible productivity suite, and it’s FREE. I say “very” because some people tell me it’s not - but I can honestly say that I’ve never in my usage seen any issues.

Let’s do some cost analysis on that:

If you have 10 employees, setting them all up with OpenOffice costs 10 x $0 = $0 If you have 100 employees, setting them all up with OpenOffice costs 100 x $0 = $0 If you have 1000 employees, setting them all up with OpenOffice costs 1000 x $0 = $0

Get it?

Upper management wouldn’t go for it? OK - price out what will happen if you buy MS Office for THEM, and whatever other subgroup you choose ( perhaps accounting? ), and give the other zillion people in your organization OpenOffice. Trust me.. Money talks.

Ah - but what about EMAIL you cry! Microsoft products are the only thing that reliably connect to Microsoft Exchange server!

You’re right - so ditch it.

Go and look at Zimbra. It’s an Open Source Exchange Server KILLER, and Yahoo recently bought it for a gazillion dollars. Why? They haven’t really said, but I imagine it has something to do with a reply to Gmail rolling out IMAP. Things could get interesting if you’re one of those people willing to sacrifice privacy for free services.

Zimbra is easier to install. It’s easier to maintain. It’s easier to scale.. and if you switch someone from Exchange to Zimbra they truly won’t even realize you’ve done it. Appointments, group calendars, contacts - it all works just the same. They truly won’t see any difference from their end. Oh - that’s not true.. if they use the webmail application they will get a shock. It makes Exchange Server Webmail look like a bucket of boiled excrement.

Then what?

Your C-level guys can use Outlook or Entourage just as they always have. PC people using OpenOffice can use either Outlook Express, or the Evolution Mail Beta Your Mac people can use iMail and iCal.. they’ll love you forever. They could alternatively use a Beta version of Evolution. Your geeks can now use Linux, and use Evolution

Then we’d get to see some truly AWESOME Digg articles, about how corporations who look at their internal usage find that 40% of their employees only use the internet, email and office tools - so can easily be switched to Linux for cost savings, security, productivity gains, and so they can show off their spinning cube desktop thingy and wobbly windows to PC and Mac users ;-)

The bottom line is that when Corporations release the strangle hold they put on themselves by using Exchange Server, the results can be nothing but great.

xdesktop discussions are often heated and go long into the night. What’s best? KDE, Gnome, or XFCE? Well it depends, and wherever you look you’ll find people evangelizing one thing or the other.

What makes xdesktops different

Many things, but MANY of them are irrelevant. Linux is not like OS-X which gives you a choice of two look and feels ( which are both awesome btw ). Linux lets you change pretty much anything, so how an environment looks out of the box is totally irrelevant. If you see someone with a great XFCE setup that you like, you can just as easily create it with Gnome or KDE. That’s not the point.

Don’t Differentiate at all

Firstly, unless you are installing on an old laptop or something ( see later ) don’t feel you have to make this choice on day one. Personally, I install Ubuntu on a machine, then add xfce later ( google “installing Xubuntu on top of Ubuntu”. I DON’T install KDE, but do use some KDE applications ( e.g. Kopete for IM ) and the install of that seems to install the core of KDE at the same time.

What I’m trying to say is, you can’t get it “wrong”. You can install multiple xdesktops, and both:

• Choose which one to startup into when you signin without any performance implications
• Once in there, you can pick and choose which applications you like with little performance implications

The best thing is that going one way or the other only rarely has an impact on the steps you might read on a forum to install X or Y.. it’s all pretty much the same under the hood.

Differentiate by Applications

Each xdesktop comes out of the box with different applications, but this is irrelevant, as you can install any element of one in the other. You might love everything about KDE except the Konqueror browser

Differentiate by Weight

The only place this really makes a difference is if you are installing on older hardware. In the scenario the last thing you want to do is install everything then pick and choose. In fact, xfce is considered the de-facto standard for sluggish and old hardware so that is ONE definitive statement I feel I can make. While you’ll probably install your favorite browser on whatever xdesktop you choose, there is no denying that the core of XFCE, and foundational elements like the file browser are super fast. Nothing is thrown in there that is unnecessary, and to some, some things are left out ( like some networking services! ).

If you are like me, it doesn’t matter how gutsy your hardware is, you still like things as quick as possible, so no matter what xdesktop I’m using, I’ll use Thunar from XFCE for file managent. It’s a joy.

Differentiate by Bells & Whistles

Note - I don’t know enough about KDE to comment here. I also don’t know enough about how things run under the surface, I just know what I’ve found to work for me.

In my experience, XFCE vs Gnome is a choice between lightness and those little things that make working with an OS so much easier.

Two examples:

1) Drag and Drop from the Menu

In a nutshell, XFCE doesn’t do it and Gnome does. Where this becomes annoying is if you use Avant-Window-Manager to create an OSX like dock. Under pure XFCE you have to create a launcher on your desktop or somewhere else, then drag THAT to the dock ( and make sure there are no spaces in the fileame!). Under Gnome you can drag icons straight to the dock.

2)Multimedia Keyboard Support

To many this is minor, but with my Microsoft 4000 keyobard ( last remnant of MS! ) I don’t care about most of those extra buttons, but I want the Pause,Mute and volume buttons to work. I dicked with XFCE until I was blue in the face and even though the keyboard is a choice in the config, the don’t. Online tutorials suggest recompiling the kernel for this. er.. no thanks.

Others find that lack of Network support in the XFCE file browser is a deal killer for them. Personally, I find SMB such a clunky POS that I wouldn’t use it anyway, so that’s not a big deal. ( My permanent machines all have NFS mounts, and for temporary needs I use SSHFS ). You CAN get around these things ( google it ) but it’s not 100% elegant.

Pick ‘n Mix

The good news is you can pick ‘n mix the best of both worlds like I mentioned earlier. Here’s what I do, although not HOW TO do it - maybe later. The information is out there:

• Install Ubuntu
• Install xfce-desktop afterwards

I login to XFCE but do some overriding of core elements:

• xfce4-panel replaced by gnome-panel for drag and drop
• xfce-session-manager replaced by gnome-session-daemon for better keyboard support

The result is the ultra-light XFCE feel, but with some of the gnome features I can’t do without.

In a nutshell, if you’re thinking about playing with Parallels, go ahead, but don’t delete your VirtualBox partition to make space for it or you’ll be disappointed.

Introduction to VM Needs

My Mac buddies love Parallels. It allows them to use a browser they hate ( IE7 ) to spend time they don’t have making their sites work for idiots who still use Microsoft products. So when I saw the announement that it was in the Ubuntu repos I hit it straight away.

I have XP and Vista vms under VirtualBox, and, like my Mac buddies do occassionally use them for IE7 testing, but also use IE7 to access QuickBooks Online. Yes, IE6 under Wine can do it, but with heavyness of the QB interface that feels like pulling teeth.

Comparing Parallels and VirtualBox

There really isn’t a comparison. With the same Vista Install, VirtualBox runs smoothely, boots quickly and acts elegantly. With an allocated 512mb, VirtualBox skips along and Parallels flounders. Parallels 5 minute boot includes a 2 minute limbo of “has it crashed or not”, pummelling the entire system so hard that other applications crawl to a halt too. top reveals a pretty constant 30-80% CPU usage by Parallels even when it’s not doing anything.

Parallel Issues with Compiz

Did Canonical Test this thing? With Compiz now standard out of the box with Ubuntu, incredibly, you can’t use Parallels efficiently with Compiz switched on. With Compiz as your display manager, black in a Parallels application becomes transparent! Even setting your linux desktop background to black doesn’t stop it from making a mess of the guest OS’s own overlapping windows. Yuck.

Comparison of Mouse integration

Both vBox and Parallels do a decent job of providing plugins to make mouse movement seamless between parent and child OS.

Other comparisons

Why bother? Horrificly slow boot time during which your machine locks up, high CPU usage, and unusable display - what else is there to talk about?

Until these issues are fixed, then this is a no-go.

You know the way you set something up once in a while ( when you are not using Microsoft products ) and think to yourself, “That’s Nice”.

Mongrel and Apache working together just gave me that joy.. So simple, especially in single instance Mongrel setup.

Basically:

1) Start Mongrel

cd /rails_app/
mongrel_rails start -d -p 3000 ( where 3000 is an available port)

2) Check Mongrel http://that_domain.com:3000

3) Tell Apache Create a virtual_host entry for the site in question and add:

ProxyPass / http://127.0.0.1:3000/
ProxyPassReverse / http://127.0.0.1:3000