Are you looking for a Windows alternative for serious office work? Many people are starting to wonder about their non-Microsoft operating system options, especially given Windows Vista’s hefty hardware demands, upgrade costs and license restrictions. Scot Finnie, Computerworld’s online editorial director, has already examined using Mac OS X in the workplace.
Now, I take a hard look at Linux by using an enterprise distribution exclusively at work. I’m not simply playing with a test machine; I’ve been using Novell’s SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10+ day in, day out to do my job as Computerworld’s online managing editor.
After several weeks, I can report that desktop Linux does appear ready for no-frills home users. But things get a bit more dicey for corporate users like me.
If your needs end with e-mail, simple (non-IE-optimized) Web browsing, word processing and spreadsheets, desktop Linux distros, such as SUSE and Ubuntu, are ready for you today — even in the workplace. At the other end, if you’re a high-end technologist, you’ve probably got the interest, aptitude and ability to get around nonsupport obstacles and dive deep in the guts of your kernel.
But if you’re somewhere in between, well, as one of Computerworld’s Web developers cautioned me, there’s a very steep learning curve in going beyond basic Linux use. If you’re a Windows power user who needs applications beyond the basic office and communication tools, if you’ve been trained on them, customized them, written scripts for them and come to depend on them in your day-to-day work, you’re going miss them.
In addition, if you’ve got a handheld, portable media player or other mobile device, chances are it’s not as plug-and-play on Linux as it is with Windows.
That’s not a knock on Linux as a piece of software. It’s a problem of market share and clout. There’s no company with Microsoft’s marketing muscle cajoling major software firms, such as Adobe and Intuit, to support the platform.
To be fair, at least there’s a possibility of hacking an application when it won’t officially run on Linux, which is less often the case with Windows. And that might be a fun challenge at home. But I usually don’t want to hack an application at the office. I need to get my work done.
First impressions
After years on Windows XP, it’s kind of fun to see something new on my desktop. And after months of Microsoft hype, I’m happy to be checking out something that’s not Vista.
My volunteer “IT admin,” Computerworld’s online special projects editor Joyce Carpenter, reports that the SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop setup was a snap.
Setup, part 1: Installation
As volunteer admin, my job was to install SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop on an old Dell machine we had kicking around the office, and to connect it to our office infrastructure.
Installation is easy: Just put in the CD, pick a few things, agree to a few things, click “next” a lot of times, put in the next CDs, one after the other, and voila! It’s done.
A few specifics:
— I selected GNOME for the desktop interface. In my mind, I associate KDE with a more advanced user than the one I’ll be supporting, although if there ever were a reason for that association it is now lost in the mists of a very poor memory.
— I tried to give “root” an easy password — this is only a test, after all. But it would have none of that. I had to go with eight characters that do not form a word but do include numerals.
— I made two user accounts, one for me (jcarpenter) and one for Sharon (smachlis), giving each a strong password.
— I accepted the default networking configuration. This included an enabled firewall and a Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol-enabled network card, which was discovered without any problem.
— I downloaded the latest updates and enabled automatic updates, which was the only change from the defaults for the entire installation process.
— Joyce Carpenter
If you think that open source means “cheesy or nonexistent UI,” I can assure you that my Linux desktop appears designed for business. Sleek and reasonably serious (well, except for the default lizard wallpaper), it offers Windows-like graphical menus to get to files and apps, along with elegant command-line access if you want to control your system via text. My initial thought: This is an operating system for grown-ups. It’s hard to imagine a Microsoft-style Clippy animated “helper” popping up here!
My new Linux station is actually an old Dell Pentium III machine (remember those?) with a 40GB hard drive and less than 800MB RAM that couldn’t even come close to running Vista.
In less than an hour, I’m convinced that Linux is indeed a way to get more life out of old hardware. I’d prefer a speedier machine — who wouldn’t? — but the system is ready to do real, 2007-era work.
SUSE Linux out of the box is bundled with a lot of applications, including a souped-up version of the OpenOffice suite and software to read files in Adobe PDF, Flash and RealMedia formats (notable omission: QuickTime). There are multiple Web browsers and text editors, Novell’s Evolution e-mail, calendaring and collaboration package, and other preloaded apps, such as the Gaim instant messaging client.
Unlike many of the applications included on new Windows systems, these don’t seem to come with annoying self-launching advertisements, such as the irony-challenged Trend Micro Anti-Spyware pop-up upgrade pleas that plagued my HP system at home. Novell’s SUSE also boasts some of the on-screen eye candy corporate users have come to expect, such as a 3D swoosh when a window minimizes.
The basics work well right off the bat. I’ve got a network connection; I can print; I can surf the Web using one of several included Web browsers. I can easily access files from a network drive and import my Firefox bookmarks. Although we couldn’t get a version of Notes for Linux to try out during my first week of testing, I still have access to e-mail and my calendar via the Web.
Several people stop by on my first day working on the new system to ask me, “What’s Linux like?” I’m almost embarrassed to say that at first blush, it’s a lot like Windows — but with more free apps and more access to command-line control. Of course, under the hood, there are many more differences.
Web work goes particularly well. I’m primarily a Firefox user on Windows, but also have to use IE in the office because it’s the only Windows browser that works properly with our content management system, Interwoven’s TeamSite. The good news is that Firefox on Linux works with TeamSite, even though Firefox on Windows does not. (Firefox on Mac also works well.) I’m only missing an ActiveX plug-in for WYSIWYG editing that I rarely use anyway.
I download a test Excel spreadsheet from Google Docs & Spreadsheets into Open Office, and it works flawlessly. After a few hours, I’m convinced this whole test will be a piece of cake and I’ll be penning a glowing endorsement of Linux in the workplace, without a single reservation.
I’m wrong.
Setup, part 2: Getting connected
My second task as Sharon’s admin was to get the Linux machine integrated with our network and communications tools.
Network file servers: I had some trouble accessing our Windows file servers, but then I found a “Connect to Server” option on the Places menu. From it, I chose “Windows Share,” entered the UNC name, clicked “connect,” entered my Windows login information (name, domain, password) and was connected.
Printing: Selecting the Applications menu > Utilities > Printing > Printers launches the Common Unix Print System Manager utility. To print, just double-click the New Printer icon, enter the information it wants and print the test page. No problem, right? Well, mostly.
There was one little glitch that required some research to get over. I knew the editorial printer was an HP Laser Jet 4000. I knew it was attached to an HP Jet Direct. I had the IP address of the Jet Direct, so I entered it, continued to the next screen and selected the printer. All seemed fine. I created a test page in a text editor and sent it off. But off it didn’t go. I double-checked the settings and tried again. Still nothing.
An hour later, I found the information I needed in the reference manual mentioned in the startup guide. When it asked for the Host, it wanted a name. I printed a test page from the Jet Direct, got its name, typed the name in the Host field and it worked. In YaST (Yet another Setup Tool), SUSE’s main admin tool, I made it available to all users and it appeared in the Printers list for the users.
E-mail and calendar: We use IBM’s Lotus Notes, and this turned out to be an initial sticking point, since IBM didn’t want to give us a test copy of an older version Notes for Linux when the Notes 8 beta was due out any day. Fortunately, Notes has a Webmail client, so Sharon still had access to her e-mail and calendar via the Web. She later installed the Notes 8 client public beta herself.
— Joyce Carpenter
The first major snag
It’s day 3, and I’ve discovered the first application I desperately miss: NoteTab Pro, a US$30 text/HTML editor I’ve used for years. It’s got elegant one-click menu commands for everything from adding HTML tags and links to changing text case, joining lines, stripping HTML (with or without keeping links), quoting and unquoting text, and checking spelling.
I’m well aware that there are better pure text editors out there, and better pure HTML/programming editors as well. But the intersection of functions NoteTab offers is what I need on the job. NoteTab has a somewhat quirky scripting language, one I wouldn’t want to learn as a standalone programming language, but I’ve developed a bunch of scripts to automate routine editor tasks we do here, such as cleaning up text when freelancers send in heavily formatted Word docs.
When I get my first major feature as a Word doc, it opens up fine in OpenOffice, and I do some editing in there. But without NoteTab, I have no automated way to strip out Word formatting I don’t want and add in HTML coding I do want.
Having a Windows virtual machine on my system would let me run NoteTab. But one point of this experiment is to see whether I can live solely with Linux on the job, theoretically avoiding the expense and support costs of a second operating system.
So I turn to CodeWeavers’ CrossOver Linux Professional, which is designed to allow you to run Windows software on Linux without needing a Windows license (or installation). CrossOver Linux is based on the open-source Wine project, offering what it calls “a compatibility layer for running Windows programs” based on the Windows Application Programming Interface.
I’m thrilled when NoteTab Light, a free version of NoteTab, seems to install seamlessly, even though NoteTab is not one of the officially supported CrossOver apps. It’s especially entertaining when, during the installation process, CrossOver says: “Simulating Windows reboot.”
Alas, the more robust Pro version won’t even open. And Light seems somewhat flaky when I try to add my scripts (called “clips” in NoteTab-speak). There are other annoying glitches. Much of the time, there’s no option to save when I’m working on a document, so I’ve got to close my document to get the “Do you want to save?” dialog box each time I want to store my work. I also encounter glitches from time to time when trying to place my cursor within a document, and “select all” often doesn’t work. Search and replace seems somewhat hit and miss.
Ah, well. I begin the search for a replacement text/HTML editor. ActiveState’s Komodo Edit holds promise. It’s got recordable macros as well as programmed ones. However, it’s designed for developers, not journalists, so it doesn’t include editorial functions such as spell check.
Kate, a text editor included with my SUSE Linux desktop, is a possibility, since it has many of the NoteTab functions I’ve used to save time, such as joining lines and changing text case, although not some of the more elegant one-step, built-in commands such as “strip HTML but leave the links.”
I move my feature into Komodo Edit and then Kate until I finally get it “clean” enough to put into our straight-ASCII-only Web content management system. Most annoyingly, I end up coding all the paragraph marks by hand, since I don’t have the patience to figure out the Linux end-of-line character and run multiple search-and-replace commands (some paragraphs had one line break, others had two). Just like back in 1995!
This isn’t to say I couldn’t get up to speed with a new text editor and new macros. I’m sure I could. But this requires an investment of a scarce resource in our newsroom these days: time. It’s clear that if we were to move from Windows to Linux, some power users would take an initial productivity hit while we figured out how to streamline tasks that were automated on our old platform.
I’m still searching for a great text/HTML editor for Linux, by the way; more on that in a future article. Feel free to add your suggestions to the conversation. Several readers have suggested Vim (for “Vimproved”), which I find slightly alarming, since I used text-based vi on Unix for years and disliked it intensely. Perhaps Vim really is improved; I pledge to give it a try. But not this week. For now, I’m cutting and pasting from one app to another in order to get all the functions I miss in NoteTab. Sigh.
Other apps I miss
I quickly discover other software packages I wish I had. I use Adobe Photoshop Elements both at work and at home to do image processing. Unfortunately, Elements isn’t available on Linux, and CrossOver doesn’t support Elements.
CodeWeavers does say CrossOver supports full-blown Photoshop, but older Versions 6 and 7, not current CS2. In any case, I don’t need the complete Photoshop package, which costs hundreds of dollars. Elements, which I got online for $50 after rebate, does just fine. I’m not saving much money using Linux if I need a $400 application package to replace a $50 one!
My SUSE installation includes an imaging package called GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program), but the interfaces are rather different. I’ve invested more than 10 hours of training in Elements, learning exactly how to do what I need to do (improve and resize photos), plus I own several detailed Elements reference books. I’m not sure I want to throw all that out to learn GIMP.
iTunes isn’t exactly a must-have business app, but I do enjoy listening to music on headphones from time to time in the office. I install iTunes under CrossOver, but it supports Version 4.9 and recommends against upgrading, which is unwelcome news if you want the latest features. (The latest iTunes version for Windows is 7.0.2.) Also, I can’t access the iTunes store. This is a nonstarter at home, where we’re a (gulp) five-iPod family.
More importantly, here at Computerworld we use Adobe InCopy for our print edition, and that’s available only on Windows or the Mac. I don’t need that application daily, but I do use it at least once a week — more if I’m trying to track down a print-to-Web production problem. When Friday rolls around, I end up walking over to my old Windows machine to send in my writeups for Monday’s print table of contents.
Adobe now offers Adobe Reader, Flash 9 and LiveCycle on Linux. Beyond that, PR director Rebecca Michals tells me, “We continue to evaluate Linux development based on customer feedback.” Which sounds like PR-speak for, “Maybe if a lot of our large, important users demand it, we’ll think about it. But don’t hold your breath.”
I’m able to access almost all of our Computerworld.com site analytics just fine, since they’re browser based. However, I’m no longer able to use an IE-only plug-in called Click Map, which lets us see a “hot map” representation of how popular individual links are on any page of our site. That’s an important tool in deciding whether to leave up a top story on our home page or replace it, and I find myself walking back to my old system to view the latest map.
Finally, I miss syncing my Palm T/X to my work desktop. It looks like it should work; there’s an included application just for that purpose, called Gnome Pilot. But it doesn’t.
I go searching on the Web, and find some step-by-step advice on NewsForge, an open-source news and information site. I try most of the recommended steps, without success. My volunteer admin gives it a try as well, but still no sync.
Here’s an example of why moderate-level power users can be frustrated by Linux at times. We’re likely to have hardware gadgets and added software applications beyond standard configurations. But we may not know enough to make Linux run what vendors don’t officially support.
The issue isn’t Linux technology or UI. It’s vendor support. If there were Palm desktop software for Linux, I wouldn’t need to be mucking around on the command line, installing packages and so on, just to back up a copy of my meeting schedule. To be honest, I can’t sync my Palm on my system at home either, because Palm doesn’t support Windows XP Media Edition, and there’s no hope of hacking around to fix that. But it does sync just fine on my Windows system in the office.
On the upside
Little things crop up during my weeks working on Linux that show it’s an operating system designed for serious users. For example, you can open up a terminal window from any folder, and the terminal immediately places you into the same directory you were just viewing. As far as I know, in XP there’s only one way to get to the command line, and that’s by going to the start menu, clicking on run and then typing in cmd. That dumps me into my C:Documents and SettingsAdministrator directory. It’s a bit of a pain to then manually move to, say, my C:Program Filesxamppmysqlbin directory to issue a text-based MySQL command. Of course, I can (and did) write a batch script to change the directory, but I don’t always know the directories in advance.
I can easily access files on my network drive from Linux, and moving them from my Windows system to the test Linux box is a snap. There’s no need for typing out cp /long/filepath
/new/evenlonger/filepath if I’m not in a command-line mood. Dragging and dropping works just fine.
Playing an MP3 file is as easy as clicking on it and bringing up RealPlayer for Linux, an application that appears refreshingly spare in this incarnation. But as my Web developer colleague warned, watching a movie trailer on the Web, which I do with a click on Windows, is more complicated, since many are in Apple’s QuickTime format and Apple doesn’t provide a QuickTime player or a plug-in for Firefox on Linux.
One of the things I do NOT miss on Linux: Windows balloons nagging me about updates I’m not interested in installing. (IE7, anyone?)
When Linux plug-and-play works, it’s a pleasant experience. I load up openSUSE, Novell’s home desktop Linux operating system, from a live CD at home and pop in a USB flash drive; the contents of the drive are as simple to read on Linux as they are on Windows. When I boot back to Windows from my hard drive, the text file I created with Komodo Edit in Linux reads just fine back in NoteTab Pro.
I know people who think Microsoft Word is the best, most feature-laden, elegant and useful word processor on the market. I am not among them, and in fact rarely use it at work, since it tends to add all sorts of problematic characters to text that then wreak havoc when the text is pasted into our Web content management system. Novell’s version of OpenOffice Writer works just fine for what I need, although I did laugh when a “helper” window popped up in the middle of some text cleanup, complete with lightbulb illustration. At least, it wasn’t Clippy-style animation!
I am, however, a big fan of Excel. I like the interface and think it’s an elegant piece of software. While I still consider Excel the best-of-category application, I’m pleasantly surprised by Novell’s version of OpenOffice Calc. For example, when I scrape a report off one of our internal Web sites, it dumps into a formatted spreadsheet just as easily as when I do so with Excel. This is important, since I pull reports off that site several times a week, and don’t want to have to cut and paste individual columns.
While some of my smaller apps like NoteTab are unavailable for Linux, others have cross-platform options. For example, I use an open-source Windows application called Password Safe to store various passwords. It’s got close to 10 years of passwords stored in there, and I have a lot of passwords. Happily, someone wrote a Linux app that uses the same database format. Installing MyPasswordSafe turns out to be easy once the right source code gets downloaded.
Overall, I believe there are ways around most of the apps I’m missing, even NoteTab. But short of dual-boot systems or desktop virtualization, Adobe applications remain a challenge.
The final piece of the puzzle
When it becomes available, I download the public beta of Lotus Notes 8 for Linux, unpack some files and run the client installation file. This is the last critical piece of the experiment — the way our newsroom is set up, it would be tough to do my day-to-day job without running the same communications platform as my colleagues.
After I answer a couple of questions and move a copy of my Notes ID file, I’m set up with Notes in just a few minutes. I can send and receive e-mail, access my calendar, schedule meetings, and use several of our newsroom-wide Notes databases.
It is, however, painfully slow, since my hardware configuration falls somewhere between “minimum” (512MB RAM) and “recommended” (1GB). Don’t expect Linux to give new life to your old hardware if you want to run the latest version of Notes. I put in a request to upgrade my Linux desktop.
The bottom line
I expected to be a poster child for the next wave of Linux desktop adopters. I wanted to be. I like the whole idea of a technically macho, open-source operating system — one that doesn’t assume we all must be protected from an operating system’s inner workings. I don’t fear command lines, and enjoy fiddling around with programming.
It turns out that an intermediate-level power user may not be the ideal next desktop Linux demographic.
It was possible for me to do most, but not all, of my work on a Linux system. There are some applications I’d miss if I were to make the switch permanently, but I believe I could adequately replace them after sufficient research and time rewriting scripts.
There are a few other applications I definitely need access to from time to time and that won’t run on Linux. I could probably deal with these either by virtual-machine Windows or by a separate Windows machine shared by multiple users. (Don’t laugh — that’s what our copy editors did for awhile, since they’re all on Macs and some initially wanted access to an ActiveX-control feature in our content management system.)
Other business users — workers in sales, finance or human resources, for instance — might also find that applications they depend on don’t translate easily to Linux. They may find work-arounds; they may not.
While I liked many things about my Linux desktop (look and feel, elegant command-line implementations, robust open-source apps, the whole open-source concept), I found the lack of some key applications and the occasional hardware non-plug-and-play too limiting. Unlike Scot Finnie on Mac OS X, I’m not willing to tell Microsoft buh-bye. Not yet, anyway. But there’s enough here I like that I’m going to keep the Linux system set up, too.
Transition issues and how to solve them
Whether you’re a seasoned admin looking to move other users from Windows to Linux, or a Windows user looking to investigate a Vista alternative, you’re likely to encounter some snags. Here are some issues I encountered when trying to make the switch:
Does my hardware work? One of the major frustrations of moving to Linux is getting deep into the transition, only to discover that a favorite device (iPod, PalmPilot) won’t connect properly. If you’re an admin at a company where nonstandard hardware can be connected to your corporate network, you’ll save a lot of headaches if you inventory users about such hardware in advance before trying to move them to Linux. If you’re an end user, you might save yourself some aggravation by doing your own inventory, followed by a Web search to see if there are any known issues.
Another possible step before going through a full Linux installation is to download a “live” CD or DVD version of Linux, burn it and then boot up off the disc. You’ll have a working Linux system where you can try to connect to your network, printers, handhelds and so on. Both openSUSE and Ubuntu have live CD/DVD versions available for free download.
Will my applications work? Inventory all the applications you have to have, plus all the ones you’d like to have. Will they run on Linux? If the application’s vendor/publisher doesn’t support Linux but the software supposedly runs using something like CrossOver Linux, definitely test it first before assuming that’s an answer.
If your applications won’t run on Linux, either natively or jury-rigged, are there similar applications that will satisfy user needs? If so, what’s the learning curve? If not, are you willing to consider the licensing and support costs of using dual-boot systems or desktop virtualization?
Where’s my stuff? As a Linux/Unix admin or user, you may be so used to directories like bin and lib that you don’t give them a second thought. But trust me, most Windows users who’ve never seen an *x system will blanch at that collection of unfamiliar file names. If you’re an admin, make sure to give your users a cheat sheet of what the important folders are, how to navigate to them and how to find equivalents to Windows folders, such as Program Files and My Documents.
If you’re a new end user, you may find useful information about this on your distro’s Web site or in a book such as SAM’s Linux Starter Kit, or online (try FreeOS.com or Red Hat). A Linux Forums post also includes a brief nod to the difference in Windows and Linux paths.
Should users have root access? This one is workplace-specific, since you’d obviously give yourself full access to your own home system. On the job here, my “admin” decided I should test the setup without having root privileges. I wasn’t very happy about it. Without being able to access YaST, I was unable to do things like check system status or download and install some security patches. I suspect some of these barriers could be addressed by adding privileges to a nonroot user.
You might get the same level of displeasure restricting admin privileges on a Windows system, but on top of the move to an unfamiliar operating system, reining in power users’ abilities is likely to add to general new technology grumpiness. If you’re rolling out multiple Linux desktops, investigate whether there are ways to give users added access without compromising security. And if you decide to keep people out of YaST, make sure to tell them why and who they need to talk to when they’ve got needs requiring root-level access.
— Sharon Machlis
Sharon Machlis is Computerworld’s online managing editor.
