I work as a consultant in a Windows-centric work-place and we remotely administer Windows servers. We trouble-shoot Windows clients. We keep spammers out of our Exchange servers. We defrag. We update. We install antivirus programs. We eliminate spyware. I suppose it would be fair to say that Microsoft keeps us in business. One day, while the boss was away, I shoved a spare hard-drive into my computer and installed Ubuntu 5.04. I managed to work for a month and a half before the Boss noticed I was using Linux - and that was only because he happened to glance at my screen. Half a year later, I am still using Ubuntu (now version 5.10) at work and I am more productive than ever.
My name is Simon, I am a Linux addict, and this is my story.
This is not a typical review, because you've read enough of those. Instead, lets pretend I'm a typical worker, who just happens to have a soft spot for Open Source software. I want to use Linux, but I have a job to do. The price of Freedom should not be my salary. I don't have time to fiddle, all I care is whether or not it can do what I want, right now.
Requirements
So what do I want out of my system? Internet access is obvious, as is e-mail. But not just one Inbox... oh no, not for me. I need to monitor multiple Inboxes and folders (each one receiving alerts from a different server), and be instantly notified when a message arrives. I also need a calendar with alarm pop-ups, because I forget... you know... things. I need to be able receive meetings requests too, because I get sent rather a lot of them. I'd like a task list, and I need it displayed on-screen or I'd never remember to check it.
I need access to file shares on a Windows 2003 Server and I have to be able to work with Word documents, Excel documents and PDFs. I need to be able to edit and exchange documentation, including complex network diagrams, with my Boss – who is still using Microsoft Office. Occasionally I need to edit some graphics for a website, or whack together some PHP code. I need to be able to print to at least one of the two network printers.
I need, absolutely need, a 2560x2048 desktop spread across two monitors. We're talking bright 17” LCD monitors suspended from a gleaming pole. I want people to be so blinded by their radiant brilliance, their shiny fonts, the intrinsic geekiness, that they don't even notice one screen is reading Dilbert and the the other is typing a non-work-related e-mail.
Lastly, I have to be able to be able to connect to Microsoft VPNs, remote desktop into servers, and use VNC to help troubleshoot Windows clients. Everything else is secondary, or not important at all. I have no need for MP3 playback, streaming video, or a wireless network card. I don't care about web cams or playing DVDs. I just want an 'out-of-the-box' business desktop.
Can Ubuntu do it? Why yes, yes it can. And here is how...
Hardware
My choice of test hardware was limited to what was sitting on my desk. I am not much aware of its innards, and not particularly inclined to become acquainted with them so long as everything works. To my best knowledge I am working with the following hardware:
CPU: Athlon 1ghz RAM: 1GB DDR HDD: 40GB something-or-other Video: Some nameless, unmarked, AGP card with DVI output - based on an Nvidia GeForce FX 5200 Motherboard: Something by Asus Sound: Onboard AC97 LAN: Onboard RhineII
And that's all I know... but Ubuntu loves it. Sound and Ethernet worked right off the bat. I had to install the restricted Nvidia drivers and read the official documentation to get both monitors working, but that wouldn't be too troublesome for anyone used to mucking around with their xorg.conf file. Now I have my dual screen desktop and it is a lovely sight to behold. The fonts are so smooth I want to spread them all over my body. It's like butter on the eyeballs, it is.
Ubuntu 5.04 had problems playing sound from two sources at once. This was fixed after upgrading to 5.10. However, Ubuntu 5.10 had absolutely abysmal performance (100% CPU usage most of the time), that I eventually figured out was related to Firefox. Switching to Firefox 1.5 beta solved the problem. I have subsequently installed Ubuntu 5.10 on many other computers and have not had CPU usage problems on any of them.
LAN Networking
Real men use wires. No hassle, no fuss, no brain cancer. Ubuntu 5.04 configured itself via DHCP during install, and a dist-upgrade to 5.10 didn't change anything in that regard. I had Internet connectivity before the operating system had even been installed. But a consultant cannot live by the Internet alone. I needed access to network shares on a Windows 2003 server. I knew from previous experience at that Ubuntu, or rather Samba, is very happy browsing workgroups. But how well would it do with an Active Directory Domain?
Less well, as it happens. Ubuntu 5.10 can authenticate against a Windows 2000/2003 Active Directory Domain [ADS] (basically LDAP with Kerberos) if you really want to. I didn't, but thought I should give it a go anyway in the interest of academic inquiry. It took two hours. Two hours of installing Kerberos packages, messing around with Samba and Winbind, editing Pluggable Authentication Module [PAM] configuration files by hand, 'net mapping' groups, and more.
It is not a process for the faint of heart unless you have very good written instructions (I didn't), but it is possible. And having triumphed at long last over adversity and lack of documentation (and coffee), I went back to using my local account. As long as I had my network shares and e-mail I was happy.
Gnome's Network Servers, under the Places menu, could not seem to browse on the domain but was happy to ask for my username, domain, and password if I typed the IP address of the server into Nautilus manually. As an aside, this problem persisted even when I logged in using my Windows account. I imagine it will continue to persist until GNOME is thoroughly 'kerborized'. At first I couldn't seem to log on correctly until I discovered that you need to use your domain's fully qualified name, e.g. example.local, rather than the NetBIOS abbreviation (e.g. EXAMPLE). Once that was done I could browse and access shares as normal.
I decided to mount my shares locally. Windows shares can be mounted using smbfs, not installed by default but included on the Ubuntu CD, and easily installed with apt-get. However, all attempts to mount the drives using smbfs failed. Google tells me this is due to something called 'smb packet signing' that Windows Server 2003 uses. Apparently you can get around this by messing with Group Policy settings on the server. Perhaps you can, but all I managed to do was lock all our Windows clients out of the network too (don't try this one at work, kids!). Fortunately, further Googling revealed that the CIFS file-system – also provided as part of the smbfs package – should be able to handle packet signing with no problems... And indeed it could, although an O'Reilly book published on the subject this year (2005) claims CIFS is not yet reliable. I haven't seen any problems with it so far... but caveat IT consultant, as the ancient Romans would have said if they'd had computers.
So, not exactly a quick and painless set up, but having done it once it would probably only take five minutes or so to do it again... though I'm a little concerned about the practicality of rolling out a large number of Ubuntu clients in an enterprise environment. Unless you create your own customized install image, it could be quite a hassle configuring all those clients by hand. Luckily there is only one of me, and now that I had access to my files it was time to see how well we could play with Microsoft Exchange.
E-mail
Before switching to Linux I had been using Outlook calendar and task lists extensively. Indeed, I'd even gone as far as installing a sidebar that constantly displayed my various Inboxes, tasks, and appointments on the side of one of my monitors. It was gray. A beautiful slug gray, sliming down the right side my screen. I really wanted to duplicate that functionality in Linux, if it was possible.
Ubuntu's default e-mail client, Evolution, is supposed to play nice with Outlook. It actually turned out to be very simple to get Evolution to connect to our Exchange server and pull out my e-mail, calendars, and task lists, sucking them over the wires like a... ummm... digital vacuum cleaner or something. That's precisely when things started going wrong. Exchange support seemed to be rather buggy and crash prone, and because Evolution is integrated into parts of the desktop, my desktop was soon littered with the burnt, twisted corpses of panel applets and daemons. Both Evolution 2.2.1.1 (Ubuntu 5.04) and 2.4.1 (Ubuntu 5.10) suffered from this problem.
However, all was not lost. Exchange server is fairly happy to deliver e-mail, and even meeting requests, via IMAP. I quietly crept onto the Windows server, turned on the IMAP virtual server, and thus set up my Evolution mailboxes. It should be noted that Evolution's mail notification service is kind of ineffectual. Unless I'm missing something, all it does it let you pick your sound of choice. No pop-up, no panel icon. It does send a DBUS message, so I guess it wouldn't be too hard to write a script or plugin to give you some sort of warning when you receive a new message. But no matter, there are Other Ways(TM). After some deep searching through the Ubuntu repositories, I settled upon a program called mail-notification to monitor my Inboxes for new mail.
Clicking on the clock applet displays a mini calender, your task lists, and your appointments. I decided I liked this minimal, 'click-to-view' integration much better than the desktop sidebar I was used to using in Windows... and not just because brown is ever so slightly better than gray. Between that and mail-notification, I had all the information I needed just a single mouse-click away.
My one gripe is that there does not seem to be any way to configure the Evolution integration features of the clock panel applet. For example, if you mark a task as completed, it stays on the list with a big line through it for a while and then eventually disappears... but what controls this behavior? From whence do these variables come? I do not know. But overall this is a minor issue. As an added bonus, in Ubuntu 5.10, Evolution lets you correctly view and respond to meeting requests sent from an Outlook client. It even adds it to your personal calendar when you accept. This was not working correctly for me with Evolution 2.2.1.1 (Ubuntu 5.04).
