[Ltsp-discuss] over my dead body... [slightly OT]

[Louis Sabet]

Hi all,

I work for a small company whose long-standing staff have long adopted an over-my-dead-body attitude towards change.

At present our sales department is using windows on a daily basis, and has done so for many many years. Our sales department only use IE, Word, Excel, so having a dedicated machine each running around £400 of software is a little wasteful.

LTSP would be a perfect, cost-effective replacement for this setup.

I have configured the server to my liking (i386-RH8, LTSP4), all seems nice and stable, and I have installed OpenOffice and Konqueror (KDE) which is pretty much all they ever need to use. I have already checked whether OpenOffice will open our existing word/excel documents, and it does so quite happily.

My problem now is in finding an appropriate GUI. These users are all trained for windows. We have no time for extensive retraining, and so I need to find something as close to the windows look-n-feel as possible, but at the same time making sure that whatever I choose isn't going to be bloated and resource-hungry (KDE/GNOME etc).

I have gone through various GUIs, and none of them really meet the grade. I have tried WindowMaker, BlackBox, Gnome, KDE, FVWM, FVWM95, and finally FluxBox (which is a derivative of BlackBox), and with which I am reasonably happy, however I know for a fact that my users won't be (i.e. it meets my requirements, but not all of theirs).

The main windows-esque features my users will be looking for are:

Fonts - and lots of them. I've installed the windows fonts, but still it doesn't look as "nice" as windows does - any suggestions here?
Alt-Tab - Fluxbox handles this nicely.
Task-bar - KDE/GNOME have this, but are too bloated and would involve hardware upgrades which I would like to avoid if at all possible. Fluxbox has a task-bar sort-of, but only displays minimised windows. Our users have a tendancy to open all their millions of windows at once, and leave them that way, flicking between them using the taskbar. With fluxbox they would have to resort to alt-tab which isn't anywhere near as convenient.

What I'm really interested in knowing is - what do people do in places like Internet Kiosks that run linux? Do they just use whatever standard bloated GUI comes with their distro? Or do they use some sort of customised GUI?

The other main reason I don't want to use KDE/GNOME is due to the fact that it opens up whole new realms of user-fiddlage which I'd like to avoid.

With Fluxbox/WindowMaker etc, I can customise each user's desktop using a single text file, remove their ability to access the shell, and let them get on with their work without ever having to worry about them buggering up their settings for me to have to fix.

I'm really interested in peoples' comments/experiences here, as I can't be the first person in the world who has wanted/needed to convert a bunch of die-hard windows users to linux without having to resort to the likes of KDE/GNOME.

Many thanks to all who respond!

L

--
Louis Sabet - IT Manager
http://www.mobiles.co.uk
http://www.gadgets.co.uk


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