On Wed, 2007-07-25 at 03:33 -0700, john_sm wrote:
Hey Guys, I am still in a thinking stage and will like to learn from your
experience, and was wondering if any of you folks have a hybrid environment
i.e. Linux and Proprietary systems and what kind of issues do you run into.
And also, what pieces of technology you have - which are open source and
which ones you have are proprietary and any changes you anticipate 1 year
out. Greatly appreciate your help. - John Smith
--
We're slowly transitioning to a completely open-source office ...
slowly.
We started out by moving about 75% of workers to StarOffice-5.2, and
then of course to OpenOffice. This went surprisingly smoothly. People
complained, but then continued working as usual. We have MS Office on a
handful of PCs where we make heavy use of VB. OpenOffice will render
print these *almost* perfectly ( some small glitches, but these can
easily be worked around ). We use OpenOffice to export stuff to PDF and
send to clients, and also archive and link to our database.
For database stuff, we're running an MS SQL Server 7 server for legacy
stuff, and MySQL for all new stuff. We have about 80% of data by volume
in MySQL. The remaining 20% makes heavy use of stored procedures that
return recordsets.
We have a couple of legacy database front-ends using MS Access. They
work as well as can be expected for Access. They don't have any trouble
querying our 2 database servers, which I suppose is the most important
thing. But they're also slow, memory-hungry, bandwidth-intensive and
crash fairly often. What's more, when they crash, they corrupt your mdb
file, which is a real pain if you've just done a couple of hours of
development.
I've rewritten most of our database front-ends to gtk2-perl ( using my
collection of open-source modules at
http://entropy.homelinux.org/axis ). These databases ( screenshot on my
website ) work on Linux and Windows, and at one point I had them working
on OS-X ( I gave this up when I gave away my Powerbook ). They also
address most of the issues I have with MS Access ... they're very fast,
very lean on memory, great on low-bandwidth connections ( 256k DSL from
home works remarkably well ), and don't *ever* crash. The only minor
pain I have is doing cross-database queries ( ie across SQL Server and
MySQL ), and I've largely eliminated this by mirroring 3 key tables in
MySQL. In the medium term, I'm working on a cross-database query engine.
Anyway, development is all done in Eclipse with the EPIC perl plugin.
GUIs are built with Glade-3. Projects are stored in a subversion
repository. About 70% of workers are now on Linux ( hold-outs are
accounts department, with proprietary accounting software, and analysis
department, with heavy reliance on Excel and Visual Basic ). But mostly,
it's coming together very nicely :)
We've also started trialling using VirtualBox ( which is similar to
VMWare ) on some of our Linux systems which suddenly have had to start
using some of our Excel VB stuff. This works quite well ( memory
hungry, but you'd expect that ).
Other than that, we're using a Postfix mail server, connected to a
DBMail storage IMAP server ( DBMail stores all mail on our MySQL
server ). We use Thunderbird on Windows, and Evolution in Linux. Firefox
is used across the board. Our printers are all shared from a CUPS
server. Windows clients connect directly to this ( ie no samba in the
middle ). Network shares are all Samba.
A handful of issues we've faced:
- Thunderbird on Linux is *horrible* for opening attachments. It
*sometimes* seems to choose your associated application, but other times
makes up it's own mind, and yet others simply refuses to allow you to do
anything other than save an attachment somewhere, and then open it from
your file manager. We fixed this by moving from Thunderbird to
Evolution, and I'm very happy with this move. Support calls have dropped
by 50%!
- Our Ricoh printers lock up when you send them a letter-sized job
instead of an A4-sized job. Sad but true. All our internal templates are
A4, but when someone goes to print an external document ...
So anyway, my suggestion is to get yourself on a Linux desktop first,
and move everyone to open-source software where-ever possible - this
will ease the migration to Linux when you make it. Then for those cases
where you must run commercial software, try out the various emulation
paths - VirtualBox is great for us, or VMWare, or Wine, or Crossover
Office ( commercial distribution of Wine ). Once you've had a stable,
hassle-free desktop for a couple of months, then you can start moving
others with some confidence.
Enjoy :)
--
Daniel Kasak
IT Developer
NUS Consulting Group
Level 5, 77 Pacific Highway
North Sydney, NSW, Australia 2060
T: (+61) 2 9922-7676 / F: (+61) 2 9922 7989
email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
website: http://www.nusconsulting.com.au
--
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