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Re: [PLUG] Linux on the desktop (was: rationalizing .Mac web pages)
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On Thu, 26 Feb 2004, Ron Kaye Jr wrote:
> new desktops have been a snap in the windows world- GHOST images!
That's fine for a base system, but speaking from a lot of experience I
have to disagree. My basis is having ghosted somewhere in the
neighborhood of 15,000 Windows machines in my career. The base system
image is a snap, but many Windows applications behave badly and need to be
installed in the context of the user who will be operating it.
> pushing apps?
> sms in big ms shops, impractical ($, ease of use) in smaller ones
Impractical in bigger ones, too. The bigger the shop, the more likely you
are to have multiple flavors of Windows floating around. The SMS package
has to be built differently for each flavor of Windows. And my SMS admin
here at $WORK dreads building SMS packages. It's a real time sink that
can really royally screw a machine up if it is not done just right and
thoroughly tested before deploying. This is especially true of packages
containing OS service packs.
For Linux I use yum. If you can put it in an RPM, you can push it out
with yum. Linux apps seem to be much more consistent about ease of
installation, and usually work just fine with RPM.
The beauty of this is I have a Kickstart boot disk that, so far, has
worked on almost every machine I've booted it with. It adapts to
differing hardware much better than Ghost ever could. Typically I'm
kickstarting HP d530u desktops but I've kickstarted server class hardware,
old beige boxes, gateways, IBM's, and even specialized telecom servers
from the same kickstart script and it works just fine. SCSI vs. IDE
makes no difference. The only thing really assumed is ethernet.
If you're clever, you can point your kickstart disk at a PHP script on a
web server instead of a static kickstart file. This way you automatically
inventory the machine, generate unique strong root/grub passwords, etc.
The %post section of the script lets you do some really neat things. My
Linux boxes even join the Active Directory domain during the kickstart
process, and authenticate you against your Windows credentials (hey, we're
a Windows shop that happens to run a lot of Linux).
I have yet to see this level of installation sophistication on the Windows
side, and I've been deploying Windows machines for about 10 years now
(I've only been doing Linux for about 6 or 7 years).
___________________________________________________________________________
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