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I work in a small (15 employees) firm that's dependent on MS
Windows/Office. We do not have a full-time IT person--the guy who does
our PC support is a programmer and has his own work to do. We are on XP
and don't use domains.
Recently we've had a lot of windows-related issues, some related to
viruses and some not. This has caused the programmer a lot of stress
and the company some inconvenience.
I have played around with VMware player a tiny bit (I have a Debian Etch
image here on my work PC) and it occurred to me that if we could run MS
Office on XP in a VMware image, with a linux host OS we might be able to
increase reliability. I would probably pick the LTS Kubuntu
distribution for ease of support.
My questions are:
*Would we be able to get away with the free VMware player if the VMware
tools are installed?
*Can things be configured in such a way that sharing files between
computers works as it does now, so that the controller and payroll
person can pass excel files back and forth?
*Are there any other things that are going to be significant obstacles
to office work that I'm not thinking of?
Thanks,
Greg
--------------------------
* From: JP Vossen <jp@jpsdomain.org>
My very small scale solution to all of this is to run W2KPro in VMware
server under Ubuntu. This works great since I get awesome and complete
cross-platform remote control (VMware fat console), hardware
independence for the picky Windows side (it's a VM), Linux power and
stability for the base platform (Ubuntu LTS), Windows "bare metal
restore" backups (i.e., copy the VM dir!:), and Windows "upgrade"
back-out protection (a VM snapshot). I can't stress enough how happy I
am with this solution, but I only use it for a very small number of
nodes thus far (4) and I doubt it's scalable though I really haven't
given that much thought.
[...]
Date: Sun, 20 Jan 2008 15:40:53 -0500
> The need to do too many frequent upgrades has been one of my biggest
> beefs with desktop Linux in commercial environments. Even with Ubuntu
> - you really need to upgrade every 6 months, ...
That's what Ubuntu LTS releases are for. While 3 years is a bit less
than the recent MS major release cycle <snicker>, it seems pretty good
to me.
My $0.02,
JP
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