Linux Desktop Deployment Postmortems? 371
duffbeer703 asks: "My employer runs alot of desktop and laptop computers -- something in the neighborhood of 40,000 PCs. Currently they are all Windows 2000 & XP managed by Active Directory and other big, complicated enterprise management tools, all of which can support Linux in one form or another. I'm looking for ways of making Linux (and maybe Unix or even Apple desktops) an option as we replace or add PCs. The problem is, most of the resources that you find online about deploying Linux focuses on server environment, and the articles that I do find about desktop Linux focus on standalone developer workstations, the IBM conversion to Linux (which doesn't seem to have happened) or things like LTSP, that won't integrate well with our infrastructure. Is anyone out there successfully using Linux for regular users? How did it go, and how did your IT and user communities adapt to the new kid on the block?"
Size matters (Score:4, Insightful)
In your case though, there will be more disruption, not everyone wants to use linux... Id suggest just inserting the new computers in one department, preferably one where the employees are already interested in linux. I would also suggest taking a workgroup poll to get interior feedback interest as well.
prof
You know (Score:5, Insightful)
Do you have must-keep Windows apps? Try CrossOver Office
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1886920,00.a
or
Verasora/Win4Lin
http://www.versora.com/ [versora.com]
I've used and deployed them all in small businesses with AD management, and they've all worked. There's no reason why they wouldn't work in larger businesses. After all, as IBM and Oracle are showing, they already do.
Steven
Rationale to a company... (Score:4, Insightful)
First, is that they cannot control the desktop using policy. This is the biggest selling point of using Windows in a workgroup domain, and especially to manage as many servers and end users as they have. Active Directory, while not perfect, is awesome in its capabilities -- all stolen mostly from Novell's NDS
Next, is expertise. Why would you introduce something into an environment that nobody really knows how to use? Your executives aren't 100% sure but they know 100% that they need to hire staff that can take on Linux servers/desktops and supporting them. That means paying a premium for that labor, and it's not necessary when you can get Windows guys on the cheap.
Lastly -- companies are hesistant to change. Financial companies in particular go with the mantra, if it works, don't touch it. You will see lots of these smaller shops on NT 4 still because to them... it works. Larger corporations that have to meet with SOX compliancy issues are forced into upgrading. That's what happened where I work.
Anyways.. best of luck trying to introduce Linux into your environment. I am going to say that you will crash and burn trying, because a company that large doesn't likely have a *need* for Linux. And if's not a necessity, a good business decision is not to let it happen. Again the mantra, if it ain't broke...don't fix it.
We're Switching Because... It's Cool...? (Score:5, Insightful)
In the past I've been responsible for switching a small company over (circa 150 desktops) from -- what was it now? -- DOS to WIN 3.1, or WIN 3.1 to WIN 95, I forget, I've burned it from my memory. And it was a nightmare. Not cuz it was Windows, cuz we were switching, period. Accounting gave us hell ("what are the cost benefits again?"), users gave me hell ("Time is Money, Y'Know!"), and Super Senior Mgt tweaked me more than once ("If you weren't switching us to this, um, upgrade thing, what is it that you would be doing, hmm?"). Learned an AWFUL lot about wacky boutique Accounting-Inventory-Shipping-Graphics-YouNameIt programs that all ran lovely on the OLD system but had to be bludgeoned into submission on the new.
Not saying you should not upgrade. Not saying Linux is not an upgrade from what you're using (not saying it IS, either; you really need to examine the apps). Just saying that you really need to look at this upgrade from every direction short of Sunday before you dive into the change. There's a large, cold room reserved in the House of Pain for Linux Evangelists who push their companies to make The Switch without having a whole pond worth of ducks in a row.
Good Luck, Bud, and God speed! And better you than me.
First Switch your Servers (Score:5, Insightful)
It is much easier integrating a Unix type workstation if you use Unix type servers. It is trivial to have nfs mounted
Re:Rationale to a company... (Score:3, Insightful)
Lastly -- companies are hesistant to change. Financial companies in particular go with the mantra, if it works, don't touch it. You will see lots of these smaller shops on NT 4 still because to them... it works. Larger corporations that have to meet with SOX compliancy issues are forced into upgrading. That's what happened where I work.
Interesting posting, but you are forgeting an even more powerful force in corporate culture - corporations are always looking to cut costs. That $10M and growing annual check to M$ will eventually overcome the cultural inertia. It has been slow going for about 8 years, but it is happening.
Re:Guitar Strings (Score:4, Insightful)
Furthermore, being out of compliance is not a criminal matter, it's a civil one, so even if they were in actual violation and not merely in a state of poor record-keeping, they still wouldn't be 'criminals'.
(Yeah, yeah, IHBT, I dunno when I'll learn...)
Success stories (Score:4, Insightful)
Not if you live on a continent full of "criminals" with success stories.
Re:Guitar Strings (Score:3, Insightful)
A "few dozen" unlicensed apps on a network with 300 people shouldn't have warranted BSA-imposed pariahdom. A small fine and forcing them to fix their licensure status, yes. Disgracing them on the evening news and in an ad campaign, no.
Although it might count as blasphemy to say as much on Slashdot, Microsoft, of all companies, understands that, and except in really extreme situations will usually work with a company to get them in compliance, for NO fine (even offering a discount to "help them out" in some cases). The BSA, on the other hand... Absolute pure evil. It amazes me that anyone would allow them on-site without a warrant and a police escort.
You also have to wonder what "unlicensed" means, in context... For only a "few dozen" installations, does that mean they accidentally exceeded their number of VLKs? Shareware that had expired without buying the full version? Random programs that employees had brought in from home that the company didn't even know about? "Out-of-upgrade-path" upgrades (meaning, for example, that you can't take an OEM Win95 machine to XP via an upgrade copy - but you can upgrade it to NT4, which you can then upgrade to XP)? Plenty of situations to consider before calling them outright criminals. Oh, by the way, you need to fix that tail light, sir - I'll let you off with a $65K fine this time.
Yes, you can say that none of those situations should have occurred. But welcome to the real world, where even the most diligent IT department can't catch everything.
Tried Sabayon? (Useful for Gnome envs + profiles) (Score:2, Insightful)
I don't think it's anywhere as good as what I've heard group policy to be, but it's a start in the right direction. I've found it to be quite buggy and it took me a couple of days to get the desktop _as_I_wanted_it_.
(See http://www.codepoets.co.uk/sabayon_creating_linux
DG
Can't Switch For Switching's Sake (Score:5, Insightful)
1. What do you do with ANY of the custom apps used on the desktop. Most large companies have at least a few apps their internal developers built for them, and I'll bet they weren't built with cross-platform use in mind. Sure, it may work for now in WINE, but what about when it throws a weird error? What about when a new feature is needed? Recoding the app isn't really an option for most places.
2. Time to fire and rehire your desktop support staff! And any IT group that is directly tied to desktop products, cause you're doing a complete 180 degree switch on them. You can argue that anyone worth paying should already know Linux, but the reality is a lot of people in IT are tied to MS, because that's what their company has bet the farm on. You would probably have to either rehire or retrain most of the desktop support group.
3. Your options are RedHat, or SuSE. A company that big is only going to switch if they can buy Linux from a vendor with the chops to support a large organization. Mom & Pop Linux Support Inc isn't going to be taken seriously since they may be in business today, but might not be tomorrow. Business wants a large company backing a product so they have someone to go back to when something goes really wrong.
4. Retraining Costs. Sure, there's adjustment when moving users from Windows Version X to Windows Version Y, but generally the user experience remains fairly consistent. Moving to Linux, unless you reskin it to look exactly like Windows and hide away anything that would hint that it wasn't Windows is going to require significant user retraining. Then there's all the new apps that they'll have to learn to use. You'll lost a LOT of time and money here.
5. What's the real benefit? Yeah, Microsoft is evil, vendor lock-in, security vulnerabilities blah blah blah and so on. But honestly, does Linux provide a real business value? Does it save money in the long run? Does it make the work easier to do? Don't answer these questions as techno-geeks who are already biased, look at it from a semi-objective standpoint.
I don't think you can make an effective case to begin the switch-over of 40,000 desktops to linux, even in much of a phased approach. Best you can probably hope for are a few pockets of Linux users within IT. The average user would probably never even get whif of its existance.
MacWindows (Score:2, Insightful)
This site is dedicated to enabling Mac OS X computers to coexist in the enterprise environment.
Linux enthusiasts will never catch on (Score:2, Insightful)
You would not believe how scared and panicky the users got. During the physical migration, users were given 4 hours of training on the changes from Win9X to WinXP. Then immediately went back to their desk to a newly converted workstation. It hardly helped at all. The shape of the MS Office icons changed, we got dozens of calls from users who said we had "taken away" MS Office. One department had their shared drive change from the P to the Q drive letter. Even after telling them verbally three times in class, and following it up with email, we still got dozens of calls from users who said their documents had been "deleted". We even got calls from people complaining that their spyware was missing! And some of them were PhD's.
Humans in general are dumb, easily panicked sheep. They fear and loathe change as if it were physically painful. They don't like Windows - in fact it is one of the favorite topics of water-cooler derision. But they would rather run their nuts through a clothes-wringer than have their toolbar move to the top of their screen.
Linux enthusiasts are generally highly intelligent malcontents. People who desire frequent chaotic change because it soothes the agony of their ADHD induced boredom. They love having to follow up the latest installation of Fedaro by trying to figure out where to download a multi-media player from because *someone* got pissy with the old player's authors and left it out of the distro. Tweaking
And Linux enthusiasts suffer from a terrible conceit, believeing that the rest of the world "wants" to be like them, but just doesn't know how. So if they can make the Linux desktop look 75% the same as windows, then they can lure the sheep in for a closer look. The implicit assumption being that once a sheep gets a good look at the "freedom" offered by vi and shell scripting, they'll have an epiphany and never want to go back to a point-and-click GUI.
Here's a clue for all the cult-of-linux followers out there. Most people HATE change. Flexibility is spelled c-o-n-f-u-s-i-o-n. Powerful tools are d-a-n-g-e-r-o-u-s. Configuration options are a t-a-r-p-i-t.
Memorize this commandment:
EASE OF USE is ***all*** that matters!
Until conversion to Linux represents LESS change for the average user to deal with than an upgrade to the next version of Windows, 90+ percent of the population won't touch it.
Or, you could go for an even lower common denominator, and develop XXX-windows with built-in pr0n. After all, it was x-rated content that created the market for VCRs and cable TV
Re:Desktop Linux in the Enterprise (Score:3, Insightful)
Roaming Profiles and publishing applications via Active Directory also greatly reduces on site time.
RIS helps greatly under Windows because you can't just install everything you want and then image the drive (unless you plan to put it on 100% identical hardware, and even then you need to sysprep it). With Linux, you can do an absolute base install in about thirty seconds more than it takes to format the HDD, then just do a normal copy from a CD (or networked) image to a live system. Or if you trust the drive, you can even skip the install, and just dd an image directly onto the HDD.
As for roaming profiles - Just put home directories on a network share. Simple as that.
Not to say that one should try to force Linux onto otherwise unwilling companies and users... But most of the reasons I've heard not to switch simply don't hold true.
I'm sure it can be done, perhaps by remotely mounting common application and
For apps, include them in the base image you put on each machine. For home dirs, you apparently already understand the easy and obvious solution.
Forget the OS for now, start with the applications (Score:2, Insightful)
One department at a time is a good strategy, but I'd go even further:
Your users will gonna have to learn to use a lot of new softwares and they won't be happy with that. If all those changes appends all at once, there will be a perception that Linux is hard and complicated. And it will fail.
I'd replace one aplication at a time for as long as I can. Internet explorer would be the first (replaced by firefox), then maybe Outlook (by Thunderbird), and then I'd go with MS-Office (one component at a time, replaced by OpenOffice2).
The idea is to make them learn while they are using there "confortable Windows environment". That way they will be able to go back to there old software (for a while) if something doesn't work as expeceted or if they are in a rush.
And make sure some of the IT staff makes the changes before everyone elses, so they can offer some supports.
Anyway, I which you good luck !
Re:Ubuntu? (Score:3, Insightful)
Try it again and let us know how it goes.
Re:You know (Score:3, Insightful)
The funny thing is that for companies who do this for a living, where are the migration tools? Microsoft provide a shit load of migration tools for moving away from competing products and even old versions of their own products. Why doesn't Novell or Red Hat?
Think how attractive it would be if RH / Novell could back up and install over an NT server. If it could replicate all file & printer shares and take the existing NT PDC / Active Directory settings and implement the Linux equivalent. Think how damned cool it would be if they even converted the NTFS partition to ext3 while they were at it so data remained in-place. Or if they printed out a handy checklist of things to be done after installation to complete the conversion. In other words make conversion from NT / W2K / XP as simple and painless as possible.
This wouldn't be a magic bullet, but even if it meant that 60% of installs could be automated, it would be a very, very good thing for Linux.
Re:Can't Switch For Switching's Sake (Score:2, Insightful)
A Few Successful Hybrid Environments (Score:3, Insightful)
-AT
Re:How to be successful at migrations (Score:3, Insightful)
So. Just because us North Americans haven't moved off the dime doesn't mean that the rest of the world is sitting still.
Why _not_ ask Slashdot? (Score:3, Insightful)
Pop Quiz: Name a place where you can ask a question of a couple hundred thousand UNIX, Linux, Windows, and other IT/IS pros all in one place, many of whom may have experience relevant to your company's situation. In addition, this place cannot charge a fee for their services, and the answers must be diverse and rapid.
...
I don't know about you, but the only place that comes to mind is Slashdot. Vendors and consulting firms often have a bias to whatever products/services they feel they can offer at greatest advantage to themselves, and not necessarily to your best interest. With all that in mind, I think Slashdot is a pretty good place to start, like bouncing an idea off of a skilled friend except on a much larger scale. That's not to say they shouldn't do their own homework from that point onward, but a company doesn't often get to the point of having 40,000 workstations by sheer guesswork.
-AT
Re:Can't Switch For Switching's Sake (Score:3, Insightful)
Most people I hear talking about "this Linux thing" at work (most of the time users) don't know a thing about it, except that it's free (and windows isn't) and they somehow think that would pretty much drop our overall IT costs to 0$.
Truth is... Even if you don't look at the money figures (may or may not be better - let's just focus on the other issues first which sometimes are more of a concern)
We have DOZENS of in-house apps (working on a new and faily big SOA n-tier app in C# /
Not to mention the TONS of of "not-quite-apps": big access databases (with hundreds of forms and tables - a huge mess that would be near impossible to port to anything in the same century), visual foxpro stuff, excel documents with VBA (lots of those), etc. Lots of it sucks badly, but we just can't take it away from them.
There's also the common commercial 3rd party apps which are only available for windows... Be it for HR people, finances, legal dept, doing statistics, planning and charting, web design, GIS, etc etc. That would be HUNDREDS of small apps to find replacements for (and there very well may be none). This may cost lots of money again.
All our infrastructure is around MS stuff. Lots of stuff relies on SQL Server. We use Active Directory and Exchange Server. Our intranet (thousands of pages and over a hundred web apps)? All ASP.Net (in C#; and some "classic ASP" stuff left) on IIS 6. Suggesting to PHP-ize everything, replace IIS for Apache, and to ditch our (already licensed & paid for) SQL Servers for Oracle or DB2 ($$$!)? Force all our coders into Java and/or PHP? I don't know, but there just isn't a good solution here really.
This list is like never ending. You just can't possibly re-code/replace all this, or force everybody to use a terminal server for half of the stuff they need everyday... In the end perhaps costing more money and creating a lot of trouble...
And like you mentionned, retraining costs, of users and admins/support people (IF you don't just have to hire completely different people instead).
We have ~60000 users, and we're making the switch from 2k to XP right now and it's very painless. Licensing costs? Well, I'm sure it's lots of money, but you gotta keep the big picture in mind too... 60000 users with an avg pay of 60000$ (my guess - may be completely off), a heavily-discounted XP upgrade license around 100$-some dollars every few years for a windows upgrade seems like not that much money (I know I cost them more PER DAY than a copy of XP costs, and that's the first upgrade in years). Our new PCs even come with XP too (no upgrade costs).
A switch to linux on the desktop (we do have a few linux servers)? Don't think it'll happen here anytime soon. Not because there's anything wrong with linux, just that it's a change to a completely different solution where everything works differently/isn't compatible with our current proprietary stuff, so it just won't happen. Any other non-Windows OS would pretty much have the same results (drastic changes required everywhere). Linux is great and all, but it's not always the one and only solution to everything.
Re:kick it up a notch (Score:3, Insightful)
That's the part you seem to be missing. Users shouldn't need or have to update their own machines in a managed environment -- you should be in control of that from start to finish.