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Linux Success Stories

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by intj-astral 1 view

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This thread is for exactly what the title says. At the end of June 2006 I lost my files to a virus whose name i can't even remember now. Norton Antivirus remove the damned thing but the damage was done. If I didn't have a recent copy of my email profile backed up, I would have lost everything. I reinstalled (groan!), saved out my emails, my address book, and imported the book to Thunderbird in Linux. Man, am I thankful for Mozilla software! I went from Suse 10.0 bundled with?Suse Linux 10 Unleashed? from Sams Publishing to Suse 10.1 retail solution, 64-bit version. I have experimented on and off with Linux for about 10 years, and I am ready to stick with it. I have for a month already. Let's hear from you.

22 replies

by jaqui

realised linux is better than windows? ;)

took me 1 week back when I first encountered linux to remove all microsoft products from my systems and I've never looked back.

by stress junkie

Of course it only took you one week. You have that rare combination of intelligence and wisdom that distinguishes you from the vast sea of average people.

I will say that there was a time that I greatly admired Microsoft software. That time was before the Internet became popular and accessible. I won't digress. My point is that you probably saw through the smoke and mirrors right away while I was thinking that Windows v3.1 was a nice MS-DOS application.

You, Jaqui, are ahead of the pack. You are one of the giants upon whose shoulders other important people stand. You are a trailblazer and a path setter. Do not decry the amount of time that it takes the rest of us to reach the conclusion that you intuitively divined. intj-astral, like the rest of us, is a mere mortal. Do not begrudge or make sport of our more normal, albeit slow, learning curve.

Jaqui, you must remain cognizant of the sad fact that we are not worthy of your wisdom, and you must remain patient when interacting with us. For it is only in your great magnanimity (is that redundant?) that we can hope to benefit from your insight and wisdom.

We're not worthy.
We're not worthy.

:D

by jaqui

:D

and windows 3.1.1 was a fairly decent dos app.
but linux cli blows dos away for power. :p
and xfree with elightenment is far better than anything microsoft or apple have come out with.

by charliespencer

I had high hopes for this discussion. I'd hoped to see at least one comment on successfully installing Linux on corporate desktops, saving money, making support easier, pleasing the corporate bean counters, and how the users didn't even notice. Apparently no one has any success stories to post.

by apotheon

I keep seeing posts like that in other discussions. I think most of the people with success stories haven't noticed this discussion -- or don't care to contribute to it. I, for one, don't really feel particularly motivated to tell my own Linux success stories here. It seems like too much work for too little return to recount all the migration stories from my past consulting work, for instance.

by stress junkie

I would have never noticed this except that I use the TR stalker tools to keep an eye on Mr. Garvin. He's a little devil so I have to watch him every minute.

:D

by jmgarvin

While I could show you cost benefit and uptime stats, really it's just WAY too much effort when I'm fighting with Matlab to properly train my ANN ;-)

by tig2

As far as I know, JD has his corp environment at least partially running Linux. I know that he has a user on Open Office.

I'm looking forward to seeing those success stories myself. I strongly believe that Linux is the direction to look in. Now that I can get a distro that will live on a bootable CD, I have a way to migrate and still maintain a Window environment for clients.

by hal 9000

Actually out of the 35 computers that I have here only 2 have XP on them and one of those is being used as a DVD player the MS Remote works so well with it. :^0

The rest have various older flavours of Windows on them when I need one of those older OS's and the rest the majority run various forms of Nix and BSD. Though I'll admit to being no where as nasty as one Nix guy that I know of who has Ported IE6 to his NB and everyone thinks that he has a groovy Desktop running XP Pro. :D

The Desktop is a map of the night sky exactly what you would see from where you are on the earth and is kept up to date in [b]Real Time.[/b] I know a couple of Windows users who would love a working copy of that Desktop. :^0

My problem is that I have to continually use Windows as I forget all the bits that you need to remember when you are working with a decent OS. Anyway it now looks like I'll be having an extended stay in Hospital come November after Vista and Office 2007 is released I need to recover from a bad case of [b]Information Overload[/b] so you lot will have worked out all the problems with Vista before I escape. Of course sneaking in a Debian NB will cause the [b]Cure[/b] to take much longer. :D

Just provided that I have my Debian NB with WiFI Broadband I'm happy and with no customers ringing me up wanting answers to their Windows Questions I'll enjoy the rest. I got sick and tired of trying to remember the Windows way of doing things. I knew that I had a problem when I told one of the less Computer Literate to [b]Log in as Root.[/b] After a long silence he asked what [b]Root [/b]was. :(

Col ]:)

by kiltie

Don't let him anywhere near this thread (we want to keep it clean, don't we?)

** grin **

j/k

by jdclyde

Not sure if you saw my post about wifi in Europe or not, but thursday I had dropped in my lap to ready a few laptops because top dogs were doing a Europe business trip and needed to know about internet access so they could get their email and to get their laptops in order. (3pm thursday)

By 4pm I discoverd the laptops keyboard was toast. He went back to interigate his kids who had been using the laptop for the last three months. (Son of President and one of the key owners, so not much I can say, huh?) The next morning he looks at me and says "soup". soup? His boy admitted to spilling soup on the system. we did find him a loaner system and got them ready for their trip.

Didn't leave a whole lot of time for much else, ya know? B-)

Was going to go hunting, but got the days mixed up and it doesn't open until tomorrow for bow season. Got up at 5am for nothing. drat!

by dawgit

...loose over here now? Thanks JD. :p so, anyway did you get your Qs answered as to what to expect over here? (....hope'n so ?:| ) -d

by hal 9000

I had a customer here come in complaining that his little used NB wasn't working right apparently no matter which key was pressed you got Upper Case L.

Easy I was silly enough to think initially as the system had been severely infected I thought that Windows was now toast and proceeded to wipe the drive and reload. Problem number one came about when I attempted to type in the Product Key apparently Upper Case L's all 25 of them where not the correct Product Key.

So out of desperation by this stage I removed the Keyboard plugged in a PS2 one and hoped for the best. It was at least consistent and continued to produce a series of Upper Case L's at every key stroke until it reached a Critical Mass and then just keep repeating an Upper Case L all the time. Made things interesting in a Word Processor 25 pages of Upper Case L and going.

Next step which I should have taken first was to load up a Live Linux and try again this confirmed that the problem was actually in the M'Boards Keyboard Interpreter so I put the entire thing back together and handed it back to the guy after wasting hours on the entire thing. Luckily it wasn't used much so the Image fitted on a CD and I Ghosted it back to the computer so it appeared to work until you touched the keyboard.

[b]Remember to Always Test with a Live Linux before even believing that Windows is Toast.[/b] It doesn't matter if the unit is only 18 months old and has no AV protection always test the hardware before even believing that the software is the problem.

Col :(

by jdclyde

Got a few to relate, so will be brief.

First, the legacy software was all written in-house, using cobol and running on a SCO Unix server. I got hired in to do the Y2K rewrite. I loaded RedHat on another server, and copied the system over giving me a clone of the original system. That way I could make the changes and run tests using real data. As fixes were written, they would get tested and them made live on the SCO box. 700+ programs, accessing 800+ data files, it was a huge project that took over a year. Could not have been done without linux.

We then just started to look at getting email, so we went with Domino. Would have put it on SCO (I am MACE) but they could not certify that Domino would run on it. IBM told us that getting a Netfinity server running RedHat was certified. We were the first in the state to run Domino on Linux. The only time we EVER had a problem was when a young pup in the department made a symbolic link to itself, making a loop that took the server down for three days. (I was not the admin of that box, and my wifes aunt has JUST died, so I left it in their hands and left) On the third day I looked into it and found it in 30 minutes. The hows are available upon request.

The current project is to migrate to linux desktops. SuSe is the contender as it is geared towards corporate. They have developed a migration plan to get people off windows and onto their platform. Reading it, I jumped on one thing that made a lot of sense. It isn't the [b]OS[/b] that is the problem, it is the [b]APPLICATIONS[/b].

The user doesn't even know what OS they are running, they just know the applications. Now that Dominos has a Notes client that will install directly on linux without dealing with WINE or other windows emulators, that is a big hurdle down.

Stage one is to get the users using OpenOffice as the office package. When we get that changed over, the jump to a linux box is actually simple as the user won't even be told they are running linux. (why scare people with something they don't understand?)

We currently have a few ZERO skill level users as test subjects. We just told them they were getting the latest version of "Office". :D

Two months and they are going great.

Vista is NOT in our future. The hardware requirements are assinine and only a moron would drop that much for mega systems just to run a word processor and email. (if you are doing this, I apologize for you being a moron :p )

by intj-astral

The desktop works, it's easy to use, and yes,
you can be productive using it. I use Suse,
by the way, at home, but Windows at work. No choice there (sigh).
In real-world application, I'm almost done with a semester writing in Star Office 7 with zero problems. Microsoft advertising is powerless against the success and peace of mind I have found with Linux.

by jdclyde

Got a few responses, and then GG sent me some links for the UK.

They know (it is a GROUP that I unleashed on you) that they should have contacted me sooner for more details.

So "ask at the hotel" is the best answer, because they were told that it did have WiFi.

by jdclyde

I was only an hour in before I needed to type in anything.

from there, it was five minutes until I realized it wasn't just me going nuts by testing every key in the word processor. I believe it was lower case "d" for me. :D Only 1/4 of the keys would do that. The rest didn't do anything.

Made sense on why I couldn't get the external mouse to work when I first got it, and so suffered with the stupid "eraser" mouse for an hour.

"soup". ~sigh~ At least he didn't have any data on it and it was just a PII 400. Hmmmm, if I have soup at work some day, this may be a good way to get rid of a few old laptops! B-)

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