distro for the workplace?

stefan1975 · 2008-04-24 20:13:02

well i am currently deciding which distro to install on my new professional laptop and although Arch is great and I love KDEmod Isort of doubt if I will end up with Arch. I love tinkering with Arch, the speed is even better, the freedom awesome.

However in my workspace I need rock solid stability, encryption, pptp vpn, ooxml integration, M$ exchange compatibility, kernel based virtualisation, security (selinux), well supported packages from external parties for x64 (like citrix ica) and need to get work done and not tinker with my system all day so need it to "just work" (tm).

I have found that I can do nearly anything with arch and way faster then ubuntu or even fedora, but OOXML is a nogo just as KVM or exchange compatibility, for citrix I cannot get it to work at all on arch64 and manually setting up SElinux is less fun then pulling my own teeth whereas Fedora has the best ever SElinux implementation (out of the box) and F9 installs on encrypted partitions by default and has networkmanager 0.7 (which rules).

I was not at all impressed by ubuntu 8.04, more of the same since 6.06 so I am more or less convinced that Fedora 9 will be the distro of choice for my professional laptop. Fedora also actually innovates where other distros just have a different way of throwing together the same packages. Near every linux innovation seems to be done by fedora (or suse) these days. besides the network implementaion of debian deratives is not nearly as good as red hat based distros.

I will sorely miss KDE4.1 svn though. I used to be a gnome man but KDE4.1 is great but the mainstream distros just ship with KDE4.0.3 which sucks bullocks imho, so I will be stuck with gnome until the 8.10 round i am afraid. But then I will always return home to my Arch32 desktop pc ....

stefan

Last edited by stefan1975 (2008-04-24 20:13:37)

Obi-Lan · 2008-04-25 16:06:26

Mac OS X?

Seriously, Evolution has Exchange plugin but what goes for OOXML it seems that even Word '07 doesn't fully support it so good luck. Or you can try to run Office 2007 on Wine. And why do you insist x64?

stefan1975 · 2008-04-25 17:46:18

Obi-Lan wrote:

Mac OS X?
Seriously, Evolution has Exchange plugin but what goes for OOXML it seems that even Word '07 doesn't fully support it so good luck. Or you can try to run Office 2007 on Wine. And why do you insist x64?

Hi,

I think I'd like OSX leopard very much. i have played with it and it is very impressive. I just don't have the money for a macbook air yet and I have some issues with their EULA.

Before I could indeed use the evolution-exchange plugin at work but we are running exchange 2k7sp1 now which doesn't work yet with evolution. nor does the full OWA with firefox. Their is a beta plugin for SuSe and Fedora though. and office 2k7 with wine is impossible (really). I do run office 2k7 under xen though which is half a workaround but with Arch I have serious issues with Xen and can get it to run only under virtualbox.

as for why I want x64? well mainly because I can! i have a dualcore x64 intel processor and therefor really want to stick with x64 versions of my favourite distros.

at work we run RedHat ES and CentOS servers and their networking implementation is the best on the market and in all fairness yum has come a long way from up2date, i hardly ever havy any rpm dependency issues anymore.

It seems they all have something going for them. SuSe plays well in windows networks (which we have) and domains, fedora is really secure and stable which a great team and artwork. Ubuntu is great for my family and Arch is like the toybox that I always wanted, tinkering with this and that until it works and then tinker some more until it is broken so I can fix it again.

I am still not sure what it will be...distro hopping is sooo tiresome.

thanks,
stefan

wuischke · 2008-04-25 17:51:47

I would go with Fedora (9). You'll have to cut it down a bit, but it's imho the better choice between the "big" distros. I can't help with MS compatibility, I lack the necessary experience.

brebs · 2008-04-25 17:57:25

Every distro needs some tinkering to "feel right", for us geeks

RPMs can be recompiled/tweaked just as easily as using ABS & pacman - see rpmbuild.

ralvez · 2008-04-25 18:14:01

I hate to sound like a "fun boy" but I must also be honest. I have been using Arch in my office workstation for 3 years now and have **never** (touching wood now ) have had any problems.
I work in a universtity and it is most definetly a Windows shop but even then I have no issues communicating and sharing data with others.
I do have VirtualBox installed for testing possible compatibility issues (on the rare occasion) but so far I'm a very happy Arch user at home and at work.

Hope this helps.

R.

Misfit138 · 2008-04-25 18:29:39

I am surprised to see such a buzz about Fedora as of late to be quite honest.
Don't get me wrong, I respect the project very much; I am just not used to anyone actually recommending a Red Hat/RPM based distro. For years untold I have seen negative propaganda and witnessed consistent RPM and Red Hat bashing, from all over the net.
I'm glad Fedora has risen above the negative campaigning and poor reputation of years past.
Sadly, Fedora 8 will not install on my Thinkpad T23, so I have no real opinion of it at this time, but it sounds like it has really improved.

stefan1975 · 2008-04-25 19:09:09

Misfit138 wrote:

I am surprised to see such a buzz about Fedora as of late to be quite honest.
Don't get me wrong, I respect the project very much; I am just not used to anyone actually recommending a Red Hat/RPM based distro. For years untold I have seen negative propaganda and witnessed consistent RPM and Red Hat bashing, from all over the net.
I'm glad Fedora has risen above the negative campaigning and poor reputation of years past.
Sadly, Fedora 8 will not install on my Thinkpad T23, so I have no real opinion of it at this time, but it sounds like it has really improved.

we'll i'd recommend it to anyone who is searching for a solid distribution that is always innovating, it does not deserve a negative reputation as much as i believe *buntu does not deserve the hype it is getting, 6 8.04 "reviews" on release day, come one? I believe it is as bleeding edge as you can get with a mainstream binary distro. i mean they have kernel 2.6.25, ext4 and xorgserver 1.5 in F9. F7 and F8 were excellent releases although i find it not the fastest distro on the block (not even compared to Arch) but that is mainly caused by SeLinux and Encryption by default I believe. SElinux is great but not very fast. They also cripple firefox by adding i believe 27 language addons by default. And the "unofficial" forum is very, very slow. Their default partitioning with LVM is also something I really appreciate.

It nowhere near has the speed of Arch nor the flexibility but it is a good peek in what RHEL6 will be like and they have very talented artwork people there and although it is a hassle to work with I also have a lot of respect for their continuing position in just using foss in their distro and working for free-as-in-speech alternatives like icedtea and sfwdec.

stefan

Last edited by stefan1975 (2008-04-25 19:38:53)

brebs · 2008-04-25 19:16:57

stefan1975 wrote:

They also cripple firefox by adding i believe 27 language addons by default.

I saw both that and sane behaviour, by installing it twice.

You didn't choose *one*, so it played it safe and installed them all.

Obi-Lan · 2008-04-26 07:34:09

stefan1975 wrote:

I think I'd like OSX leopard very much. i have played with it and it is very impressive. I just don't have the money for a macbook air yet and I have some issues with their EULA.

Macbook Air is thin only at edges and has every connector some mac-standard. Lenovo X300 made it happen with standard connectors and dvd drive. Besides that, two guys at my workplaces got some regular Macbooks and vmware fusion to run XP for Office 2007 etc. It seems to work pretty well for them.

It seems that Evolution Exchange connector works trough OWA which should explain incompatibility issue. There doesn't seem to be any other MAPI compatible client but Outlook. I found this:http://www.42tools.com/ but dunno if it really works and its not really a client. Exchange 2007 has some kind of iCal support but it seems that you need to have Outlook 2007 running to get iCal stuff working.

Last edited by Obi-Lan (2008-04-26 07:34:30)

stefan1975 · 2008-05-11 19:49:02

i have been playing with "thinkfree" office for a bit, their new version is free (as in gratis not speech) with limitations and they do have very good OOXML support. The dev version of OOo here is also quite good regarding that (just headers and footers are a no-go) but not really stable.

I might play around with the evolution-brutus stuff from 42tools sometime soon, i have noticed that F9 has the plugin in their default repos, the thing that sucks about it is that you have to run a windows-service under a priviliged domain account to go between echange and evolution.

I do fear that fedora has gone Too Bleeding Edge for F9 though. I mean xorg-server 1.5 is no where near stable and it won't be for a while post release date tomorrow, so no 3d drivers and no compiz in that direction. Their KDE4 is not the best either. OpenSuSe 11 beta2 does a better job there as does the KDEmod team here. you can notice that fedora is more gnome-centric wheras Novell can work magic with KDE.

stefan

11010010110 · 2008-05-11 20:20:50

If you are going to use the computer yourself then the system should be optimized to you and not to an average user. Install your own preferred distro

I would install Arch or Gentoo (my 2 preferred distros) and not a perfect binary distro

Why ?

I will have problems with any distro. In Arch or Gentoo the problems are likely to be instability while in the perfect distro they will be me not familiar or not thinking the same way as the distro('s makers). Either way there will be problems that will consume time to resolve (fixing them or studying the ways of the perfect distro)

If i am familiar with the distro i will resolve the problems more easily and i suppose i will have less problems in the 1 st place

If my approach is close to that of the distro i will understand better whats going on and flow better with it. (by approach i mean keep it simple vs keep it gui or the approaches of desktop environments 1 vs the other)

Nothing is perfect. Me too. So it is possible that the inperfect Arch or Gentoo suit me better than the perfect binary distro. Its most likely to be this way

cardinals_fan · 2008-05-11 20:27:41

How about FreeBSD?

stefan1975 · 2008-05-11 21:06:52

cardinals_fan wrote:

How about FreeBSD?

i did try that and although i must admire it's stability and in case of OpenBSD the security I feel it is not a desktop-os per se. I mean flash and other plugins can be troublesome as well as citrix clients and office apps like OOo3 or thinkfree office. I would love it for a server though. Mine is now running CentOS but if it should ever fail it will be a decision between CentOS5.x, debian stable or freebsd7. My office laptop is also my multimedia station so those three would not reall fit there.

I like my laptop to be:
bleeding edge
stable
multimedia supported
business apps compatible (rdekstop, citrix, pptp, OOXML, exchange 2007, .net, java, etc.)
KDE4 in a working fashion

since the start of this post some of my issues have been getting better right here though, the OOo3_devel version seems workable. evolution-brutus might work out and for now i have xp_fundamentals in vbox 1.6 with office2k7 and thinkfree office installed. So maybe besides my desktop pc I will keep my laptop with Arch as well, especially if F9 will have a crappy KDE4 and no 3D, then I will wait for F10 with KDE4.1 and xorg-server1.5 final and DRI2 which seems an awesome development, X in the kernel, graphical boot.
fedora does pull off a lot of upstream work still.

stefan

brebs · 2008-05-12 01:30:29

stefan1975 wrote:

so no 3d drivers

It's quite possible, with a little bit of work, just as with pretty fonts.

Bison · 2008-05-12 11:57:18

OSX is easy enough. We have several people in my office rocking leopard

stefan1975 · 2008-05-12 13:58:51

Bison wrote:

OSX is easy enough. We have several people in my office rocking leopard

OSX is easy enough just the hardware is SOOoo expensive.....and the x86 port really is too slow and gives me 1024x768 instead of 1900x1200

Bison · 2008-05-13 12:43:48

stefan1975 wrote:

Bison wrote:
OSX is easy enough. We have several people in my office rocking leopard
OSX is easy enough just the hardware is SOOoo expensive.....and the x86 port really is too slow and gives me 1024x768 instead of 1900x1200

Not really - a MacMini cost me $600 which is pretty moderate

stefan1975 · 2008-05-13 13:06:54

Bison wrote:

stefan1975 wrote:
Bison wrote:
OSX is easy enough. We have several people in my office rocking leopard
OSX is easy enough just the hardware is SOOoo expensive.....and the x86 port really is too slow and gives me 1024x768 instead of 1900x1200
Not really - a MacMini cost me $600 which is pretty moderate

perhaps, but if I buy a comparable notebook as my Dell precision m65 i would end up with a macbook pro 15" for EURO 2200,- (which is around $3000 i believe). So my wallet prefers my m65 with a professional linux distro i am afraid, although I really appreciate MacOS leopard.

stefan

MONODA · 2008-05-13 13:37:10

I like my laptop to be:
bleeding edge
stable
multimedia supported
business apps compatible (rdekstop, citrix, pptp, OOXML, exchange 2007, .net, java, etc.)
KDE4 in a working fashion

why not opensuse, 11 comes out soon. It seems that it fits in with everything you need. The OpenSuSE OOois really good. You can check out the release notes on the site. By when do you need to have this, OpenSuSE 11 comes out June 12ish. If you havent tried 10.3, that is also really good. KDE 3.5 comes with 10.3 but you can do a one click upgrade to kde 4 easily. just google one click install kde4 open suse or something like that. Tell us what you decide.

Last edited by MONODA (2008-05-13 13:52:49)

Arch Linux

#1 2008-04-24 20:13:02

distro for the workplace?

#2 2008-04-25 16:06:26

Re: distro for the workplace?

#3 2008-04-25 17:46:18

Re: distro for the workplace?

#4 2008-04-25 17:51:47

Re: distro for the workplace?

#5 2008-04-25 17:57:25

Re: distro for the workplace?

#6 2008-04-25 18:14:01

Re: distro for the workplace?

#7 2008-04-25 18:29:39

Re: distro for the workplace?

#8 2008-04-25 19:09:09

Re: distro for the workplace?

#9 2008-04-25 19:16:57

Re: distro for the workplace?

#10 2008-04-26 07:34:09

Re: distro for the workplace?

#11 2008-05-11 19:49:02

Re: distro for the workplace?

#12 2008-05-11 20:20:50

Re: distro for the workplace?

#13 2008-05-11 20:27:41

Re: distro for the workplace?

#14 2008-05-11 21:06:52

Re: distro for the workplace?

#15 2008-05-12 01:30:29

Re: distro for the workplace?

#16 2008-05-12 11:57:18

Re: distro for the workplace?

#17 2008-05-12 13:58:51

Re: distro for the workplace?

#18 2008-05-13 12:43:48

Re: distro for the workplace?

#19 2008-05-13 13:06:54

Re: distro for the workplace?

#20 2008-05-13 13:37:10

Re: distro for the workplace?

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