Comments on: SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 for Spreading the Linux Cure

By: tubeme

tubeme — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 00:47:45 +0000

lefty.crupps

“So how does one log in and administer a newbieâ€™s box via SSH if weâ€™re all behind DHCP addresses assigned randomly by our ISPs,”

Pretty easy. use one of the Dynamic DNS service providers. then you will have your domain “myname.dyndns.com” matching your IP everytime you connect to the ISP. This guarantees your connection.

If you have router that does not have VPN, make one of your machines VPN access point and forward the VPN port in the router to this machine. Then make the VPN connection to your domain “myomain.dyndns.com”. Then you can connect to your machines by IP. Just make your home network with static IP’s. The DHCP service is nice but you really need it if you have more than couple of workstations at home.

Some Routers have VPN access points so if you buy such router (LinkSys makes good ones with IPsec) you can connect directly to the router and then connect to the workstations at home by IP.

If you don’t like VPN you can still manage doing it. Make custom port RDP for each machine. THen forward each custom port in the router to coresponding workstation. Then when you make the RDP connections just use these custom Ports and here yuo go.

By: Brian

Brian — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 18:55:38 +0000

Scott,
Thanks for the work you’ve done. With the information you supplied via the electronic courses and books I am able to put together a reasonable ‘arm twister’ to move our company to Novell Suse Linux! Of particular help was “Who Uses Linux” and “Why People Like It”. The reponses of those who’ve switched also improved the image of Linux to my peers. So long M$

The one Gotcha is the MS Access compatability issue. We use Access 2003 extensively and to date there is now solution via Crossover Office, Wine or other emulators. OpenOffice Novell Edition just needs to pound on this one for a while, when we can open linked Access databases with OoBase we will REALLY have a complete solution! Til then, it looks like we’ll need to spend the $$$ on Terminal Server or Citrix to access Access I hope someone will keep us posted with any break throughs concerning this issue…

Brian

By: hardwyrd

hardwyrd — Wed, 11 Apr 2007 07:58:00 +0000

@fynali

You can add packman.unixheads.com/suse/10.1 and packman.unixheads.com/suse/10.2 alternately if you want to have access to apps and other stuff. However, this _might_ nullify your support contract for the SLED10 you bought.

Regardless, if you know your own way around Linux in general, I dont think it will hurt.

By: floris naaijkens

floris naaijkens — Mon, 04 Sep 2006 13:16:48 +0000

Reacting to john brown:

I wonder how you would arrive at that conclusion…
Many fonts you may donwload, as well as many fonts linux offers by default, do not render very well on the screen, and have anti-alias badly.
But a selected list of fonts are well crafted and make any application look very beautiful indeed. Just like in Windows. I must say, verdana, arial, georgia and times new romal render really attractive in Windows. But so do their counterparts in Linux. And you can set the fonts in Linux at any level…
And get the right size, too…. For those with -6 or +6 glasses )

By: E@zyVG

E@zyVG — Wed, 26 Jul 2006 11:13:36 +0000

Linux is indeed solid … I use it @home, @work and while I am moving.

By: Michael

Michael — Wed, 26 Jul 2006 04:48:43 +0000

My primary problem with Linux has been setting things up outside the home users needs. You mention Samba server to share files from Linux to windows. That is not a simple task nor has it proven entirely reliable thus far. Linux finds Windows shares easily and it has a number of niceties in terms of Firefox and openoffice. It unfortunately sadly lacks a simple/consistent method for doing anything outside of the norm. Admittedly I am new to Linux and have run Windows since its early days (3.0). I am looking at Linux to add to my network to do autobackups and have the primary server back up its files. This has proven far more difficult than it should be. To share a folder should be little more than a valid user account and appropriate rights. Samba does not lend itself to this as it does not appear to utilize the currently configured users. It hs its own password file that has to be configured separately (At least from the information I have been able to gather thus far). If Linux is to be accepted as mainstream these things need to be much simpler to set up and should be able to be done in one place with good documentation to make it fairly easy for most people coming in the door to figure it out. The only other significant irritation I have is the lack of software written for Linux. Unfortunately that will have to come in time as it becomes more accepted in the industrial fields (Those related to PLC’s, HMI’s Scada and the like). Few vendors make Linux a priority in writing their software. There is also the issue of where you get your software from and its compatibility with your distribution. Some level of compatibility needs to be acheived before Linux can ever be mainstream and start getting the backing of other software vendors who are currently Microsoft specific.

By: lefty.crupps

lefty.crupps — Tue, 25 Jul 2006 20:19:59 +0000

kolobok and Scott mentioned VNC:
QUOTE “…if the person is inside a local network (behind a router), forward the VNC port to that personâ€™s machine. Obviously youâ€™ll want a pretty serious username and password, if theyâ€™re on Windows. Alternatively, if they are on Linux, you can just forward the SSH port right to their box and then you can help them remotely.” /QUOTE

I don’t think this would work, for a variety of reasons, the most obvious (to me) being: I don’t know how to do that stuff! (any links on a good how-to!?) It also requires a router that has SSH or VNC ports that can be configured, which i may or may not have, and my users may or may not have. Plus, if the ISP is providing and changing the IP, how am i going to guess today’s assigned IP? Maybe this is obvious to those with a Networking Certification, but… oh yeah i have that, and i still don’t know…

I want it easy, for them and for myself. No new user wants to start off a help session by being told, “oh, just go register at dyndns and do these next ten steps, then i can help you… Oh you didn’t change your VNC port on the router? RTFM!”

By: George Beinhorn

George Beinhorn — Sat, 22 Jul 2006 15:54:45 +0000

Top reasons few will switch:

1. No killer apps
2. GUIs don’t sell
3. OO a kluge
4. Not a single Linux developer in the world who’s thinking outside of the MS box
5. No killer apps…

By: Limerat

Limerat — Fri, 21 Jul 2006 20:37:49 +0000

What an excellent read…
I have managed to get one person so far to try Linux…She’s still using it.
I left Microsoft in Jan. of this year for the usual reasons and installed a friendly version of Linux…It’s been great!
I really like it and KDE has some nice eye candy…

By: Ed Larson

Ed Larson — Fri, 21 Jul 2006 18:54:47 +0000

When you have a true equivalent to MS Access and the features it uses to feed information
to spreadsheets of the Excel flavor, you’ll have the ability to sway more business.
AutoCad and design programs is also of big interest. The rest of the programs
available today for Linux need minor tweaking but are good enough.

By: Scott Morris

Scott Morris — Fri, 21 Jul 2006 15:36:05 +0000

I was told by Andreas Jaeger directly that the SLE10 platforms should be fully compatible with the 10.1 installation sources. If there are glitches, that sucks, but they should be compatible. However, if you do this, you nullify the tech support contract you get when you buy the OS.

By: fynali

fynali — Fri, 21 Jul 2006 15:19:24 +0000

Iâ€™ve been trying out SLES/SLED 10 (since pre-release, and now the final release).

Some of the applications that I was trying to install are not available on the catalogs on CD (apps like thunderbird, lighttpdâ€¦). I tried using openSUSE 10.1 YaST installation sources. Sure enough theyâ€™re available there, and installs on SLE[SD] 10; but I think they break LSB compliance or introduce other glitchesâ€¦ and strictly speaking, they arenâ€™t packaged for SLE[SD] 10; moreover, it is not right way to do it in a production environment.

Are there any YaST/rug online installation sources for SLE[SD] 10?

By: Scott Morris

Scott Morris — Fri, 21 Jul 2006 14:57:37 +0000

Lefty Crups,
As kolobok says, Dynamic DNS is great! Then, if the person is inside a local network (behind a router), forward the VNC port to that person’s machine. Obviously you’ll want a pretty serious username and password, if they’re on Windows.
Alternatively, if they are on Linux, you can just forward the SSH port right to their box and then you can help them remotely.
Thanks for stopping by.

By: kolobok

kolobok — Fri, 21 Jul 2006 06:48:59 +0000

lefty.crups,
you should try Dynamic DNS (www.dyndns.org) to overcome the dynamic IP problem.

By: Frank M

Frank M — Fri, 21 Jul 2006 04:23:50 +0000

I Agree, fonts and consistency are still a problem. There are still too many “moving targets” in Linux for the corporate desktop. Home use is ok, I have the time to play around until I can get it right, but not at work where I don’t have the time and the users don’t have the patience. From one distro to the next, from one version to the next, too many things keep changing and too much time is wasted trying to find out how to make it work. I love Linux, all our servers are Linux, but the desktop… no way. It’s as if Linux has a bad attention span, can’t decide what it wants to be or how it want to look.

The best option if you want to move away from the Windows desktop, is to use Mac OS X. You get a great core OS(BSD) with the best GUI in the world.

Apple OS X is what Linux wants to be when it grows up. At the rate Linux is growing up, it’s going to be a teenager for a long time.

… Peace