Thursday, October 04, 2007

Ubuntu Linux is finally in the right place

I love Linux. Now, at this point, you're probably thinking that I'm just one of these fanboy nerds that loves to sit on a computer all day and hack on code. You're partially right : I do love to sit on computers and hack on code, but certainly not all day and certainly not at the expense of other fun activities like going to hockey games and being with friends. That said, I like Linux because it's good for doing development and it's ridiculously stable. It's even quite performant as well, which is
quite nice. I like it to the point that I'd want to put it on all of the computers here in the office, and as per the title of this post, I think that Ubuntu Linux is at the point where that's a practical possibility. In the past few days, I've installed Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn) on two machines here in the office, set them up to do networked printing, networked file sharing, and everything else that may be needed by office workers. Hell, they can even use the built in Terminal Services client to remote into our server here in the office if they need to do any centralized work. They even have all their networked drives mounted for them, and they can see the Windows domain on which this place runs. The only thing remaining is for the systems to pass the Boss Test : sit the big boss of the company down on one, and if he can print his stuff, access his stuff and access our server exactly the same as he could in Windows, then it stays.

There's a great tutorial on setting up Samba with Windows Shares in Ubuntu here. Printing was
ridiculously easy to set up : I went to System -> Administration -> Printing , it autodetected the printers on our LAN and setting them up was merely a matter of following on screen directions.

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