Linux at the Workplace — Take 2

I posted a few blogposts ago about being the only person in our US Office that uses Ubuntu Linux on a regular basis. As I mentioned there are challenges but there also easy ways of getting around them. One of the things are empowering tools to make it easier to use the few windows ™ programs you still need to get things done. I have about two or three programs I just need:

Visio – I use this for a lot of drawings, flows, processes. Its a very useful tool and it just does all the stuff I need.

PowerPoint – This is not useful and its a pain; but company management provides templates in PowerPoint format and expect us to use them. I tend to produce slides which are white on black and those often get a few chuckles in my roadmap and management presentations. Our CEO appreciates them though.

IE 7 – for some reason this is still necessary. I don’t like it.

Now we need an integrating platform that delivers these. I see a few possibilities. One is Codeweavers implementation of Wine. It works for some basic things but I cannot get office applications to run reliably. So I use it for smallish things. The next is VMware Workstation/Player. Its a heavy duty, 600 pound gorilla in the virtualization space. Unfortunately, the 6.5.x release shows in the amazing amount of cruft that it ships with. It used to be a slimmer 160mb or so and now it tops 350mb. VMware Server has suffered the same fate with the 2.0 release. I won’t even run that gigantosaurus and stick with Server 1.0.8 these days.

Finally, the one that saves me daily is VirtualBox 2.0. I truly hope that they never build the cruft into it. Its slim and fast and runs XP Pro SP3 faster than native hardware it almost seems like. Woot! To Virtualbox!

When you tie these altogether with tools like Samba and SSHfs you get a set of enabling protocols and services which tie your data and programs together in true habilis form. SSHfs saves me time, lets me mount a remote file system like its right there and it works securely. I included a /etc/fstab entry to do easy mounting of the file system and then use it on VMware Workstation on a remote system at work running Ubuntu. It works very well and seems robust and easy to start and finish.

Hopefully, you all can see that there really are not many barriers but honestly at Visa when I worked there it would have been very difficult to use Linux. At Celestix, its much easier and I just do it everyday. Try it out and see if things work for you. I find myself more productive, happier, faster and able to get more work done on Linux.