Right, so at work I’m going to be trying out virtual workstations as a way of making better use of the hardware we already have. I’ll go into more detail on that as the project progresses, but for now, I wanna talk about some of my experiences w/ Linux.
For starters, the reason I’m trying Linux is to serve as the thin workstation that my users will use to start either a VNC session or a VMWare Console session w/ their virtual XP host that’s running on a VMWare server. One of the goals of this prototype is to determine if it’s feasible to push the cost of computing and hard disk requirements into the NOC where I can get higher utilization percentages out of my hardware while running very cheap, underwhelming workstations.
Three distros of Linux came to mind: Fedora Core, Ubuntu and Suse. As a long time Mac and Windows user, I figured this would be a great learning exercise for me to get to know Linux and to secretly determine if there was a chance I might use it as my daily OS, or even (GASP!) try introducing some users to it.
Having not tried Linux for years now, I was expecting pretty much the same experience: very solid, very configurable, rough around the edges. I’ve played w/ some open source programs that people’ve ported to the Mac, and I knew that there was a high level of sophistication in store for me, but I was honestly taken by surprise by just how close these OS’s are to being ready for plain users.
The main point that I want to make is that they aren’t quite there yet, and I’ll give this one example. In Ubuntu today, I wanted to adjust the resolution to the laptop’s native display resolution. Given just the three choices of 640×480, 800×600 and 1024×768, I was somewhat irritated. After asking Ted how to fix it, he recommended googling, and what I fixed it based on the discussion thread I found here.
What pissed me off is that after going through the text-based config program, I happened to have chosen a bad option, so the UI wouldn’t start anymore. Rebooting left me in the shell. That sucks. There has to be a better way.
Last thing I want is my users goofin around in the shell.