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Perhaps it was sheer exhaustion after all the arguments of late, but Linux bloggers have been relatively quiet over the past few days. IBM, oddly enough, seemed to be the topic of most frequent conversation recently, and on several fronts. The first was yet another thread dating back to LinuxCon, which Linux Girl is hereby awarding her "Event Most Likely to Spark a Contentious Debate" award. "Bob Sutor, IBM's VP of open source, seemed to once again throw desktop Linux under the bus this week at LinuxCon," was how Carla Schroder began her post.
While I was with IBM Global services (Jan 2006 to Dec 2008) I used Desktop Linux almost exclusively. The Distro of (IBM) choice was Red Hat. It worked pretty well including VPN client. For the last half of my time with IBM I also had a Debian installation running perfectly using the VPN and other software (Notes Symphony etc.) The Ubuntu and Debian trees with the IBM specific software are supposed to only be used for internal research projects so you need to be a little circumspect in when you use them. They also require a little bit of a search on the intranet as they are not promoted. But they both work well. It looked like there was also a SuSe distribution available at one time with the IBM toolset but after the Microsoft partnership I could not stomach that. In any case I was using Rational Software Architect on both Red Hat and Debian as well as all the other IBM internal tools without any difficulty. There are a few tools our group sometimes had to use that did not have a Linux version available but for the work I did using them was very rare. (Some educational content for IBM classes seemed to only work in IE as one example.)
I thought IBM was doing a great job getting ready to transition to Linux. The maturity level of the various tools is almost there. (For the small number of tools not on Linux those that are power users could run a virtual machine with W2K or XP or perhaps even Wine although the average user might be a little put off with that.)
I thought IBM was doing a great job getting ready to transition to Linux. The maturity level of the various tools is almost there. (For the small number of tools not on Linux those that are power users could run a virtual machine with W2K or XP or perhaps even Wine although the average user might be a little put off with that.)
There are many of us within IBM who would prefer to use a linux desktop. Unfortunately IBM has not based their Linux image on practical desktop distros. Also, their choice of AT&T for VPN is incredibly limiting (AT&T's linux VPN is awful and does not work on most distros). Ironically, many of the other apps we need to use internally (like Notes) do work well. The VPN is an incredible bottleneck. IBM should work to make the AT&T VPN work with all distros and then should work on a good Netbook image. IBM should make Linux desktops available world wide but we should start by making them work well for our own employees. This would not be as difficult as it seems but is hamstrung by lack of vision, bad management, lack of budget and lack of comittment. If IBM could prove that the desktop could work within IBM there would be a good argument for providing services in this area for customers.
Isn't that the communities job and VARs to sell Linux. When I worked at IBM I wanted to use the IBM Linux Desktop with Symphony but it was lacking some core work tools but who's job is it IBM's or the Linux communities? I agree no one on the server hardware side pushes Linux more than IBM. On testing we installed 5 Linux servers to 1 windows server, that ratio represented real world install projections. Like the article said if you can get a match desktop to server then pushing buyer to a full Linux install is easy. I think we should blame Lenovo, they don't want to sell Linux on their client machines in the US. I have a S10 running OpenSuSE, S9 comes with SuSE but is only available in Asia/Australia. Just bought a Lenovo G530 came with Vista wiped and installed Novell Linux Desktop. Maybe IBM/Lenovo should form a strategic Linux partnership.
