Linux does provide everything
Hi.
Yes. Linux does provide everything windows does, and more.
The installation process is just often slightly more tedious, and there is a learning curve if you are going set up mailservers and webservers and such - but the same holds for windows.
I have tried Mandrake, Debian, SuSe, Ubuntu, Caldera, and some others I cant recall.
However, in an office with 5 PCs it is unlikely that there is a "dedicated IT team, well trained or otherwise. The fact is that for such an...
Out of the lot, Mandrake and SuSe's installations are the most straightforward. Mandrake being simpler than Suse. But Suse more powerful.
Each has its own configuration utility and menu system once youre in windows, and you will be better off with someone knowledgeable to walk you through the basics. But in short, with a few hours on hand, simply by browsing the menus and configs, you should get a webserver up and running on Suse or Mandrake.
While I wouldn't consider zero desktop space much of an advantage for virtual desktop managers...
haha, The hardest bit will be finding the subdirectory where you should put the HTML files! on suse it issrv-www-html
Internet Explorer = Mozilla Firefox (which I use on Windows anyways, it is identical to IE except you dont get popups and spyware. You can enable popups for certain sites. Firefox is really neat! Font smoothing, everything, just like IE. Actually, most sites nowadays look better on it. Firefox also adds tabbed browsing which is vasly superior to having 10 or 5 different browser windows all over the screen or the taskbar.
MS Office = Openoffce 2.0 Beta - which I use on windows anyways. It is slightly less responsive than Office 2003, but more versatile and powerful, and looks nicer. Just make sure your PC's have at least 512MB Ram if you are going to keep mail, spreadsheet, writer, and webbrowser all open at the same time.
Outlook = Mozilla Thunderbird - which I use on win anwyays. Its about as configurable and an option I personally LOVE is the threaded view - I dump all my sent mail in there, then it is easy to follow email conversations as when you receive a response to a previous mail, it shows up as a tree, right on top. (if sorted by date). Lovely, neat.. and as for firefox you can download all kinds of extensions. Be warned, it runs best clean with no addons, as do firefox.
Unfortunately I know of only one linux that comes with all this out of the box.
KNOPPIX!
The beauty of knoppix is, that you can run it without installing it. Thats right. It boots right off the CD. And it is just so cool.
So, If you want to see what Linux is-can be like, rather download Knoppix. I looked at 2.4 and 2.6. Theres probably a newer version out. Its even got plugins to use windows drivers for unsupported hardware!
..But thats getting into too much detail.
Do give yourself at least 3-4 days of "down-time" while upgrading and installing linux to get everything more or less in place. You are going to get stuck and frustrated, and although there is such a volume of help available on the internet, you are sometimes going to have to wait quite a while until you find the answer.
It's a subtle "gotcha". Here's the important bit: Wildcard expansion happens first. Think about that for a minute, and see if you can figure...
But try Knoppix.
It's got my stamp of approval!
Coenraad
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