Re: [PCTECH] Linux for a programmer's desktop

On Friday 13 February 2004 16:12, Buck Calabro wrote:
> >Although, the horses usually just watch
> >short clips of the latest races...
>
> It's amazing the audience share that NASCAR garners.  I must say that
> I'm happy to hear that we have lives outside of work.  I have two
> teens, an infant and a menagerie.  Time is a precious commodity indeed,
> which leads me to a more topical question:

Hi Buck

What's a life? I'm not sure I even had much of one before kids, and I 
agree time is scarce ;) However, I might have something to contribute 
here. I started using Linux at work nearly five years ago, and I'm still 
the only Linux user at our firm. At least now we have a couple of servers 
running it too, so I'm not quite so isolated ;) 

> I want to learn more about Linux.  By far, the easiest way would be to
> run it here at work.  In fact, I have a hand-assembled jumble running
> on a 486 here in my cube, but it's ancient and command-line only.  I'd
> rather use X on my desktop.  There are several gotcha's that I'd like
> to overcome.  The first is that I'd be all alone - the IT folks will be
> unable to offer any assistance, and will be somewhat apprehensive about
> me ditching Windows.  Also, everyone else will still be running
> Windows.  Dual boot might help in that regard.  IT are running Exchange
> for our email/calendar and Office is installed on every desktop.  I'm a
> dyed in the wool Code/400 user.

Rather than dual-booting, you might want to look at VMWare. If you're a 
member of a Linux User Group (LUG) they are running a $100 rebate program 
at the moment. I got it at work so I could run WDSC (unlike WSAD, there's 
no Linux version), though I ended up with a Windows PC (as well) that I 
could run WSAD on. I have quite a few Linux distros install in VMware so 
I can compare the installers without breaking my existing setup. I put up 
with dual-booting for six months or so, but the learning progress was 
slow during that time :(

> I can investigate the interoperability of OpenOffice.org with Office,
> and perhaps be able to continue to participate with the rest of the
> company who will still be using Office.  If that doesn't work,
> dual-boot.

It depends on how much editing & returning of documents you need to do. 
Unless the documents have contained lots of mixed text and graphics, I've 
never had any problems using OpenOffice with others MS Office files. It 
tends to be external users (customers/suppliers) that cause me more 
problems, but generally I only need to read them, not amend them. I've 
been using OpenOffice since it was released and StarOffice before that 
and it keeps getting better. I really like OOo 1.1. In fact I started 
using StarOffice when StarDivision still owned it, back around '98, just 
so I didn't have to install MS Word at home!

> I have looked at Ximian for Exchange interoperability.  It'll run me
> $99 for the desktop and another $69 for Exchange interoperability.  If
> push comes to shove, I might be able to use OWA but the Exchange server
> has a severe limit on the size of mailboxes and I store most of my mail
> on my PC.  Has anyone else used this to be the sole Linux geek in a
> Windows company?

I use Evolution but fortunately I don't need the Exchange stuff, as we run 
Domino. I just use the Notes POP3 server to access my mail. I've tried 
the web interface, but at release 5 it's still pretty poor :(

> As far as Code goes, I guess I'll have to bite the bullet and learn
> something else.  Bearing in mind that my work PC is a PII-450 with
> 128MB RAM and 1.6Gb left of disk, any thoughts on an editor that is
> iSeries-friendly?

I use a mixture of SEU on iSeries and vim (VI Improved) on my desktop to 
work on code. PDM options copy the source member to/from the IFS where my 
PC edits them (via an NFS share). The diff mode has really speeded up the 
time it takes to merge code changes in different versions, and I wouldn't 
be without it now. 

> Does this whole plan even sound feasible?  Or would I be better off to
> spend less time at work and more time on the computer at home where I
> can cobble a PC together to load Linux et. al.  That ought to make the
> family happy, eh?  :-) --buck

It's feasible, but it does take perseverance. I've had quite a bit of 
(good-natured) flak in the office over the years, particularly from our 
IT manager (who asked me to look at Linux in the first place) ;) 
Surprisingly our new IT director is quite pro OSS (as a result of 
attending too many recent IBM briefings I think), which makes a pleasant 
change. Open Source is officially on the agenda for this year :)

Regards, Martin
-- 
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