| A DAY AT THE OFFICE
For years, true believers battered and bloodied themselves with Linux on the
desktop as a moral badge of courage, while cooler heads with real work to do watched and waited. Now, at long
last, the door to the front office cracks open. |
 |
|||
 by
Jack Fegreus |
|
In the second fiscal quarter of 2001, MS Office led the way as desktop applications brought in $2.5 billion in revenues for Microsoft. That may sound like a cool piece of change, but for Microsoft those numbers are down right depressing. Four years ago, desktop revenues accounted for more than half of Microsoft's cash flow. That percentage has seen severe negative growth since then. A good deal of this change rests with the fact that Office upgrades have been stalled dead in their tracks for some time. While Office XP is the new technical wunderkind of the family, in survey after survey of IT executives, the reports indicate that roughly half are still using Office 2000, while the other half are using Office 97. Perhaps that explains why Microsoft's director of worldwide licensing and pricing says services will dominate in the future as upgrades are frequently "drizzled out." Meanwhile there as been an ominous rumble of thunder from the IT gods at sites with thousands upon thousands of desktop systems to service. The IT Director of Ford's European division has publicly stated that he is looking for an Open Source alternative on the desktop. Both the British and German governments have recently set in place schemes to encourage various governmental agencies to consider broader Open Source alternatives for all levels of computing. The indisputable fact is that the potential savings on the desktop could dwarf all of the savings already realized running Open Source software on servers. What's more, the desktop is pretty much a green field for Linux distributions today. While this year, IDG projects that new installations of Linux on servers will surpass that of Windows 2000, finding a Linux desktop system in a large corporation is somewhat akin to finding a Renoir in the attic. The current desktop market share for Linux is reportedly an abysmal 1.5%. That number is not so improbable when you compare it to the entry platform statistics for the Open magazine web site. Only about 15% of Open's readers come into the site running on an OS that is not a version of Windows. |
|
With this in mind, openBench Labs turned its eye from the back office to the front. The purpose of our test scenario was to access the feasibility of running Linux on the desktop of a typical knowledge worker. In all practicality, this boils down to providing an alternative to running MS Office on either Windows 98 or Windows 2000 Pro. As a result, the issues for our assessment would be ease-of-use and transparency rather than speeds, feeds, and raw seething performance. For this test, we installed SuSE 8.0 on an HP Omnibook 6000, which was powered by an Intel Pentium III CPU clocked at 700 MHz and sported 256MB of PC133 SDRAM. Like most high-end business laptops, our Omnibook came equipped with a DVD-ROM and an integrated Ethernet NIC and modem. Installation of SuSE 8.0 is painless to the point of now bordering on the trivial. The SuSE default is to use the journal-based Reiser file system for the OS, which is particularly important in our test scenario. Drivers were discovered for all of the hardware with one notable exception. The built-in modem went undiscovered, which is hardly surprising. Like most, if not all, embedded modems, ours was a WinFAX modem sans controller chip and thus relies on the Windows OS to function. The solution was simply to pop a fully functional PCMCIA modem card into the Omnibook. |
|
The other exception to note concerns the SuSE software installation. The LinNeighborhood application is not installed by default as a Samba client. LinNeighborhood must be specifically chosen as an option. For most Windows users, this is a rather critical application for emulating the 'Windows experience' on corporate LANs. With LinNeighbohood, users can easily locate and mount Windows shares, NAS devices, and shared printers. In line with simulating the 'Windows experience', the installation default by SuSE to Reiser FS, a fully journaled file system, eliminates the hideous fsck experience users would otherwise have had to go through on boot up following anything not resembling a perfectly well-ordered shutdown. While obviously not recommended, users can now pull the plug with extreme prejudice on an apparently hung system and suffer little or no consequences. They simply reboot and blithely continue on their way. What's more, installation of SuSE Linux does not stop at the last track of the DVD. As with Windows, SuSE provides for easy web access to updates and even automated installation of binary patches. Most significant for our tests, we were able to upgrade our desktop environment to the 3.0.1 release of KDE. |
|
|
One of the key assumptions of our test scenario was that IT would do all of the configuration and support for the system. It would fall to IT to determine a default, or at least a recommended, desktop environment. The theory behind this being that letting loose unsuspecting end-users loose into the boundless candy shop of Linux desktop configurability would raise havoc with any corporate help desk organization. We began by checking the performance variation between KDE and GNOME. We had earlier measured a 7.5% performance difference between the two desktop systems, which is just short of what we would consider a significant difference. This time, with the 3.0.1 update of KDE, the difference was cut in half. Performance numbers for the oblCPU benchmark on KDE were within 3% of the performance on GNOME. Given the slight, but persistent, performance edge of GNOME, a revitalized look and feel with GNOME 1.4, and affinity for GNOME in all of the software packages that we were examining, it seemed at this point that GNOME would be our hands-down choice for new users. For most of our testing period, it appeared that this was not to be. |
 |
|
Problems immediately developed with GNOME and the Sawfish windows manager in particular. Sawfish has added a rather annoying feature that prevents an open window from being resized if Sawfish believes that resizing will simply add dead space to the Window. Unfortunately, Sawfish is often plain wrong in its assessment and ends up simply irritating the user. We searched our favorite windows themes for an obscure means to turn this behavior off, however, we never found it. As an alternative, we tried Enlightenment as the Windows manager. While this windows manager takes a much more enlightened view about allowing users to resize windows at will, its configuration interface has a rather clumsy look and feel and this assessment is a lot about look and feel. What's more, Enlightenment can not be tailored inside the GNOME desktop control panel on SuSE. In essence, Enlightenment left us decidedly with the impression of being on top of some manically out of control machine in the fantasy world of the noire movie Brazil. This naturally left us with the KDE environment. |
|
We began our desktop testing with the search for a browser with which we could view Flash graphics and view Adobe Acrobat pfd files. Mozilla plugins now exist for both applications and both are included in the SuSE distribution. As can be seen in the attached Flash-based mouse over images, all three browsers—Mozilla, Galeon, Konqueror—worked nicely with both the Flash and Acrobat plugins. Interestingly, the three browsers were not equally forgiving when it came to web pages with non-standard HTML code that worked with Microsoft's IE browser. Both Konqueror, the KDE embedded browser, and Opera, which is also included in the SuSE distribution, displayed all of the Open magazine web pages in the expected manner. Galeon, the GNOME embedded browser, and Mozilla both failed to display a frame with trim on our splash page. |
|
We then closely examined the code on that page. Prior to this examination we had simply set our syntax check to insure compatibility with Netscape 4.0 and IE 5.0. We now tightened the check to flag any code not in strict compliance with the HTML 4 specification. This tested immediately flagged a line of code that we had early on introduce and which propagated through the site. The malformed code simply identified the name of the frame within which it would be displayed. Deleting the line eliminated the error and made no change in the way it was displayed within IE, Konqueror, or Opera. Nonetheless, with the offending line of code removed, both Galeon and Mozilla displayed the page just as the other browsers did. Unfortunately, Opera proved incompatible with both the Flash and the Acrobat plugins . As a result, we were unable to view Flash web content or an Acrobat pdf file within the Opera browser on Linux. We next turned our attention to the office productivity aspects of our migration to Linux scenario. Clearly the most high-profile aspect, and the one sure to cause the most angst among end users is that of email. At least in corporate America, that means Outlook in the eyes of the end user. Whether the server is Sendmail, qmail, or Postfix on Linux or Exchange on MS Windows 2000, for end users the mail system is simply Outlook. |
|
The implement to crack open the Outlook nut is Evolution from Ximian. This Open Source Outlook look-alike is truly a better Outlook than Outlook. Starting with the Evolution splash page, the look and feel is very much Outlook with some nice extra touches. In the case of the Evolution Summary, added to the inbox, appointment and task lists this is a local weather feed as well as a list of news feeds from which users can customize their Evolution splash pages. Within Evolution, users work just as easily as in Outlook. Personal scheduling of appointments is done just as in Outlook. Ximian also has a connector for Exchange so that Evolution users can participate in a Microsoft-style workgroup-sharing scenario. Like Outlook 2000, Evolution can handle any number of simultaneous IMAP and POP3 email accounts. As with Outlook, all of the POP3 mail is delivered to a central Inbox, while the IMAP folders naturally remain separate. |
|
We next turned our attention to the core applications of MS Office: Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. We chose to evaluate StarOffice 6.0 rather than its Open Source foundation, Open Office 1.0, because we believe StarOffice better fits the needs of an IT organization that must support a host of users. For a fraction of the cost of even a Microsoft upgrade, let alone a new license, StarOffice comes with both support from Sun and a more robust set of add-on tools. We were primarily interested in three things: How well could StarOffice 6.0 complex documents, how intuitive was the user interface for someone who regularly used MS Office, and how well could we share ersatz MS Office documents with other users on both PCs and Macs? On all three points, StarOffice 6.0 was an outstanding success. For the first time testing an MS Office-compatible suite, we encountered no problems opening Office 2000 or Office XP documents. As the screen shots demonstrate, the new user interface nicely parallels that of MS Office. This we found a welcome change from the curiously quirky interface of StarOffice 5.2. As for trading documents between StarOffice and Office on both PCs and Macs, once again, we encountered absolutely no problems. |
|
Nonetheless, StarOffice was not without some administrative concerns. These concerns center on the default configuration which attempts to install the application programs into the home directory of the installer. We originally installed the product as root and placed the files in the /opt directory. As root we had no problem in running the application; however, we could not run the programs properly from a user account. Even after assigning the proper file access permissions to our user account, we still could not get the application to work properly. We found that we had no alternative, but to reinstall the application while running under our user ID. In doing so we first gave our account access to the top of the /opt directory. We then reinstalled StarOffice in /opt as before. This time the application worked perfectly from our user account. This installation scheme, however, leaves an open issue as to whether StarOffice is capable of being cloned for redistribution by IT. Another petty issue came down to our earlier decision to pursue a KDE desktop strategy. StarOffice puts a comprehensive set of entries in the Favorites section of the GNOME menu and nothing in the KDE menu. Worse yet, the Favorites section of the GNOME menu does not appear in the KDE menu. Naturally these entries can be readily created by hand in the KDE menu, but the issue is why such a manual task is necessary. |
|
|
This triggered one last look at the GNOME Control Center to override the restrictions on resizing windows. Once again we failed at changing this property for our favorite style. Nonetheless, we did discove that both the microGUI and Crux themes mercifully did not take advantage of this new Sawfish feature. What's more, Crux provides the option to emulate the MS Windows control icon style on the tops of window frames. We had found our answer for a simplified end-user migration. At this point we also investigated the ability of Linux to communicate and utilize USB-based devices such as digital cameras now coming into business use as well as the home. Here Microsoft touts Windows as offering very easy integration. To test the theory we plugged an Olympus 4040Z into the USB port after snapping a few shots of Mousse, our openBench Labs mascot. . |
|
|
To our surprise, we were able to dynamically access and mount the camera as a new storage device using Kdiskfree on both the Gnome and KDE desktops. With the camera mounted we were then able to navigate its directory tree to manipulate the photos stored on its Smart Media card. The shear ease to accomplish these tasks at the user level, once
all of the initial configuration decisions were made, was admittedly a bit of a surprise. With the advances in the
new kernel introduced last year, the adoption of fully journaled file systems, and the refinements now coming in in
KDE and GNOME, the time is right to selectively begin freeing the corporate Microserfs. |
