🚀 go-pugleaf

Oliver Bannatyne wrote:

> I am investigating technology solutions on behalf of a small-medium sized
> inner-city finance firm. The firm is looking at a number of possible
> technology options. At the moment the firm has about 20x Pentium II PC's
> running Windows 95, 98, and 2000 and MS Office 95 and 97.  The firm is
> looking at moving to either stand-alone workstations or thin clients
> running linux, and MS Office (by use of Codeweavers CrossOver product -See
> http://www.codeweavers.com/products/office/ and
> http://www.codeweavers.com/products/cxofficeserver/.). The workstations
> will be upgraded, but only if they need to be.
> 
> I am trying to ascertain what is possible, and whether a (thick/thin
> client) linux (running CrossOver Office and MS Office) is robust enough in
> an commercial environment for use by this financial firm. I am unsure of
> the hardware requirements and the coverage of technical support available
> for such a setup. (Note: the firm does not have dedicated IT staff.) To
> further this goal, I am looking for any organisations that have
> implemented any similar system in New Zealand, Australia and other parts
> of the world.

The only iffy part is Outlook and Access, however, since most users don't 
use Access and there are already adequte replacements for Outlook, 
Crossover does a pretty good job.

Matthew Gardiner
-- 
Linux linux 2.4.19-4GB #1 Mon Oct 21 18:45:41 UTC 2002 i686 unknown
  4:40pm  up 2 days, 15:56,  6 users,  load average: 0.07, 0.18, 0.17

Oliver Bannatyne wrote:
> I am investigating technology solutions on behalf of a small-medium sized
> inner-city finance firm. The firm is looking at a number of possible
> technology options. At the moment the firm has about 20x Pentium II PC's
> running Windows 95, 98, and 2000 and MS Office 95 and 97.  The firm is
> looking at moving to either stand-alone workstations or thin clients running
> linux, and MS Office (by use of Codeweavers CrossOver product -See
> http://www.codeweavers.com/products/office/ and
> http://www.codeweavers.com/products/cxofficeserver/.). The workstations will
> be upgraded, but only if they need to be.
> 
> I am trying to ascertain what is possible, and whether a (thick/thin client)
> linux (running CrossOver Office and MS Office) is robust enough in an
> commercial environment for use by this financial firm. I am unsure of the
> hardware requirements and the coverage of technical support available for
> such a setup. (Note: the firm does not have dedicated IT staff.) To further
> this goal, I am looking for any organisations that have implemented any
> similar system in New Zealand, Australia and other parts of the world.
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Oliver Bannatyne
> Technology Consultant.
> 
> Phone Mobile: +64 21 2613151
> Temporary Phone DDI: +64 9 375 8513
> Temporary Email: KerrynB@SHlock.co.nz


I would ask why keep MS office, download and trial openoffice, I am at 
work and its good.  See if its good enough for you.

You have P11s so are they good enough ? or they lacking grunt? I would 
not run a 20 pc office without a server to centralise and back up your 
data. MS SBE is a reasonable product for that size of business, take a 
look at it, it depends on you want.  Linux could be an acceptable 
solution for thin clients but your talking 2 small servers clustered to 
ensure availability, thats not a real option for your size.

I would tend to suggest keeping the present MS clients, move to 
openoffice with samba as a file server. My reasoning for this is its 
simple, The key to supporting your business is KISS, keep it simple and 
stupid. Once you have proven openoffice is adequate consider moving to a 
linux desktop to improve reliability.

If you had 100 users or 200 I would tend to look to a thin client 
solution using 2 decent servers in a HA cluster situation, but at 20 
users the savings are just not there to justify the complexity.

regards

Thing

"Thing" <nospam@hting.dyndns.org> wrote in message
news:3DEC6AD1.4070709@hting.dyndns.org...
> Oliver Bannatyne wrote:
> > I am investigating technology solutions on behalf of a small-medium
sized
> > inner-city finance firm. The firm is looking at a number of possible
> > technology options. At the moment the firm has about 20x Pentium II PC's
> > running Windows 95, 98, and 2000 and MS Office 95 and 97.  The firm is
> > looking at moving to either stand-alone workstations or thin clients
running
> > linux, and MS Office (by use of Codeweavers CrossOver product -See
> > http://www.codeweavers.com/products/office/ and
> > http://www.codeweavers.com/products/cxofficeserver/.). The workstations
will
> > be upgraded, but only if they need to be.
> >
> > I am trying to ascertain what is possible, and whether a (thick/thin
client)
> > linux (running CrossOver Office and MS Office) is robust enough in an
> > commercial environment for use by this financial firm. I am unsure of
the
> > hardware requirements and the coverage of technical support available
for
> > such a setup. (Note: the firm does not have dedicated IT staff.) To
further
> > this goal, I am looking for any organisations that have implemented any
> > similar system in New Zealand, Australia and other parts of the world.
> >
> > Thanks,
> >
> > Oliver Bannatyne
> > Technology Consultant.
> >
> > Phone Mobile: +64 21 2613151
> > Temporary Phone DDI: +64 9 375 8513
> > Temporary Email: KerrynB@SHlock.co.nz
>
>
> I would ask why keep MS office, download and trial openoffice, I am at
> work and its good.  See if its good enough for you.
>
> You have P11s so are they good enough ? or they lacking grunt? I would
> not run a 20 pc office without a server to centralise and back up your
> data. MS SBE is a reasonable product for that size of business, take a
> look at it, it depends on you want.  Linux could be an acceptable
> solution for thin clients but your talking 2 small servers clustered to
> ensure availability, thats not a real option for your size.
>
> I would tend to suggest keeping the present MS clients, move to
> openoffice with samba as a file server. My reasoning for this is its
> simple, The key to supporting your business is KISS, keep it simple and
> stupid. Once you have proven openoffice is adequate consider moving to a
> linux desktop to improve reliability.
>
> If you had 100 users or 200 I would tend to look to a thin client
> solution using 2 decent servers in a HA cluster situation, but at 20
> users the savings are just not there to justify the complexity.
>
> regards
>
> Thing

E-Smith (aka Mitel SME) would be a useful back office server for an
organisation of this size, keep your client machines as they are (already
paid for, etc) and you already have Office 97 which is OK for most things.

In aus.computers.linux Oliver Bannatyne <KerrynB@shlock.co.nz> wrote:

> I am investigating technology solutions on behalf of a small-medium sized
> inner-city finance firm. The firm is looking at a number of possible
> technology options. At the moment the firm has about 20x Pentium II PC's
> running Windows 95, 98, and 2000 and MS Office 95 and 97.  The firm is
> looking at moving to either stand-alone workstations or thin clients running
> linux, and MS Office (by use of Codeweavers CrossOver product -See

i'd consider installing a decent server (fast processor, plenty of ram,
and plenty of hdd space) with redhat (i'd probably still use rh7.3 at this
stage) and staroffice (or openoffice, maybe, which is basically the same
thing, but staroffice seems to be a bit more "professional") and use ltsp
(linux terminal server project www.ltsp.org)  running on the pentium IIs
as X terminals.

it should certainly be better than what they've got now!

will

pete wrote:
> "Thing" <nospam@hting.dyndns.org> wrote in message
> news:3DEC6AD1.4070709@hting.dyndns.org...
> 
>>Oliver Bannatyne wrote:
>>
>>>I am investigating technology solutions on behalf of a small-medium
>>
> sized
> 
>>>inner-city finance firm. The firm is looking at a number of possible
>>>technology options. At the moment the firm has about 20x Pentium II PC's
>>>running Windows 95, 98, and 2000 and MS Office 95 and 97.  The firm is
>>>looking at moving to either stand-alone workstations or thin clients
>>
> running
> 
>>>linux, and MS Office (by use of Codeweavers CrossOver product -See
>>>http://www.codeweavers.com/products/office/ and
>>>http://www.codeweavers.com/products/cxofficeserver/.). The workstations
>>
> will
> 
>>>be upgraded, but only if they need to be.
>>>
>>>I am trying to ascertain what is possible, and whether a (thick/thin
>>
> client)
> 
>>>linux (running CrossOver Office and MS Office) is robust enough in an
>>>commercial environment for use by this financial firm. I am unsure of
>>
> the
> 
>>>hardware requirements and the coverage of technical support available
>>
> for
> 
>>>such a setup. (Note: the firm does not have dedicated IT staff.) To
>>
> further
> 
>>>this goal, I am looking for any organisations that have implemented any
>>>similar system in New Zealand, Australia and other parts of the world.
>>>
>>>Thanks,
>>>
>>>Oliver Bannatyne
>>>Technology Consultant.
>>>
>>>Phone Mobile: +64 21 2613151
>>>Temporary Phone DDI: +64 9 375 8513
>>>Temporary Email: KerrynB@SHlock.co.nz
>>
>>
>>I would ask why keep MS office, download and trial openoffice, I am at
>>work and its good.  See if its good enough for you.
>>
>>You have P11s so are they good enough ? or they lacking grunt? I would
>>not run a 20 pc office without a server to centralise and back up your
>>data. MS SBE is a reasonable product for that size of business, take a
>>look at it, it depends on you want.  Linux could be an acceptable
>>solution for thin clients but your talking 2 small servers clustered to
>>ensure availability, thats not a real option for your size.
>>
>>I would tend to suggest keeping the present MS clients, move to
>>openoffice with samba as a file server. My reasoning for this is its
>>simple, The key to supporting your business is KISS, keep it simple and
>>stupid. Once you have proven openoffice is adequate consider moving to a
>>linux desktop to improve reliability.
>>
>>If you had 100 users or 200 I would tend to look to a thin client
>>solution using 2 decent servers in a HA cluster situation, but at 20
>>users the savings are just not there to justify the complexity.
>>
>>regards
>>
>>Thing
> 
> 
> E-Smith (aka Mitel SME) would be a useful back office server for an
> organisation of this size, keep your client machines as they are (already
> paid for, etc) and you already have Office 97 which is OK for most things.
> 
> 

yes true. 97 is getting a little long in the tooth, but OpenOffice can 
always be installed along side for zilch cost

regards

Thing

will@xxxx.swaggie.net wrote:
> In aus.computers.linux Oliver Bannatyne <KerrynB@shlock.co.nz> wrote:
> 
> 
>>I am investigating technology solutions on behalf of a small-medium sized
>>inner-city finance firm. The firm is looking at a number of possible
>>technology options. At the moment the firm has about 20x Pentium II PC's
>>running Windows 95, 98, and 2000 and MS Office 95 and 97.  The firm is
>>looking at moving to either stand-alone workstations or thin clients running
>>linux, and MS Office (by use of Codeweavers CrossOver product -See
> 
> 
> i'd consider installing a decent server (fast processor, plenty of ram,
> and plenty of hdd space) with redhat (i'd probably still use rh7.3 at this
> stage) and staroffice (or openoffice, maybe, which is basically the same
> thing, but staroffice seems to be a bit more "professional") and use ltsp
> (linux terminal server project www.ltsp.org)  running on the pentium IIs
> as X terminals.
> 
> it should certainly be better than what they've got now!
> 
> will

For 20 ppl for file sharing you dont need a high spec. Probably 256 meg 
of ram and the slowest p3/p4 out there. Even AMD but make sure the 
server case is designed to be a server. In fact recycling an existing P2 
with new PSU and cpu fan should be enough.

regards

Thing

In aus.computers.linux Thing <nospam@hting.dyndns.org> wrote:

>> i'd consider installing a decent server (fast processor, plenty of ram,
>> and plenty of hdd space) with redhat (i'd probably still use rh7.3 at this
>> stage) and staroffice (or openoffice, maybe, which is basically the same
>> thing, but staroffice seems to be a bit more "professional") and use ltsp
>> (linux terminal server project www.ltsp.org)  running on the pentium IIs
>> as X terminals.

> For 20 ppl for file sharing you dont need a high spec. Probably 256 meg 
> of ram and the slowest p3/p4 out there. Even AMD but make sure the 
> server case is designed to be a server. In fact recycling an existing P2 
> with new PSU and cpu fan should be enough.

i'm talking about a lot more than just file sharing. using ltsp to run x 
terminals, all the processing (except the actual display) is done on the 
server. the x terminals are just terminals. the faster the machine is and 
the more ram it's got the better.

will

-- 

Oliver Bannatyne wrote:

> I am investigating technology solutions on behalf of a small-medium sized
> inner-city finance firm. The firm is looking at a number of possible
> technology options. At the moment the firm has about 20x Pentium II PC's
> running Windows 95, 98, and 2000 and MS Office 95 and 97.  The firm is
> looking at moving to either stand-alone workstations or thin clients



 From what you've said, the firm is already running standalone workstations.

In your mind, what is the difference between a standalone workstation 
and a thin-client ?

What actual problem(s) is the firm experiencing that makes them want to 
change from what they have now ?

> running
> linux, and MS Office (by use of Codeweavers CrossOver product -See
> http://www.codeweavers.com/products/office/ and
> http://www.codeweavers.com/products/cxofficeserver/.). The workstations will
> be upgraded, but only if they need to be.
> 
> I am trying to ascertain what is possible, and whether a (thick/thin client)
> linux (running CrossOver Office and MS Office) is robust enough in an
> commercial environment for use by this financial firm. I am unsure of the
> hardware requirements and the coverage of technical support available for
> such a setup. (Note: the firm does not have dedicated IT staff.) To further
> this goal, I am looking for any organisations that have implemented any
> similar system in New Zealand, Australia and other parts of the world.
> 



No disrespect intended, but I'm not sure that you understand the 
difference between thick, thin client, standalone and client/server 
implementations.

Dave

Oliver Bannatyne wrote:
> I am investigating technology solutions on behalf of a small-medium sized
> inner-city finance firm. The firm is looking at a number of possible
> technology options. At the moment the firm has about 20x Pentium II PC's
> running Windows 95, 98, and 2000 and MS Office 95 and 97.  The firm is
> looking at moving to either stand-alone workstations or thin clients running
> linux, and MS Office (by use of Codeweavers CrossOver product -See
> http://www.codeweavers.com/products/office/ and
> http://www.codeweavers.com/products/cxofficeserver/.). The workstations will
> be upgraded, but only if they need to be.
> 
> I am trying to ascertain what is possible, and whether a (thick/thin client)
> linux (running CrossOver Office and MS Office) is robust enough in an
> commercial environment for use by this financial firm. I am unsure of the
> hardware requirements and the coverage of technical support available for
> such a setup. (Note: the firm does not have dedicated IT staff.) To further
> this goal, I am looking for any organisations that have implemented any
> similar system in New Zealand, Australia and other parts of the world.

They'd be better off to use Open Office primarily and only use MS Office 
where they had a proven file compatibility issue.

I have Crossover Offcie installed here. It supports Word, Excel and 
Powerpoint. Iy was only installed 3 days ago,so we haven't got a proven 
track record for reliability.

It also supports MS IE 5.5.

All of the above seem to work very well on a PIII-450 with 256MB RAM and 
Red Hat 8.0.

But I haven't got much to go on so far.

Dave,

The firm does not own any Microsoft Licensing - rather they have a service
level agreement with a related firm. That related firm is no longer legally
related (besides the SLA) so they are in a position where a completely new
solution (either Microsoft, Linux, or another) will have to be bought and
paid for. They are also leasing server hardware which is unsatisfactory from
a legal point of view.

The difference between a thin-client and a fat-client in my mind is one of
hardware upgrade paths. The question is rather, should the firm buy a
powerful server (the thin client route) or upgrade the workstations (the fat
client route). Every other man and his dog seems to be developing a linux
thin-client solution. Unfortunately the client is tied to MS Excel for
certain mission critical parts of their workflow (OpenOffice and StarOffice
do not support VB due to their opensource and Java allegiances) - so
whatever solution is chosen, be it, CrossOver Office, Lindows, Win4Lin, or
Citrix - it will need to be able to run MS Excel satisfactory.

Technology/Legal Consultant
Oliver Bannatyne.

Dave Green wrote in message <3DED2248.7080806@nospam.winpulp.co.nz>...
>Oliver Bannatyne wrote:

> From what you've said, the firm is already running standalone
workstations.
>
>In your mind, what is the difference between a standalone workstation
>and a thin-client ?

>What actual problem(s) is the firm experiencing that makes them want to
>change from what they have now ?

>No disrespect intended, but I'm not sure that you understand the
>difference between thick, thin client, standalone and client/server
>implementations.
>
>Dave
>
>

> The difference between a thin-client and a fat-client in my mind is one of
> hardware upgrade paths. The question is rather, should the firm buy a
> powerful server (the thin client route) or upgrade the workstations (the
fat
> client route). Every other man and his dog seems to be developing a linux
> thin-client solution. Unfortunately the client is tied to MS Excel for
> certain mission critical parts of their workflow (OpenOffice and
StarOffice
> do not support VB due to their opensource and Java allegiances) - so
> whatever solution is chosen, be it, CrossOver Office, Lindows, Win4Lin, or
> Citrix - it will need to be able to run MS Excel satisfactory.

As much as I'd like to see more linux/open office out there, this doesn't
sound like the place for it (at least initially).

Transitioning to another office suite can be fairly simple if file formats
are the only issue, but a custom workflow system using VBA could be
prohibitive to migrate. I'm not a bit fan of building up applications inside
office suites for that reason. This is where the traditional unix way of
keeping the data and the tools seperate avoids lock-in, but you'd need
fairly savvy users and/or a lot of admin/developer effort to make it work.

It sounds like fat windows clients with a Linux/Samba server or MS SBS (I
hate supporting SBS by the way - but that's just me) would be the way to go.
SBS 2000 (or 2003?) would need a lot more hardware than a samba server.

I'm not sure I'd trust relying on Windows 'emulation' for critical systems.

The only economic justification for using Citrix/Terminal Services would be
if you'd have to upgrade all the workstations otherwise. P2s are more than
capable of running W2K Pro, if they have at least 128MB (pref 256MB) of
memory.

It sounds like some strategic workstation ram and OS upgrades (get all the
workstations running the same software versions), plus installing a
linux/samba server would be the cheapest option.

Future plans could then revolve around making a cross platform version of
that workflow system (eg Python/PHP/Java etc), then replacing the office
suite, then last and optinally replacing the OS. Users don't tend to like
too much change at once (and it's also very risky), let them get used to
each step first.

Cheers
Anton

Thing <nospam@hting.dyndns.org> wrote in message news:<3DEC6AD1.4070709@hting.dyndns.org>...
> I would ask why keep MS office, download and trial openoffice, I am at 
> work and its good.  See if its good enough for you.

I am using OpenOffice 1.0. If I were just producing and printing
documents it would be fine, but sharing documents with uses of
MSWord is not feasible. OO frequently screws up formats, especially
tables. And sometimes I find that, after saving a file in Word format
and send it to a Windows user, it displays fine but attempting to
print causes Word to crash. This is pretty funny, but makes me
unpopular.

Bruce Fountain

will@xxxx.swaggie.net wrote:
> In aus.computers.linux Thing <nospam@hting.dyndns.org> wrote:
> 
> 
>>>i'd consider installing a decent server (fast processor, plenty of ram,
>>>and plenty of hdd space) with redhat (i'd probably still use rh7.3 at this
>>>stage) and staroffice (or openoffice, maybe, which is basically the same
>>>thing, but staroffice seems to be a bit more "professional") and use ltsp
>>>(linux terminal server project www.ltsp.org)  running on the pentium IIs
>>>as X terminals.
>>
> 
>>For 20 ppl for file sharing you dont need a high spec. Probably 256 meg 
>>of ram and the slowest p3/p4 out there. Even AMD but make sure the 
>>server case is designed to be a server. In fact recycling an existing P2 
>>with new PSU and cpu fan should be enough.
> 
> 
> i'm talking about a lot more than just file sharing. using ltsp to run x 
> terminals, all the processing (except the actual display) is done on the 
> server. the x terminals are just terminals. the faster the machine is and 
> the more ram it's got the better.
> 
> will
> 

A p3-600 with 1 gig of ram does 80 odd ppl according to LTSP (ive read 
the notes and Im building my own cluster test bed right now), so you 
dont spend what you dont need to. This is only 20 ppl, again for 20 ppl 
I dont think the linux thin client is the best solution, but I maybe wrong.

Certianly 100~200 ppl and larger I would go thin client, because then
we are talking full time staff on site.

regards

Thing