The Great Linux Migration
Posted on 29. Jun, 2010 by Amit Jindal in General
Those who know me already know that Aquevix is a Linux based Infrastructure. Our mail servers, virtualization, thin clients, firewalls, application servers, database servers, monitoring servers, all are Linux. I have been a Linux user since 1997 when Redhat was 6.x (before their Enterprise products).
Moreover, somehow I just couldn’t bite the idea that we need a antivirus, a firewall, security settings and the huge laundry list that goes with Windows. Oh, don’t forget the CALs. However I personally have not been able to migrate to Linux completely because of several reasons. Not that I am making excuses but really these are not easily replaceable:
- Microsoft Outlook
- Microsoft Project
- Adobe Photoshop
- Nokia OVI Suite
Apart from these there are many small utilities that I simply cannot abandon due to our development cycles. However I have decided to try to make Linux my primary machine.
So which is the lucky platform?
I am going to try Ubuntu 10.04 LTS. This seems like a reasonably stable OS. Before this I have tried Ubuntu 6/7/8.04/9 and all have failed one way or the other. Not just these, OpenSuse, Fedora, Linux Mint, debian 5; the list is exhaustive. Linux is vastly superior on servers, no doubt. But on desktops, I still don’t think its ready.
Today was Day 1. I tried using KeePass (.NET version) and started getting missing references error. Apparently some DLLs are not in correct default path. When I searched, I didn’t find anything that directly solved my problem. In the end, I ended up not using Keepass for now (till I get some time).
I think the real problem is that when something doesn’t works in Linux, it is _really_ hard to figure out what’s wrong. And even if we do figure out, its even harder to fix it.
So let me see how long I can cope with this and if I will be able to completely surrender to Linux.
So long.
Amit Jindal
Aquevix (http://www.aquevix.com)