linux as a workstation

Mark Szidik szidikm@mlc.lib.mi.us
Wed, 15 Aug 2001 11:19:35 -0400 (EDT)


On Wed, 15 Aug 2001, Scott Overfield wrote:

> Good Morning,
> I have been asked to give a presentation at an upcoming meeting on the
> viability of linux as a workstation/desktop OS.....could anyone on the list
> point me toward any resources? Also, are there any alternatives to NFS for
> network file sharing between linux/unix servers and linux/unix workstations?
> Any help appreciated....

You could run smbmount/Samba between two Linux/unix boxes.

As far as resources go, I don't really have anything to suggest.

However, I just did a presentation on Free Software and Linux to
several groups of librarians.

I also talked for 90 minutes on the whole Free software movements
history, licenese, philosophy and culture.  For this I relied on
ESR's CATB, etc. papers.  They were bored with most of it.

Then I demoed Linux apps and this really blew them away!

I think most people don't realize just how good Gnome/KDE are now
days. (I still prefer WindowMaker)

Here is what I demoed:

twm (just to contrast it with the heavyweights)
Gnome
KDE
Netscape (for familiarity and the mail client)
Mozilla 9.x
GIMP  (this really impressed them)
Dia
Gnumeric
Abiword
StarOffice 5.2  (I showed opening Word and Excel documents)

VMware - I ran out of time to demo it.

I also explained and demoed SSH forwarding of X applications from
a server to my desktop.

They loved the demo portion.  So my suggestion to you is to
dazzle them with a hands on demo.  Then explain that its all
free!


HTH

-Mark