I certainly make no secret that my favorite Linux Distro is Ubuntu, but I felt compelled to give PCLinuxOS another shot. Before I get to PCLinuxOS 2009.1 let me tellyou a little about PCLinuxOS 2007.x. About, two years ago a college of mine convinced me to give PCLinuxOS a try. OK, he did not have to try all that hard, I do like to try new distros from time to time and I had not tried PCLinuxOS. I do remember that I initially liked PCLinuxOS, but in the end my experience left me with the feeling that some how the distro was not managed by a group that understood usability. I feel like they were to focused on what I call “Type one users” that they were failing to address “Type two users”.  “Type two users” generally have expectations about usability which can be summed up by following buzz words:

Scalability – The ability to customize, the frequency of updates, and the easy of finding packages for the distro.
Functionality – This will include hardware detection, and inclusion or certain packages.
Presentation – The eye candy and location of common tools.
Comparability - How it compares to other features in other distributions.

I would like to point out that in my opinion there are three types of users that a distro needs to address in order to be successful. The first being the newbie, everyone knows that a newbie is hard to please. Newbies, because or their always present pre-conceptions placed by their former OS (Mostly Windows Users), tend to dislike anything unfamiliar. The second is the intermediate, I group two persona of users here. Those who understand how to use Linux, but don’t know how it is put together and don’t care; And, those who both know how to use and understand how Linux works under the hood, but mostly just Google for the answers to any problems that araise. The intermediate crowd can be the toughest to please, and it is also known that they are vital to a distros existence and longevity. Then we have the experts which generally use which every distro they are actively participating in the community with at that time (This includes those writing tutorials, participating in the forums,doing real debugging on applications, and other technical writings for or about the distros).

The intermediate users are the ones that a distro should keep in mind when they do things. And personally two years ago I felt they failed to please this group of users.

So enter the 2009.1 PCLinuxOS experience. To start things off I started up trust old VirtualBox and created a machine to run PCLinuxOS on. Strapped on the 2009.1 iso as the cdrom drive and away I went. Churn, churn , and a few minutes later I was presented with a login where I could choose guest or root. So I chose guest, no special reason other than curiosity, why do I actually get a choice after all it is liveCD. To this point the graphics have been exactly what I would expect from a new distro, nice and clean, professional, and a touch of web 2.0, very polished look.

At this point I am presented with a little dialog box which says “Error KDesktop” The process for the file protocol died unexpectedly. This is not good, I don’t even get this thing booted good and I have an error. I began to ask myself is this a beta release or is this the real thing. At this point for the sake of looking I looked around and found pretty much the same distro I found 2 years ago, and found the same great disappointed feeling in my stomach.  This is where I shutdown the Virtual machine and began to ask myself a few questions.  How could two years have passed anf the only thing you guys really change is the Eye Candy? What about improvements to the repositories? What about improvimng the overall community?

PCLinuxOS has some nice eye candy but that is about as far as it goes. In my opinion I an no longer take these guys serious as a Linux Distro. At least not until they truly makes some improvements other than security updates and eye candy. I guess the error just as KDE was loading just sort of sums it up. Linux is trying to make a move on the market, how can a distro launch a new version with this kind of carelesness.

OK, right out of the gate Linux can save you big money per year by eliminating your cost on anti-virus software. Currently there are very few known viruses that affected Linux. Second the very nature of Linux is more secure than Windows making it harder to create viruses for Linux. Thirdly, the every vigilant Linux community usually releases any security updates before they become a problem and escalate enough for someone to create a virus to exploit it (In other words usually before a virus can be written to exploit a security problem the community has usually released a fix to it, something you don’t see happening in a closed source shop).

Not only Ubuntu, but just about every Open Source product has an effective support community. Not only do the projects (you may call them products but in the open source community they are called projects) have effective communities but they also usually have forums that answer your questions about known problems. You can also submit your problems and get answers relatively quickly as well. Most of these projects also incorporate a request-for-feature list in some manner or another, where users like you make suggestions for future enhancements. Usually the request which is most requested is incorporated in the next version or update of the software. Using the entire community to replace the three or four “suits” in a closed source shop, ensures the most important features that are relevant to the users of the software are included and changes according to need.

Ubuntu releases a new version every six months. Enterprise (commercial) releases are typically every 12 to 24 months. The other open source projects usually follow there own release schedule and sometimes those releases are every night, this means you can grab the latest development release every day, try that with a Microsoft Product!

Below I will list several business-critical tools from Ubuntu, designed to replace costly standards from Microsoft.

CNET says Ubuntu Linux 9.04 is “as slick as Windows 7 and Mac OS X” (CNET.com, April 24, 2009). Michael Dell, founder and CEO of Dell Inc., his home computer is Ubuntu Powered. Drum roll please, now the real reason to switch to Ubuntu, is it now offers a complete alternative to Windows environment and it is free I might add. In addition, it has a large community backing it, 8 million users and counting.

More than 50 million users have downloaded OpenOffice 3.0, Ubuntu’s alternative to MS Office. OpenOffice can edit documents that were created using the MS Office format, avoiding the need to recreate critical documents. When installing OpenOffice, ensure that all installations are version 3.x.x. If you install version 2.x on some machines, it can corrupt files when users with different OpenOffice versions try to access the same documents on a file server.

Evolution 2.26.x can now directly import Outlook PST (Personal Folders) files. You can bring your e-mail, contacts, appointments, tasks, and everything else you have stored in Outlook over to Evolution. It also now has support for Outlook’s native protocol, Microsoft Exchange’s MAPI (Messaging Application Programming Interface). In other words, Evolution is now considered by many to be a complete Linux replacement for Outlook.

Started in 1995, GNU Image Manipulation Program, or GIMP, is one of the oldest and best image manipulation programs for the Open Source community (Windows and Linux version are available). The interface is somewhat different than Adobe Photoshop and can be somewhat difficult for a user to swap from Photoshop to GIMP. Now in comes GIMPshop it is a plug-in for GIMP which can be used to replicate the feel of Adobe Photoshop making the transition for those users easier.

Several alternatives to Windows Small Business Server 2008 exist; the two most popular are Debian GNU Linux 5.0 and Ubuntu Server 9.04. By default, Ubuntu Server has a command-line interface (CLI), but you can also download a graphical interface, if you need it. In addition, a server system needs other applications like a Web server, proxy server and firewall. On Ubuntu you will be able to find many alternates but the basic players for Linux are Apache, Squid, and Iptables or Ipchains respectfully.

Openfire 3.6.3 (formerly Wildfire) is a cross platform, real-time collaboration server based on the XMPP (Jabber) protocol. It’s a perfect chat server for any organization. To use Openfire, you will need to use Spark 2.5.8, a cross-platform, real time collaboration client. Spark can work on Windows/Linux and Macs, and also used to talk to your other contacts in Yahoo!, MSN, Gtalk and AOL. So, even when users are on different operating systems, all of them can collaborate and chat using Spark. You can also use Pidgin as well if you just need an IM client.

I am not going to spend a lot of time here but my brother-in-law let me check out the new net-book remix version of Ubuntu, and I spend a little time looking it over. I really, personally, don’t like what they did with it but for him, he had never used any Linux flavor before, it was easy for him to use. I really don’t have a lot of information as my time was limited testing it. The time I did spend with it, I discovered a lot of small nuances which were irritating to me but I know that the community will fix them quickly and I am sure I will be pleased with it once they iron out the problems, after all the net-book is still new to the scene. Anyway Just thought it was worth mentioning that there is a net-book specific version of Ubuntu floating around.

The case for using Open Source and free applications is strong. But before transitioning your business, it’s important to be aware of two roadblocks.

First, many third-party application developers do not have Linux support available for their applications yet. If you rely heavily on a certain application(s), you need to determine if there is a Linux version of that program or application from the company who developed the windows version, or if you can work with a viable alternative. Also some applications can run on Ubuntu under Wine, an Open Source solution that runs Windows applications on Linux. Go to http://appdb.winehq.org to check if your Windows application is compatible with Wine.

Second, resistance from Windows users to switch to Ubuntu can be a major issue, as I have already described people don’t like change period. The change in interface is really no different than a Windows XP user switching to Vista, and just like switching from XP to Vista, it takes no more than a few weeks for most users to become familiar with the Linux way of doing things. You can always support your argument by calculating the total potential savings from switching to Open Source solutions. Switch a few users first then gradually make a complete transition will also ease this pain.