[Gllug] Migrating windows to linux

[Ian Scott]

You might find it worth trialing a few distros.  I have a 32Mb machine
at home, and it used to run suse 6.2 fine.  Then I tried Mandrake 7.2
(from a covermount CD), and now it runs like a dog.

If you've got low-spec machines, you might want to try a slightly
older distro - but check watch out for dependancies.  For example, you
probably want glibc, not libc5  (which I think rules out Suse 6.2).

I've never used redhat, but I guess you might find the same with the
latest redhat versions.

I'd recommend opera for browsing on low spec machines - much quicker
than netscape or mozilla in my experience.

KFM is pretty handy for ftp, etc. - will let you browse FTP just like
local disks - may be an alternative way to get at stuff on NT
machines.  It also acts as a lightweight browser.  I believe KDE2 has
a much improved version called Konqueror, but that is too fat to run
at an acceptable speed on my machine.

Another useful tool for connecting linux to windows shares is sharity
<http://www.obdev.at/products/sharity/index.html>

Hope this helps,

Ian

> Hi,
> 
> I was wondering if anyone had any experience on migrating Windows desktops
> to Linux. Our company is looking at reducing software licensing costs, and
> moving to Linux is the obvious answer.
> 
> Naturally, however, The Management want to do a small-scale trial first,
> with just one or two users. The main fileserver will remain NT4 for the time
> being.
> 
> The Linux machines will be used for basic word processing, email, web
> browsing, printing and so on.
> 
> Fortunately we don't run an Exchange mail server (phew).
> 
> Does anyone have any experience of overseeing this sort of thing? Any
> hints/tips/gotchas? Distro recommendations? (I'd probably use RedHat, simply
> because it's the one I'm most familiar with, though I was very happy with
> SuSE in the 6.2 days.)
> 
> The workstations are all pretty old - P2 266 machines, with 64MB RAM, though
> I can probably swing an upgrade on the memory front for each of them.
> 
> Any thoughts?
> 
> Cheers,
> Dan
> 
> _______________________________________________________
> Daniel Fairs | d.fairs at cogtest.com | +44 (0)20 77029000
> 
> 
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