[Nottingham] Evangelism

[Michael Leuty]

I've previously mentioned my project to infiltrate FOSS in general and 
Linux in particular into the Church office where I am (faute de mieux) 
more or less in charge of IT.

Current state of play is that we now have a server (cheap IBM, 1.5Gb 
RAM, 2x80Gb hard disks, DVD writer) with four clients running a mixture 
of Windows (from 98 to XP Home, depending on their age) and one client 
accidentally converted to Fedora Core 3. (I had intended to install 
dual boot, but lost the Windows partition during the process. Yes, of 
course I had the data backed up!)

At present the server is doing little more than acting as a firewall. 
The next stage is to get Samba and NFS servers setup, and to move all 
the data files from the clients to the server where they can be 
properly backed up.

My ultimate aim is to convert all the clients to Linux, but this will be 
the tricky bit. There have already been complaints (from people outside 
the office) when OOo 1.1.3 on the Fedora client could not accurately 
format Word documents that were sent to the office. As these complaints 
were causing problems for the secretaries, I installed Crossover Office 
so that we could also run Word on that machine as an interim measure.

This made me realise that I had to be a bit more careful. I have 
successfully moved everyone from IE/OE to Firefox/Thunderbird on all 
the Windows clients, and everyone is happy about using these. I am 
currently slowly introducing OOo 2.0, in the hope that this can become 
the standard WP in the office. Clearly this is an area where a lot of 
support for the secretaries is required.

However, even if everyone transfers successfully to OOo 2.0, there will 
still be some Windows software that cannot be replaced by FOSS. One is 
Visual Liturgy. The previous version of this will run under Crossover 
Office, the next version will be web-based and so Firefox will suffice. 
Moving to Linux would involve going back a version, for now at least. 
The other is the accounts package, which is specialised for church use 
and includes special facilities for dealing with donations from the 
congregation and elsewhere. No doubt these could be duplicated by an 
accounts package that runs on Linux, but I don't have the resources to 
arrange this. This software does not run on Crossover.

So one client will have to run something like Win4Lin (it is impractical 
for the secretary to keep rebooting) in order to use the accounts 
package, and several of the other clients will have to run Crossover to 
be able to use Visual Liturgy.

I am therefore wondering what the advantages are of converting the 
clients to Linux, rather than leaving them as Windows boxes. I realise 
that there are some. I imagine they would be less prone to malware, and 
we could save on antivirus subscriptions. It would also prevent 
well-meaning people from popping in and installing software or 
hardware, just to be helpful. This has happened in the past, then I get 
told "we keep getting this error message appearing". I don't think it 
is unreasonable for the IT person to be allowed to control what 
software and hardware is used on the network for which he is 
responsible.

Sorry to have gone on at length. I should be grateful for your customary 
helpful comments on any or all of the above.

Thanks,

Mike

-- 
Michael Leuty
Nottingham, UK