Business Desktop proposal, Any takers???

[Daniel Robitaille]

On Wed, Jun 3, 2009 at 7:47 AM, Darryl Moore <darryl at moores.ca> wrote:
> Corey Burger wrote:
>> 3. Be conservative. This means use an LTS release. They are tested and
>> supported. You can piggy-back off all the contracts that Canonical has
>> to support desktops/servers and the people that they have working on
>> non-security fixes.
>>
> In general I agree, butone of the problems with this is the need to
> support the new Firefox 3.5. Neither Hardy nor Jaunty support it, but I
> am hopeful that when Karmic is released in October it will support it.

are you sticking to only ubuntu-supported packages, or you are going
to install some bits yourself?  It's generally not that difficult to
install your own firefox from mozilla.org.  The quick and dirty method
I often do on my systems (but never tried with FF 3.5):

*) download the tar file from mozilla.org
*) untar in /opt/firefox
*) do a symlink from /usr/local/bin/firefox to /opt/firefox/firefox
*) adjust /opt/firefox/plugins to make sure it picks up only the plugins I want
*) possibly uninstall the official "firefox" package (depending on the
version of Ubuntu since some allow you to do it, some older Ubuntus
don't)

since a default user generally has /usr/local/bin in their PATH
environment variable before /usr/bin, uninstalling the Ubuntu's
Firefox is not always necessarily since the users, if they click on
the control panel icon, or run firefox from the command line, should
hit your own /usr/local/bin/bin/firefox before anything else also
installed.


> Support for FF3.5 is important in a desktop deployment, because it will
> be the only non-beta version to support weave
>
> http://labs.mozilla.com/projects/weave/
>
> when FF3.5 is finally released as a non-beta :-(
>
>
> Weave will allow synchronization between multiple firefox instances run
> by the same user, so no matter what machine he is running FF on he will
> have access to his history, bookmarks, passwords etc.

of course, it will also depends if your users want to rely on so
cutting edge technology like Weave, and if they mind having their
personal data sitting on an external server.


-- 
Daniel Robitaille