The "It's Just a Desktop Distro" Problem

[Jack Johnson]

On Wed, 5 Jan 2005 09:50:42 -0800, Matt Zimmerman <mdz at canonical.com> wrote:
> If there are good tools which already exist, which we can integrate with
> Ubuntu to provide "server in a box" functionality, this would be
> interesting, but developing such tools from scratch is beyond the scope of
> what we're doing at the moment.

The latest Redhat and Fedora iterations have some nice, free admin GUI
tools.  Not perfect, but a good step in this direction.

I haven't hunted for equivalent Ubuntu/Debian packages.
 
> I think we'll get more mileage by first targeting server admins who already
> know what they want and how to do it, and giving them the simplicity that
> they appreciate (server edition).  "Server in a box", and allowing less
> experienced users to set up servers, would be a much longer-term
> consideration.

I always picture a fantasy ad campaign, Plays Well With Others, and
you see Tux and the Apple logo and the Sun logo and the Redhat fedora
and the BSDaemons and the rest (maybe not the Windows flag -- or you
just promote Clippy to advocate status).  I think the best thing about
the free, open source, and open standards solutions is that you can
take an Ubuntu box, share its printer with an iBook and have them both
access a WebDAV share on a Novell box and not even blink.

If we were targeting server admins, it would be fun to do the 1-click
Windows Domain Controller,  1-click Macintosh Server, or 1-click LAMP
server.  Ubuntu's real shine is its attention to detail, polish and
integration, and I'd love to see a small handful of instant-server
selections done excellently.

Alternatively, there are some things that are not trivial to set up
but not difficult, either (winbind or ldap authentication, for
instance), and rather than doing a 12-step configuration on Debian it
would be nice to pop in Ubuntu and trivially set up a single
authentication server, configure the clients to use it at installation
(using the same disc, of course), and it all just works.

-Jack

P.S.
On the Plays Well With Others front, it would be nice to have GUI
options for little things like configuring CUPS printer sharing and
cull/market utilities that interoperate easily with traditional
commercial apps like iChat and NetMeeting -- things we're already
doing but not expressed in a way that might entice people on other
platforms.