VMWare / Wine

[Peter Garrett]

On Thu, 22 Feb 2007 12:02:44 -0800
Patton Echols <p.echols at comcast.net> wrote:

> Does anyone have thoughts on why I should choose one route over the other?

Looking at your original post in the previous thread, I notice that you are
entirely focused on working out a way to run Windows - is there any
possibility that you could use Linux for the needs your users have?

For example, which applications are fundamental, and are there Linux
equivalents for them? A listing of the apps you need might trigger
discussion of alternatives.

If you actually have apps that *must* run on Windows on all machines, then
this is not an option of course. 

An alternative might be to analyse whether some portion of your machines
could be fully migrated to Linux, while keeping some for purposes that
definitely require Windows. The thin client approach using for example
Edubuntu / ltsp could still be at least a partial solution, and save time,
money and license woes at the same time.

This might also ease your problems with broken installs, since Linux has a
multi-user model and is inherently less vulnerable to "fooling around" by
users.  Sudo/root is needed to really mess things up, and if you run
thin clients you don't have to administer all the boxes as much, as
most of the important system things are on the server :-) The updates
problems are also easier to solve with apt / synaptic / update manager, and
you might consider setting up a local mirror or proxy for Ubuntu
repositories.

just some more ( possibly impractical)  ideas ...

Peter