Active Directory Domain on Ubuntu

[Christopher Chan]

On Saturday, November 13, 2010 10:07 AM, Mark wrote:
> On Fri, Nov 12, 2010 at 4:28 PM, Christopher Chan
> <christopher.chan at bradbury.edu.hk>  wrote:
>>
>> You have missed the point. It is not whether they have a long
>> 'maintenance' commitment, it is whether they have any tools that make
>> them manageable in the corporate environment. None of the Ubuntu LTS
>> distros are with the exception of Hardy but its so called LTS means that
>> it is not viable since that only means security updates. Who needs a
>> dumb distro that cannot open files most of the world are using?
>>
> If I missed the point, someone else (you?) missed the whole topic.
> LTS is not (just) a commitment to long maintenance.  RHEL is used in
> corporate environments all over the world - that's what "Enterprise
> Linux" entails, as opposed to other RH packages. That's one of the
> distinctions between SuSE and SLES (formerly SLED?).  They're not
> Enterprise distributions solely because of long-term support
> commitments - all RH and SuSE releases have those (as opposed to
> Fedora, or Gentoo which I also know for a fact is used in some
> enterprise situations).

RHEL will get NEW features for example. It is not just 'long term 
security maintenance' which is what Ubuntu LTS means. Hardy has this 
outstanding bug, for example. with regards to Yahoo Messenger accounts 
for which there are bug fixes but nobody is willing to get that 
addressed. The only thing done for Hardy is security related. And forget 
getting an OpenOffice version that can handle OOXML on Hardy. It is 
probably not even on their radar.


>
>> You have zero idea what is potentially required of corporate desktops.
>> Even small roll outs have the possibility of requiring certain lock down
>> or what different people should have on their desktop.
>>
> Given that you have zero idea about my experience, that's quite a statement.

Amazing you never even addressed group policies for the desktop then. 
Have you ever really managed the corporate desktop?


>
>>> It's not so much the size or condition of the ship but how much
>>> maintenance you are willing to do.
>>
>> HA! Exactly my point. Admins want to roll out desktops, not first
>> engineer a management solution and then roll out. Distros with KDE 3.5.x
>> will have a big portion of that handled. The question is whether it
>> offers desktop apps that are viable today.
>>
> So here you are saying that KDE 3.5.x is the only desktop environment
> in corporate use in the whole Linux world?

NO. I am saying, KDE 3.5.x is the only Linux desktop environment that 
has the tools that make it palatable to the desktop administrator. The 
OP asked at one point why Windows admins cannot make the big change. It 
is because they have tools for managing the desktop that are not 
available on any Linux desktop environment except KDE 3.2 upwards.


>
> So far, I've only seen one Linux office where KDE was used, and I
> didn't work in that one.
>
> You can more easily present convincing arguments based on your own
> knowledge than you can using insults to people about whom you know
> nothing.

Well, you have not even seem to have noticed the reason why I only 
singled out KDE 3.5.x and completely left out KDE 4.x out of the 
picture. I did not say KDE for the office. I said ONLY KDE 3.5.x for the 
office on one particular ground which seems to have completely flown 
over your head.


>
> However, I have yet to see any desktop environment in a corporate
> controlled environment that does not require at least some tinkering
> by the sysadmins as to what gets rolled out and what does not,
> including Windows-based environments (which are, let's see now, oh,
> yeah: EVERYWHERE).

Sorry, I manage Windows desktops but I do not have to CREATE/ENGINEER a 
management solution. I said nothing about not needing to tinker. You can 
only tinker IF you have tools that allow you to tinker. Otherwise you 
have to build from scratch.


>
> Amend that: my last two jobs I just installed CentOS on my desktop and
> no one gave a hoot about what I did on it.  I had to put a Windows VM
> on it to communicate with the Exchange Server (and which I used for
> pretty much not one damn thing else), but my sysadmins didn't really
> care what I did with that, either.  It was my choice to avoid Windows,
> not theirs for me, and no one ever restricted my Linux machines in any
> other way.

Bah, I have used GNOME on OpenSolaris, KDE 3.x on Centos 4 and KDE 3/4 
on various versions of Ubuntu but that is for MY personal work desktop. 
I would not dream of pushing anything other than Ubuntu Hardy with KDE 
3.5.x for the rest of the 400 desktops out there given the different 
requirements for people of different year groups and support staff BUT I 
cannot even dream that because Hardy cannot handle OOXML files.


>
> Maybe you could cite some specific examples of what you mean by what
> KDE has that GNOME or others do not.  We could probably have a much
> more meaningful discussion (or argument) over that.
>

How can you engage in a meaningful discussion (other than saying "let's 
make it happen") when I have very plainly used the term 'group policies' 
but you completely missed it and even snip it out of your replies 
because you missed its relevance to the reason why I only pick out KDE 
3.5.x and not GNOME or KDE 4.x?

KDE 3.5.x has kiosktool (never heard of it? maybe you never had to do 
different desktops depending on group of users) of which neither GNOME 
nor KDE 4.x has an equivalent. So let's have this meaningful discussion. 
This is not the first time I have whined (to put it some people's 
perspective) about this on this list or elsewhere.