Toolkit

In association with Network Liberation Movement

Story: Desktop Linux for small business

Posted by: Ely Conroy Sr. II (Saturday 6 May 2006, 4:51 PM)

I have installed and used about everything on distrowatch. I have also purchased xandos (although it was a few years ago deluxe 3.0 and the 2.0 version for business). It was a breeeze to install at the time but it did'nt do much after that. However, to be fair the updating process, cost, antivirus install are very commendable but most business need a little more. II actually perfer the straight debian install over xandros. Ubuntu's pretty much the same and I have not found any that actually give anything for a small business out the box although I would truely like to see the new xandros server but I nor any business if going to fork out $450.00 for just to find there is no use for it. I know this is a desktop forum but to be honest for any business the desktop and server are going to have to work together in a simple graphical fashion. No buisness owner is going to be impressed by the command line no matter how much better it is. They want to see what they are buying. I have been using fedora core 5 and I like it a lot but its not for anyone just starting out. I have been running a fedora core 3 server for about 2 years in a windows active directory domain. I had to reboot once. Turned out to be a window problem thought so I guess I really did not need the reboot on the linux box. Ramble on,
Ramble on! I was actually impressed by the Mephis distro and I actually purchased something however I am still unsure what it was. It supposedly was a 90 day subscription to the most current mephis releases. Since they seemed to be available to everyone I would'nt recommend it but I do not mind giving a few dollars here and there for the community. Anyway you can install Mephis and it give you a preinstall version of dans guardian and if anyone has not tried this great product you really should. I use a smoothwall linux (a light distro that can be easily configured as a router, vpn ,firewall, and ips and you can easily configure dans guardian content filter) at home to keep my kids safe while they are on the internet. I have tried some commercial products but they all pale in comparison to this one. Also if you screw something up in mephis you just boot up the live cd and select to repair you install. I just have to vote for mephis for these two reasons alone. If a simple antivirus install with a mail server just working on a local subnet already preconfigured then that all I would every need in a desktop and server. Apologize for the grammer, fragmented paragraphs, etc...