Fedora 7 for the office

Last week I wrote a post on my personal weblog about using Fedora 7 as a home Linux OS. My conclusion there was that, barring Linux aficionados who experiment all over the place (like myself actually) that Fedora 7 was not well suited to use as a home Linux.

I have noted here that I set up my brother on Ubuntu a while back, and he has *never* called to ask me a question about how to use it. Not once. Either he just uses his Mac for everything, or it is dead easy.

Fedora ... not so much. While I would have no issue setting up just about anyone at any level of computer experience with Ubuntu, or even better, Mint, I would only recommend Fedora to those who really want to get to know a great deal about Linux from the get-go.

What about the office then?

As noted in the last post, Fedora was pretty handy at exposing a bleeding edge NFS V4 protocol issue. Fedora as a technology preview is pretty much unrivaled. If you want to know what is coming soon from other distros, it is hard to beat. They are usually a kernel revision or two ahead of anyone else. Almost all their package sets are about as fresh as they can be and not still be in the "Cooker"... and maybe in some cases some packages should have still been in development only trees, but those issues usually get fixed very quickly.

We use Fedora a great deal inside R&D Support as desktop OS's, and even more importantly, we use it as a R&D production data center OS. Our current Tier II storage server (as noted in my NAS series of postings a week or two ago) is Fedora Core 6 based.

Having said all that, am I truly advocating Fedora 7 as an office OS? Data center or desktop? Errr... no.

I have a team of people in R&D Support whose average work experience is about twenty years each. They are multi-platform, Multi-OS proficient, and for them, Linux is an old friend. They don't get too wrapped around the axle about distro or whatever because they all know how to peel back the covers if they have to and dig into problems. They will read the source code, and talk to the original developer and work to solutions. They are self reliant and extremely competent. That is why they do R&D Support.

What does an Office Linux look like then?

Most people that are going to be using Linux as their full time desktop are no more interested in how it works than they are "what holds airplanes up in the air" (Mr. Weasley, Harry Potter Book 6 reference... geek points!). They just want something that works, and solves their business needs. In my Fedora at home post I list a few things home users probably don't care about, and one of them is central patch management. For an office Linux, in an office big enough to have a desktop support person, central patch management will be far more important. Example: If OpenOffice is doing something weird with a spreadsheet, and the new version fixes that, the desktop support folks will want to be able to push that out. one time. Much easier than visiting every PC, or having the end users do the updates. And yes: All operating systems, even Linux, need to be patched from time to time. Being off MS Windows is only a relief in magnitude, not protocol. Operating Systems are way too big, even with many eyes looking at them, to not have bugs appear from time to time. Linux of course adds the dimension of extremely rapid rate of change to add new features and new packages: things the major "production" distros slow down and rationalize.

Each of the major distros like SUSE and RedHat have their own internal central patch management tool sets, and heterogeneous environments have tools from vendors like BMC's Marimba or BigFix.

Companies with very little Linux experience, but willing to take the plunge will in fact want to run a version of Linux that is certified for their hardware by the vendor. HP certifies different versions of Linux depending on which laptop you are considering for example. Some are RH. Some are SUSE. All are certified for one or the other. Dell certifies Ubuntu as most people know by now.

Data Center Linux

If data center Linux varies in any way from desktop Linux, it is probably the versions of Linux that are certified to the servers. While data centers are far more likely to have experienced staff on hand similar to what I have on my team, they are also servicing a high up time SLA more than likely, and most support teams like to be backstopped by the vendor. Fedora 7 then is probably not on the candidate list there either.

Just us crazies then...?

Clearly Fedora 7 is a niche OS. If you are experienced (Jimi Hendrix reference: double geek points!) , or if you are wanting to learn more about Linux. If you are a support person and you want a preview of what is to come. Each of those incomplete sentences is a case where Fedora 7 is viable. Fedora 7 can be made stable, and because it is so current, is pretty fast, taking advantage of all the latest and greatest tweaks. But it can be a real bear to work with. If you ever watched the Colbert Report, you know what a threat bears are. If not, then the last two sentences might make no sense at all...

Here is a short example: I was testing Fedora 7's Evolution version against MS Exchange 2003. 2.10.2, and the brand new 2.10.3. Other than having to follow my usual delete-and-start-over protocol, there were no issues. Evolution worked fine. The problem was that during this, I was carrying around my IBM X30 laptop upon which Fedora 7 is installed. I left the wireless cards in the office. I got home, and noticed the storage pocket where I keep the cards in the X30 transport sleeve was wide open. Frantic looking produced no place they had dropped out. I thought they were gone forever. IR an idiot, but that is a different story.

I wanted to write some on the blog, and I wanted to do so on the X30, but without a wireless card, it was less useful. I do most of the writing on Google Docs. Network connection required. Sun had it right: the network is the computer, especially here in "Web 2.0" days. Its really true on an iPhone... But I digress.....

It was late Sunday, after all the good computer stores had closed. Honestly, are there no stores outside Silicon Valley that realize a geek needs to shop, all hours of the day and night?

I went to Walmart. I know. I know. Don't get me started. Walmart is not computer geek paradise. But at least they were open and had something.

There were two cards in stock: A Belkin I knew nothing about, and a Linksys 802.11N card I knew was not yet working on Linux. The Belkin was a plain old "G" card (the F5D7010 V7), and I assumed I could fire it up under ndiswrapper at the very least.

I went home. I installed ndiswrapper using yum. I copied the drivers from the Internet per the instructions, and installed the .inf files. The last step to get the card up and running is "modprobe", to load the ndiswrapper module... "modprobe ndiswrapper" failed. This made no sense till I looked at the obvious.

I finally figured out I had a module mismatch: Yum had installed ndiswrapper, but not the version I needed for the currently running kernel. I fixed that via the ATRPMS web site, and now modprobe installed the ndiswrapper module. The lights on the card lit up. And...... the computer hung, Solid as a rock. Never seen Linux do anything like it other than the time I installed another, different, fried wireless card, and it hung everything I put it in.

Nuts. A bad card. Maybe that was why the box was open slightly. I gave it all up as a bad job.

Next day at the office I found the Atheros chipped D-link card, as well as the Orinoco chipped Linksys. I jacked both of those in and they worked. Happiness and this blog ensued.

The Fedora 7 Linux Experience(d)

My point is this:

• I documented in my other weblog the heartburn I had on getting Fedora 7 going with the Atheros chipped D-Link card on the X30. MADWifi modules were mismatched, same as the ndiswrapper ones were this time.
• The Orinoco chipped Linksys card works out of the box. No problem. I still don't know why Fedora thinks this driver is more open than the MADWifi one.
• This new Belkin F5D7010 V7 (pci id 1799:701f, Realtek 8185 chipset, see ndiswrapper site for details) required I already know ahead of time to use Ndiswrapper rather than hunt for "native" Linux support.

Therein lies the issue: Fedora Linux works best if you already know Linux, and at more-than-a-cursory level. You might be lucky and have the Orinoco card or similar and a plain install (I.E. no bit twiddling to get it working) works just fine. It is more likely you will have to "work for your supper".

When you are done, you will have a current... bleeding edge even... version of Linux. Nice for knowledge and practice. Not so nice if you are going to have to support it for people for whom this is their first experience with Linux.