Looking at Kubuntu 6.10 DVD for use in the Linuxworld lab

Before I talk about Kubuntu, I want to go over some ground I have mentioned in various posts from time to time. I want to pull together the specific needs I have for the Linuxworld lab before I talk about why Kubuntu is not going to work for me in this application. I like Kubuntu. A lot. It just is not going to work for this.

Simulating a company

The lab I give at SHARE and Linuxworld has some very specific requirements. For three hours or so, folks in the lab are Linux desktop using employees of a new company. A company that uses mostly Microsoft networking infrastructure. Like any simulation, some of the constraints are probably not realistic outside the simulation. If a company was really going to use Linux desktops, they more than likely would use Linux servers too, and simplify everything.

But how does one deal with transitions or mixed populations? The lab is about showing what a Linux desktop can do, right now, today, in a mixed world.

We only have three hours, so not everything that is even possible can be shown. I have made some educated guesses about what might be of interest to folks coming to a session like this, and I have refined it over the years. If I had a day and blank PCs to start, this would be a very different lab.

Core to this lab is showing Evolution access the MS Exchange 2003 server, and setting up not just email, but task and calendaring and contacts. Evolution has to be there and it has to be working. If you have read this weblog, you may have noticed from time to time me posting about issues I am having on some releases and Distros with Evolution. This lab is based on my experience of being a Linux desktop user in an MS infra-structured company.

At Linuxworld, people bring their own laptops to the session, so one of the technical issues is: I have *no idea* what kind of computers are going to be in the room. Unlike a real company that might have a hardware standard, this little synthetic company has no hardware standard. That is actually one of the best parts of the lab though, because it shows what the current state of the hardware-support-art is for Linux.

The last time I gave the lab at SHARE in Baltimore, we used Knoppix 3.6 boot disks that my collaborator, Sam Stengler, and I had modified to add Evolution to. Knoppix 3.2 was an earlier version of Knoppix I had used, as was PCLinuxOS , and both of those had Evolution installed already, but Knoppix 3.6 dropped it off the CD version to make room for other things. I needed it back, so we deleted and deleted and hacked and hacked until we have a special version of 3.6 that handled the core functions being looked at in the lab.

That has worked pretty well, but Knoppix 3.6 is getting fairly far back there in terms of things like it's kernel and KDE versions. It has Mozilla rather than Firefox / Thunderbird. It is all still applicable, but it would be nice to update if possible.

What came before, on the lab desktop

As I mentioned in my last post, I  started BitTorrent downloads of the current Knoppix DVD, 5.1.1, as well as the current Kubuntu DVD.

Knoppix is pretty hard to beat when it comes to the main point on the 'desktop' side of the lab. The goal there is to simulate on all the disparate hardware in the room the experience of having a real computer in a real office configured as a Linux workstation, accessing the MS infrastructure. Knoppix leaves the real hard drive alone, and runs completely off the CD, so at the end of the lab, no computers have been changed in any way. The simulation suffers a bit in speed of course: a real Linux Workstation running off a hard drive would be faster.

When Knoppix dropped Evolution, I re-evaluated at that time, and moved the lab to using PCLinuxOS. PCLinuxOS is Mandrake (at the time: Mandriva now) based, and still had Evolution in it. Then the next version dropped Evolution, and Sam came up with moving back to Knoppix and updating its application stack to match our needs.

Can you be too KDE?

I booted the Acer 5610 on the Kubuntu 6.10 DVD. 3.9 GB of data on the disk. The Acer flew up. Both CPU cores were recognized. All the 2GB of RAM. The wireless card was configured correctly. The boot artwork was very easy to look at.

And it took about 10 seconds to realize this just wasn't not going to work. No Evolution. No Firefox. No Thunderbird. No LiSA. I could do the Kontact part of the lab. I could show Konqueror browsing the SMB network, no problem. The Lotus Notes 6.5 bit would work still. The Citadel part would work. But not enough.

Then I decided to write this weblog on Docs.google.com. And with only Konqueror as a browser, I was rejected by Google, with the message that they would soon be supporting... Safari. Sigh. I know Safari started life from Konqueror, but clearly the child has passed the parent in mind share, even at normally savvy places like Google.

Kubuntu is KDE. All KDE, all the time. Evolution is Gnome. In the real world, I could install  Kubuntu to the hard drive, and then use Adept or Synaptic or even apt-get to install Evolution. If this was a lab about installing Linux I'd go there. But I only have three hours, not all day.

Another thing I can not figure out by just looking at the running LiveCD version of Kubuntu: what are you getting by having the DVD? This looks like the exact same applications I would have if I had booted just the CD. There might be a nice repository of other software products available on the DVD, perhaps if you install Kubuntu and use Adept to load them up. But they do not appear on the LiveCD menus. It is late, and I do not have time to figure this out. I'll keep an eye on this to see if I can figure out what is happening down the road.

Thinking (while pacing) about other versions of the lab brought to mind another question I had not asked for a while: What about PCLinuxOS?

Knowing what I know now about Kubuntu and why it was not going to work, I looked at the PCLinuxOS web site, and found the package list. No Evolution. Looking around the site, it looks like maybe the Mandrake / Mandriva roots of PCLinuxOS have faded too. Looks interesting, but I do not have time to investigate further.

Time to look at Knoppix 5.1.1. for the lab desktop.

And Mint 2.2 on the 'server'.

More on those next time.