Those who know me already know that Aquevix is a Linux based Infrastructure. Our mail servers, virtualization, thin clients, firewalls, application servers, database servers, monitoring servers, all are Linux. I have been a Linux user since 1997 when Redhat was 6.x (before their Enterprise products).

Moreover, somehow I just couldn’t bite the idea that we need a antivirus, a firewall, security settings and the huge laundry list that goes with Windows. Oh, don’t forget the CALs. However I personally have not been able to migrate to Linux completely because of several reasons. Not that I am making excuses but really these are not easily replaceable:

• Microsoft Outlook
• Microsoft Project
• Adobe Photoshop
• Nokia OVI Suite

Apart from these there are many small utilities that I simply cannot abandon due to our development cycles. However I have decided to try to make Linux my primary machine.

So which is the lucky platform?

I am going to try Ubuntu 10.04 LTS. This seems like a reasonably stable OS. Before this I have tried Ubuntu 6/7/8.04/9 and all have failed one way or the other. Not just these, OpenSuse, Fedora, Linux Mint, debian 5; the list is exhaustive. Linux is vastly superior on servers, no doubt. But on desktops, I still don’t think its ready.

Today was Day 1. I tried using KeePass (.NET version) and started getting missing references error. Apparently some DLLs are not in correct default path. When I searched, I didn’t find anything that directly solved my problem. In the end, I ended up not using Keepass for now (till I get some time).

I think the real problem is that when something doesn’t works in Linux, it is really hard to figure out what’s wrong. And even if we do figure out, its even harder to fix it.

So let me see how long I can cope with this and if I will be able to completely surrender to Linux.

So long.

Amit Jindal

Aquevix (http://www.aquevix.com)