Funny Mythness
About Linux desktops in a business environment and virtual machines... best appreciated by experienced Linux users.
There are many myths related to Linux in a business environment. For me, the most pervasive and irritating is the assumption that the most convenient and efficient way for everybody (including me) to do our jobs is from a Microsoft desktop. It seems irrelevant that I spend most of my day wrangling Linux and Solaris servers. "Oh, you can do everything you want with Putty." Well, no, I can't. To me, the argument is as valid as me saying, "Oh, you can express everything in German." The statement is simultaneously true and ludicrous. In the sense that everything that's expressed in english can be expressed in German (more or less), the statement is true. In the sense that I (or most readers of this article) can express in German anything that I can express in english, it is arrant nonsense. It's nonsense for me, even though I was born in Germany and spoke German for the first few years of my life. At a pinch, I can ask someone for directions to the local schloss. I don't understand the answer—but I can tell which way the responder is pointing.
Sure, given enough time, and the help of Yahoo's Babel Fish, I could probably express a fair bit. But who's going to pay me for that sort of feeble output?
Similarly, if I have to, I can operate a Microsoft desktop. But I am reduced to a mere mortal; I lose many of my super powers (like Superman in the presence of Kryptonite—maybe that's what Microsoft is: Kryptonite for supermen.)
In the last few years, I have solved this problem several times in several different ways. Let me share these.
The first time: MS Windows/ VirtualBox/Linux
I was contracting with IBM, building Solaris servers. I had been given the use of a laptop loaded with uP. I asked around and discovered that IBM did not object to the use of Linux. There was some documentation around—there were kindred souls, people who had a similar view to mine—and there were Linux ports of the software suite that constituted the company's SOb (Standard Operating environment). So what was stopping me? Well, for what it's worth, here's my take on things. To me, it epitomises the difference between the business environment and, say, my home environment. It also takes impact into consideration. It differentiates between how I behave if I am the only person who feels the impact, and how I behave if others are affected. When I'm at home, playing with one of my own computers, I tend to be more adventurous. If I make a mistake, I can spend the next week picking up the pieces— but only I suffer. If, at home, I'm working with infrastructure (the firewall, for example), I'm more cautious, because now I might impact the whole family. My customers at home, my wife and son, depend on me to provide reliable, always-on access to the Internet. And they are very demanding.
If I'm on a short contract, being paid big bucks by a company, I'm sure they don't want that burned while I spend a week or so investigating how to make Linux work with the company's products on the company's laptop. That may be a fun exercise for me, but poor return on investment for them. The difficulty is not whether I could get the whole set-up working, but the risk lay in how long it would take. When it comes to business, I am very risk-averse.
In retrospect, I might have considered buying a laptop and building a Linux environment on that, safe in the knowledge that I had the company's laptop to use for business during normal work hours. The added advantage being that I would have a reference machine with which to compare, if something didn't work. In the event, I chose a different course. I installed VirtualBox under XP, installed Fedora 10 in VM, and my HAL under Fedora. At work, the laptop was not naked. I had an external keyboard, mouse and screen. I allocated the laptop screen to uP, and the external, larger screen to Fedora. I used the XP environment for email, messaging and the inevitable office