r4ndom h4x

I work in the IT department for a large national company. We use a fairly typical mix of vendors I guess – HP, VMWare, Citrix, EMC, Cisco, Microsoft.

So, more than 18 months ago I scored myself a new laptop. It came with Windows Vista Business. It took me six months or so before I finally couldn’t handle it any longer. And so it was settled. I would run Linux as my primary OS on my work machine.

I’m not unfamiliar with Linux – my first Linux installation was Slackware, and yes it was installed from floppy. But I’m no expert, either.

Using Linux in a corporate environment is not the same as using it at home. There are no excuses if I can’t do something. If someone sends me a document, I must be able to read and maybe edit and return it. If an appointment is made, I must be able to accept it and have it show on my calendar. I must be able to read the global address list..  in short, I can’t (and don’t want to) use my choice of operating system as an excuse. It’s just not acceptable.

Being a work machine, I also need something that is “up” more often that it’s not. It just has to work.

After trying a few different distributions, I settled on Ubuntu. At the time, 8.04LTS was just released so it seemed to make some sense. I use Debian at home on my PC but Debian always feels a little dated unless you run Sid. And everytime I click on “iceweasel” I cringe. Yes, I know it’s the same as Firefox. I still cringe.

It’s Jan 2009 and I’m still running Ubuntu. I’ve survived over 12 months. Here’s what I had to do to make it work for me.

Groupware – Microsoft Exchange integration
I’ve tried all sorts here. This is actually of prime importance and can’t be underestimated in a corporate environment. This has to work.

Evolution using Exchange connector : I used this for a while. It was quite unstable and would crash for me several times a day. Many things just didn’t work. This disappointed me as I think Evoltion has potential. But in the end I gave up.

Outlook running on a Windows XP VM : I was running Outlook inside an XP on VMWare for a short while (and as a backup while looking for other solutions). Of course it worked fine, except integration with the host OS is poor. This is to be expected of course, but it means you end up installing a complete VM PC. (Office, Outlook, Acrobat reader, Zip, etc)  So why wouldn’t I just do everything in there instead? And if I’m doing that, why run Linux native at all? It just misses the point.

Thunderbird, Lightening and Davmail : This solution worked for me for a couple of months. Thunderbird is a great email client and I can see why people like it. Adding the Lightening plugin gives some calendar integration – although nowhere near what you can do in Outlook. And to get Thunderbird to talk to the exchange server I used Davmail. Thunderbird talks in POP3/SMTP, DavMail converts it to something the exchange server understands. (POP3 is disabled on our exchange server for security reasons).

I can see that DavMail now does some sort of calendering as well, so maybe I’ll look further into it again. But basically all the above was replaced with :

MS Outlook running on Crossover Linux : I had tried to use the latest Wine snapshots to install Outlook 2003, but it never worked. Then one day I tried Crossover, and was totally surprised to find that Outlook 2003 installed and ran as advertised.  It’s not free but it is cheap, and your money does help support the Wine project. I’m not going to sugar coat it – there are still a couple of issues. Sometimes Outlook will crash. But, I can usually go through a few days between crashes which is more than I could with Evolution. Email attachments will open in the locally preferred application, it’s almost seamless. Clipboard support is there, but not perfect – especially when using pictures or other non-text clipboard item. So far this has been the most reliable way of getting access to Exchange, but I expect Evolution to catch up eventually. I think there is a MAPI connector in the works but I’ve not looked into it.

Office suite – word processor, spreadsheet, presentation
No prizes here – Open Office opens Microsoft Office documents with excellent compatibility. The area that I’ve had problems with is macros. No biggie for me since most people don’t use them here, but I do get the occasional problem with the more complex macro embedded in a sheet. I have an installation of Office via Crossover Linux for those times that OpenOffice has problems. (Hey, work pays for an Office license for me so I might as well use it). I also run Visio in Crossover.

Domain integration
This was a little tricky. At the moment I have a local account with the same username and password as my domain account. Ubuntu has been set up (manually..) to try and obtain a kerberos ticket when I log on. So if I’m at work, then I get a ticket and can browse file shares without having to think about it too much. But I don’t need the domain to log on – it’s optional.

Additionally, if I am at work and I change the password on my local machine then Kerberos will try and change it on the domain – so I can try to keep passwords in sync. It usually works pretty well, but there is some stuffing around to make it work. I will write an article up on how to do this at a later date since it involves Kerberos, Samba and PAM and some manual editing of config files.

Other applications
For configuring that router or switch, minicom does the trick and should be in most distributions.
Sun Virtualbox is an excellent virtual machine for running another instance (or two, three etc) of an operating system. And I find it’s Seamless mode works quite well. Here is an uninspired snapshot of a seamless XP running on my Ubuntu box.

Seamless Virtualbox VM