Review of ‘Moving to the Linux Business Desktop’

TBR writes “Following on from the success of Moving To Linux, author Marcel Gagné comes back with a new title in similar vein. Whereas the first book was aimed directly at the non-technical home user interesting in switching to Linux from Windows, this latest book is aimed at the business user wishing to migrate away from Microsoft. However, this is a difficult audience to target. In the vast majority of companies users have no choice about which operating system to run, and usually precious little say about applications as well. So, despite the title, the book is more suited to the small company or home office user than anyone in a corporate environment.

The shift in emphasis between this and the previous books is more than skin-deep. The choice of topics is very different, even though there is inevitably some cross-over. The aim of the book is to help migrate business users to a new operating system, so there is much more about networking, user support, user administration and so on and less on multi-media, games, graphics and so on. Topics such as file-sharing with Windows using Samba, Linux thin-clients and implementing directory systems using LDAP all get a good airing.

It’s not just the operating and network system infrastructure that is covered. Business applications are also well-covered, with an emphasis on OpenOffice.org as a replacement for Microsoft’s offering. The material on email looks both at Linux-hosted mail services using Postfix (though Sendmail is mentioned as well), and at using Linux mail clients to Microsoft Exchange. In all areas the book looks both at command-line tools and GUI options. The author makes clear that there is no shying away from the command-line and that learning to love the shell is essential for the Linux user and/or administrator.”