GNOME and Debian deployment

[Jérôme Warnier <jwarnier beeznest net>]

I haven't seen much trafic on this list yet. Maybe you are all too busy
with deployment?

Well, I wanted you to know what I've done for the last year at least in
a small business (+-60 person).

Most of the things I've done is described (mostly in French) on the
following link but I'm going to explain it shortly here too:
http://www.bxlug.be/migration-dupedi

It tells how and why and everything about the migration of a SME using
Windows (NT and 2000) and Mac stations to Debian GNU/Linux with GNOME
(1.4). And guess what? It makes sense!

So, they have Mac stations which remain unmodified for the moment
(pre-press applications needed). But everything else has changed at
least a bit.

To start: no more MS Office, OpenOffice.org is now on every machine,
under GNU/Linux and Windows. Some MS Access remain, though.

Next, their mail, file and print servers migrated to GNU/Linux, but we
don't care here, as we are talking about GNOME.

Most of the workstations are now running Debian GNU/Linux Woody, with
GNOME 1.4 and OOo 1.0, Evolution 1.2, ... Everything is running really
fine, on average low-end PC (PII 300MHz with 128MB RAM are common) but
we wanted more. More features, more compatibility, more performance, ...
And the next version (which is already in test on 4 machines) brings it
all: GNOME 2.2 and OOo 1.1, Evolution 1.4, and a now (at last!) fast
Nautilus, ...

The GNOME 2.2 backported packages are those of James Strandboge, and we
contributed a lot to it. OOo 1.1 is the Debian packages backported
already for Woody with GNOME 2.2 (feature nice Ximian icons, ...) which
we made ourselves.

All the packages we added to those already found elsewhere are on
http://apt.bxlug.be/backport-from-sid-to-woody,
http://apt.bxlug.be/gnome2.2, http://apt.bxlug.be/ooo/.

Central authentication is managed using NIS.
The homes of the users are stored on the file server and accessed
through NFS (seems to cause some trouble with OOo 1.0, though).
Printing is done through CUPS.
E-mail is accessed using IMAP.
Workstation installations/reinstallations are done in a breeze using
Replicator.

Feel free to ask if any questions.
Regards.
-- 
Jérôme Warnier <jwarnier beeznest net>