Hacking for fun and profit

There has been some adoption of free software lately at my current job. I’m not talking about the servers running apache, postgresql, samba, postfix, squid, etc. I’m talking about free software in everybody’s computer. Note that everybody (but me) is still using Windows, but hopefully once they all use free software a migration to Linux will be painless, since people use applications and not operating systems.

The first free software application used around was the most obvious: Firefox. It started by word of mouth. It is faster, safer, smaller, it blocks popups. People love it. Not everybody is using it but still, it’s an spontaneous move, nobody is forcing them to do it (there was a squid rule for a couple of users with lots of spyware problems that forced them to use firefox, but it’s gone now).

Now the second move was an official one: OpenOffice.org. This is the BIG money saver. Microsoft Office costs A LOT of money, and most people just use Outlook and the most basic features of Word. Excel is used mostly to store lists of stuff, not as a spreadsheet.
Management gave me the freedom to prepare an OpenOffice migration. And it has been a success. Right now almost half of the people around here is using OpenOffice instead of Microsoft Office. Note that I installed the 2.0 beta. It has an excelent quality, is VERY stable, and the users love it (once they get used to the fact that it takes longer than MS Office to load). Disabling Java and tweaking the memory settings helps A LOT.
In the first days I gave a “migration talk”, I prepared some case uses and everybody noted that the way oo.org works is very similar to MS office. What I didn’t expect was a general concern: How to setup keyboard shorcut keys. I was in trouble, I didn’t know how to do that. So I was honest and I told them the truth, that I didn’t know how to do that but we can use the search feature in the help system and we immediatly found what we were looking. Props to the OpenOffice.org documentation project for this, it saved my day.
Real non-geek-final-users are using oo.org here. It is an excelent product.

But there is something that Microsoft Office has that OpenOffice.org doesn’t: Outlook. Final users love that buggy piece of crap. Sysadmins and helpdesk people hate it. I hate it. It’s buggy, sometimes it refuses to work and it has a lousy security record. I want it (and Internet “explorer”) outside my nework. But I just can’t say “don’t use outlook anymore”, I must come up with an alternative. At the time I was using Evolution to test the “linux-final-user experience” (I am a disciple of the mutt order). But evo has a serious problem: it doesn’t run on windows (at least not yet). So I had two choices, both from mozilla: Thunderbird and the Mozilla suite (codename seamonkey). I tested both in my debian workstation and allthough I really liked thunderbird, I fell in love (again) with the Mozilla suite. I loved the integration of his parts: a (mature) web browser, a (mature) mail/news client, an excelent html editor, and a calendar application. It is every sysadmin’s dream for his users. But I chose Thunderbird instead because:

• Mozilla is devoting all it’s efforts in the “birds-suite” : firefox, thunderbird, sunbird (firefox used to be a bird: phoenix/firebird). And now it is official, the mozilla suite won’t have a new release. The birds suite is the way to go.
• Outlook stores all it’s junk in .pst files. Both Thunderbird and Mozilla Mail can import .pst files, but only Thunderbird could import the attachments of the messages. We have a winner.

And of course, Thunderbird is the tool of choice if you have spam problems (and who doesn’t). It has a built-in bayesian filter that WORKS(tm).

On the server side, FreeBSD is taking over the server room. But this belongs to another post…