LinuxSnobs come from almost any walk of life. They really only have
2 common personality traits - They can laugh at themselves, and they hate
M$ Windoze. The linuxsnob finds M$ windoze tiresome, and that most
users of such are "click happy," and afraid to touch the keyboard. He / She
may even feel resentment if someone asks them for help on a windoze problem.
( Canned answer - Did you reboot it?)
Can I Become a LinuxSnob?
If Indeed you feel that you match the description above, You may be worthy.
Answer me these questions three... what is your name? What is your
Quest? How many bits are in a subnet mask?
(Please note:
The Subnet mask question is, in my opinion, a very good yardstick for
dealing with technical people you've never met, and are uncertain of their
technical background / ability. there are 3 types of responses that
I have found in my experience -
1. Never heard of a subnet mask ( if you get this response
from a help-desk person, ask to speak to someone who knows what it is.)
2. Understands that there is such a thing, but hasn't ever
needed to know exactly how many bits there are, and can find out if you
give them a few mins. This is not bad. Many people have never needed
to know this. And if they are able to locate the answer... Then
they prove themselves worthy of utilizing the resources at their disposal.
3 The correct answer. The correct answer from a person is
a good indicator that you may want this persons phone number. Anyone
that carries this type of technical gobbledygook around in their head can't
be all bad. But remember, this is only a yardstick, an ice-breaker at the
lan-gaming party, if you will.
There is occasionally a person that feels the question is incomplete.
"For a class "C" network?" is an example response of this person.
They have read into the question too far, and are thinking of how many bits
are set to 1. This is silly, and I have seen it come mostly from people
whom work with networking / firewalling more than with a computer )
They make me use M$ windows at work, can I still be a LinuxSnob?
Well, I have to use Windoze at work.. Although I
NEVER log in to the NT domain. They force Lotus Notes down our throats,
and then everybody makes these cutesy M$ office Docs & attaches them
to "Lotes Mail" Don't get me wrong, I don't have anything against "Lotes".
A year or two back, somebody made a slip of the toungue and said "Lotes"
instead of "Lotus Notes" I thought it fit well, and it's kinda stuck
around the office. But regardless, I do have to use Windows at work.
Although, 90% of the time, I'm using it with an exceed session.
I have to maintain a certain amount of documentation on the systems I
support ( in case I get hit by a truck ) and luckily, the department uses
a web server to house this wonderful information. The primary reason
for this is that if your sitting at a Unix console, your not going to be
able to read any docs written in anything outside of pdf, text, or html.
So it truly is rare that I am subjected to M$ products, and then usually
it's for reading, not writing. ( give me any sh*t about M$ Word being
able to save in html and your message will be in /dev/null before I even
read your name )
I am getting heartily sick of always having to reboot. I would like to use Linux, but is this possible in an MS
environment, and an MS dominated network?
Short answer - Yes.
Long answer ( god, I'm wordy sometimes) see below.
The biggest problem your going to run into is who's gonna help you
if it doesn't work.
If your an IT person, and you never let anyone else touch your
computer, then this doesn't matter too much. If you rely on IT people to
keep you connected to the network, this might be a problem.
Another hurdle to get through, what's your boss going to say?
I have made several steps to get out of using windows at work, and
as time goes on, I'm becoming more sucessful. I haven't used windows at
work for almost 3 weeks now. But it's been a slow process, getting
another application working, then testing it for a while.
The first thing is determine what applications you need to use to
do your job. (ex. I use Lotus Notes, and one or two other windows based
apps at work, and everyone uses M$ excel & word for file attachments.)
Lotes Notes works OK running under wine in linux. and I use
StarOffice to translate M$ word / excel docs. this works unless someone is
doing fancy stuff in excel ( like graphics imbedded in a spreadsheet,
which is rare in my environment)
There are other options as well, the wine effort is still working to get
the M$Office suite up to 100%, you may want to look into the functions
that are still being worked on, if that kinda stuff doesn't affect your
environment, then you can just go with it.
If there are applications that will only run on windows, there are
options for getting that to work too. ( See Win4Lin below )
If you need to get to a windows network drive to access
documents-
two options come to mind. first samba is ansource "windows
networking" implementation for linux.(now being called CIFS) it works
similar to an ftp-client to transfer files back & forth to windows file
shares. this is standard on many linux distributions.
secondly- Win4Lin is a commercial product that can be purchased
for installing windows into a linux OS. this takes care of all the
networking options, as you are truly running windows, but instead of it
being an OS, it's just a window on your linux system. ( if something
crashes, restart the "windows applicaton" I think this supports win98 &
win95, at this time. ( you'd be surprised how much faster this is too)
generally, most windows applications can be run on linux under
wine, and you'd be surprised how many people have had sucess running many
common applications under wine. http://winehq.com
