James Holland

This page will hold information about James Holland and his talk.

Profile

James has been working at Alone in London until just recently. He has been messing around with computers since 1979 when he wrote a BASIC program to computerise Stockport's meal-on-wheels service. He now sees himself as an aspiring System Administrator and has been involved in Linux/Open Source for the past 5 years having been completely Windows-centric...

To contact James, mail to jamesholland at geocities.com

Notes Relating to talk

Alone in London works with homeless people in central london providing services including housing advice, advocacy and support. Before open source software (OSS) was implemented the organisation had just one standalone pc and no effective email. Needed to network one office because fundraising team needed access to a shared database. James first tried Windows NT4? trial version but this had many problems so tried Red Hat Linux which worked first time. James looked into internet connectivity and discovered Samba http://www.samba.org/ -- OSS which allows Windows machines to connect to Samba Server (windows machines "think" they are connected to a Windows server). Ran Linux and Samba servers across the organisation.

Money always an issue so they didn't have much to spned on IT. They needed a terminal server solution that didn't cost very much. Tried Windows NT4? again but no joy. Came across Linux Terminal Server Project and were able to set up and run "thin client" PCs? off a central linux server. Had 60 PCs? donated , got 30 of these working and added cheap network cards and graphics cards. Cost around £20 per machine. Red Hat Linux 7 was installed on an old Dell server. Setup allowed frontline staff to have thin clients. This worked so well it was rolled out to the whole organisation. Gnome (graphical user interface for desktop) was used on red hat 7. Now running Red Hat 9, Evolution for email (Outlook clone), Galeon (http://galeon.sourceforge.net/ browser) and Open Office (http://www.openoffice.org/ Microsoft Office replacement).

Organisation still needs to use windows for various database applications using access. They also run Windows 2000 for the few people who need to use it.

R desktop -- Windows users can copy and paste from Linux applications into Windows applications. Samba is used to access the Windows file system.

Issues / Problems faced:

• "not like my computer at home" (running Windows) - users may not be happy working with 2 different systems -- one at home and one at work

• backup tape drive - used Arc Sync from Samba team -- allows remote backups from all servers

• Drives - users needed to get used to linux drive system (e.g. home drive rather than drive letters)

• firewall - satellite offices connected via broadband - use smoothwall initially then IP Cop. For clients (young people) at some of the projects content filter was neccessary used DansGuardian (http://dansguardian.org/).

• first release of OpenOffice was not terribly good at saving in Word format so moved over to saving in Open Office format as default format. Current versions of OpenOffice can save to Word format fine now.

• fonts can be a problem - organisation had to use some Microsoft fonts

• finance dept was outsourced and the company they outsourced to used locked down Excel spreadsheets. Housing dept also needed to use them. In the end used Crossover Office which allows some windows products to run on Linux (http://www.codeweavers.com/site/products/).

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