| Almost all of the Linux distros are set up to install on a single user | machine by default. This works fine for a single user, but in large | organizations, this is a bad deployment scheme and a vast under-utilization | of Linux's capabilities. And Windows does what by default? Unless you have a Windows domain setup, windows pretty much reverts to a single user install. IE, you're asked for an administrator password, and prompted to create a user account. Creating additional user accounts is left until instalation is finished. Most Linux distros do the same thing. | I have read accounts of other people's experiences in converting an | organization to Linux and getting them off the M$ train, and it seems that | to really make Linux more easily maintainable, you have to have some sort | of centralized software deployment/file repository solution(i.e. NFS or | Samba). | | At my company, and many others, the apps may be M$, but the network | deployment/file repository is Novell. The IT people never touch my desktop | computer, all their time is spent managing the network resources. This, I | think, is the key to saving time and $$ in maintenance costs. And there is no shortage of tools to do so. For authentication, you can use NIS or NIS+, LDAP, Novell, and I'm sure I'm mising a few. For install and configuration changes, setup an rdist and/or cfengine. Is slick. | What Linux distro is structured to be | networked-apps/many-simple-workstations? I know you can add this on by | yourself later, but then.... Well, I like debian myself. :) Dier has gotten it to the point where we can tell workstations to install a deb, read the debconf answer database to configure itself, and things are off and running. Some things like the autoinstaller for Debian are immature, but they work. | Why not roll your own? Because you have to update everything. This is a huge chore. (Hey nerp boy, speak up or something...) Imagine you did this a few years back, when libc5 was the standard. Now you have libc6 out, and you really should convert everything to libc6. But that involves rebuilding lots of software, which may not alwasy go cleanly. Why should you have to replicate the work that has already been done for you countless times? Better to focus on security, training, managment, and other improvments that a roll your own soultion IMHO. Andrew S. Zbikowski | http://www.ringworld.org "The irony is that Bill Gates claims to be making a stable operating system and Linus Torvalds claims to be trying to take over the world."