It’s been some days in my office an activity is going on to shift operating system of all machines from Windows XP to Fedora and Ubuntu. Most of employees got their PC’s operating system changed and remaining are under process. This is a great edge to use Java and open source based softwares that you can say bye to Windows smoothly. Organizations save a lot of money by shifting to Linux. If they really keep their selves to use such kind of software which are open source.
Well the app servers where our application deployed are already Linux based. Developers use putty programs to access them. For just writing code and SQL queries, Eclipse IDE and database explorer are available in their Linux binaries. But their are other softwares too which facilitate your office work. Some softwares I use for graphic designing and web page development, but their Linux binaries are not available. I have to look their alternates. I have to make my MP3 files work too.
I think it will be a smooth transition and ‘Write Once Run Anywhere’ spirit of Java will not let developers to stay uneasy on Linux based system. I hope it will be a good expirience.
One and propably only one thing I would miss in Linux (Debian) world is TOTAL COMMANDER. No one will convince me that Gnome Commander, Midnight Commander, WTF Commander is better than it.
Seems good! Let us see, whether your org. and staff can continue with that. At least you should be very happy, as you have done your final year java web enterprise project on Linux using MySQL, JBoss, and Netbeans, etc. Wish you best of luck!
what i am missing is a writeup of your actual experience after switching to linux. did you miss anything. did ‘write once run anywhere’ really work out? did you have trouble adjusting to the different applications? …
greetings, eMBee.
I have mixed type of feelings after this migration.
Development
And development didn’t got effect. We only need to change some of our config files where we have hardcoded Windows style paths. Java really proved “write once run anywhere”. The source code which we copied from Windows before migration, worked perfectly well on Linux without any headache of configuring environment. And Eclipse and Tomcat are all JVM based so there is no issue at all with them.
Other Computing
One of our web app is not cross browser and that only worked on IE. So to install IE on Linux we installed WineServer a VM software. And that eat memory like hell. It keep gradually increase consuming resources. And your system started responding very slow.
I found Fedora bit slower than Windows XP. My system is Dell Optiplex 320 with 2 GB of RAM. I was very happy with its performance on Windows XP but it give tough time on Fedora.
I dont know why OpenOffice is slow. If you just scroll the mouse button with spead, you will see it trailing dead slowly.
So its a big shift and it really effects the way you efficiently do things. Some times open source alternate didn’t gave that pleasure of work that you can feel on Windows apps. But being all such kind of applications free, its a blessing.