enterprise-ubuntu team mailing list archive

[David Partain <david.partain@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Alan,

Thanks for the conversation.

On 11/02/2012 12:36 AM, Alan Bell wrote:
> so Canonical have done some work in this general area before, and came
> up with this:
> http://www.ubuntu.com/business/desktop/remix

The business remix is interesting but relatively irrelevant from my 
perspective. :-)

When we hand a user a machine, it's something we've crafted.  That means 
we have our own automated way of installing (using preseeding), choose 
our own set of applications (basically vanilla ubuntu with a few things 
added and a few things removed) and the real heavy lifting that's done 
is all about configuration.  How do we authenticate?  How do we 
pre-configure t-bird for email, pidgin for chat, etc.?  That's the bit 
that's non-standard.

I seriously doubt that any company is going to roll out the business 
remix inside their company.  It's very valuable as a demonstration that 
you can package things in an enterprise-ish way, but we'll roll out our own.

> I don't know if they installed likewise-open/wine/mono and other
> microsoft compatibility things, but they could have done.

I don't know about other companies, but I can pretty much guarantee that 
we're not going to have business-critical applications that depend on 
things like Wine and Mono...

> Now this is all a perfectly valid approach, and some people will see a
> lot of value in it (I was perhaps a bit flippant to call it boring)
> however it is the Canonical approach at the moment, I am not sure that a
> community effort in the same direction is going to achieve anything more
> than the professional services crew can sort out for themselves.

From my perspective, the value of community is how to solve the problem 
of gluing in applications into the infrastructure as described above, as 
well as the problem of configuration management of those clients using 
puppet/cfengine/whatever, possibly in coordination with Landscape if the 
company is a Canonical customer.

> If we are going to target a dependency on a Windows heavy environment
> then lets do stuff that makes Ubuntu more awesome than Windows, maybe a
> lens that searches Active Directory for stuff would be interesting. A
> SAP/Peoplesoft Lens would also be cool along those lines.

Excellent thoughts!

Cheers,

David