Linux Desktop Odyssey: Linux on the business desktop? Let's see it for ourselves

I'm sick to the back teeth about all this talk of whether Linux on the desktop is ready for average office worker.

Or should that be is the average office worker ready for a Linux desktop?

The only way I (and hopefully others) will know if it's ready for me is to use it in a production environment.

Being a Novell old hand, TechWorld's IT manager Andrew Glassock has expressed interest in Linux since it acquired SUSE Linux a few years ago.

Since that time a number of factors have swayed him to test the suitability of Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop (SLED) 10. Very generally, these are:

- Windows XP is reaching its end-of-life
- An upgrade to Vista may require an unnecessary hardware upgrade
- Novell supports and releases its commercial software for SLED
- IBM has released Lotus Notes for SLED 10
- Most, say 70 percent, of IDG's employees don't require specialist windows apps that may not have an equivalent for Linux
- Minimal, if any, end-user training required

Add all that up and you arrive at a climate where migrating to a Linux desktop presents as much potential disruption to the business as an upgrade from XP to Vista.

A few months back, after a combination of curiosity and coercion, Andrew set up a “pilot” SLED 10 system out of a disused office PC.

I'll let Andrew spell out the pros and cons of installing SLED 10, Notes 8.x, and Novell's client software to arrive where we are today. As far as I'm concerned I'd like to document the experience of using a Linux desktop in the enterprise and draw some comparisons with Windows XP, which still has the lion's share of the business market.

I'll be blogging about my Linux adventure regularly, starting next week with the user interface experience.

For the sake of consistency, I will post review and how to pieces in TechWorld's main content system and then link to them from my blog.