Welcome!

Welcome to my "Office Linux" blog. This blog is going to chronicle my journey to finally and completely abandon all current (and future!) flavors of Microsoft Windows and move permanently to Linux on every PC that I own or use.

I've been running Linux since 1996 (Redhat v4) and can pretty much make it do anything I need - from a homebrew PVR to Samba, iptables/masq, internal DNS, and LAMPS, getting things done through Linux is almost always possible and fun (well, most of the time ).

But imagine this scenario...You negotiate a deal to use your own PC hardware with your employer and you happily take your Linux box into the office. You're just an average Joe (or Jane) working in marketing, engineering, operations, etc - so unlike your IT brethern you have no information on the company's network topology and no place to go for expert help. How do you authenticate to the Windows domain? How do you login to the company's internal IM service? How do you map to Windows network printers? How do you deal with websites that require ActiveX? How do you get VPN and iPass to work?

Fact of the matter is that while Linux owns the Internet, it's not nearly as easy making it work seamlessly and easily in the corporate Windows world. That's what this blog's all about - how to walk in and beat the Windows crowd on their own network. ;)

Let the fun begin...