DarkWyrm Unabridged

As if I needed further confirmation. Right. I just got a new toy: a Dell Latitude D620, used for eBay for $250. Definitely a great deal for the price. Once I got it last night, I proceeded to wipe it and install XP Pro and Ubuntu Karmic. The Karmic install took about an hour with updates and extra programs that I use. It still needs a few tweaks, but it's basically done. 3 hours later, the XP install is now downloading updates for Office 2007. I really don't like Office, but seeing how this laptop is for my use at school and I teach a class on Office, I kinda have to have it. Personally speaking, I'd rather not bother with Windows at all. 1 hour vs 3+. Hmmm. Once again, Micro$oft can't seem to get it right.

My search for a good, usable, free groupware package has been a tough quest. There are a lot out there. Some of them, like OpenGroupWare, are ugly. Others, like phpGroupWare and eGroupWare, are easy to install, but buggy. Scalable OpenGroupWare seems almost designed to be near-impossible to install. While I haven't tried OpenChange, I've heard that its webmail is clunky. Zimbra, at first, didn't seem much better than them. Actually, it's quite good, but if you don't have much background in the components that make up Zimbra, it's not at all easy to install. The learning curve is steep, but I nailed it and set up a mail server on a Linux partition I have on my development box. I'm *so* excited and relieved at the same time. I'm a little concerned, too, because the box hung itself completely, and I couldn't even do an Alt-PrintScreen reboot. It doesn't want to boot now. I hope the thing hasn't died. Even if it has, I can get the data back, but ...

These last few weeks have had a lot of ups and downs, and I've learned a lot in the process. First thing that I've learned is that Linux Administration is hard to learn quickly. I twiddled with Zimbra for a few days and learned that it's kinda a picky. Interface-wise, there aren't any groupware packages out there that are usable, open source, and easy to set up. Pick any two, instead. Scalable OpenGroupware is usable and open source, but a pain to set up. The documentation isn't exactly great, either. I've managed to set up a nice Courier mail server with a MySQL backend and I'm in the middle of setting up OpenLDAP services so that I can (theoretically) set up SOGo. Not easy, but maybe I'll write a HOWTO if/when I get it going. *shrug*