Puppy Professional just for business

[hendrikus]

CUPS has come a long ways and had made it possible to communicate with hundreds
of printers. I can hardly imagine trying to promote Puppy to a business only to say
that they cannot use their printers.

CUPS or some associated app needs to be expanded to manage printing to pdf and to
recognize the very popular and inexpensive Samsung laser printers.

In my business point of view opinion it's no problem to buy a printer from the 'supported printer list', I just bought a new printer for the same price as my IT guy cost per hour. Lets be realistic, even I'm living in Indonesia I'm able to buy me a nice pentium4 systems with enough memory, I buy a flashdisk 512Mb for the same price as a good lunch.

Important is that the Puppy Professional is still plug&play, system independent. History becomes future again, company critical applications are more and more weboriented like the old reliable Digital and IBM mini systems. The web is accepted by the audience, so I need a workstation with a webbrowser and some supporting office applications. OO is perfect.... Don't put too much in it, it's not difficult to install additional packages....

Hendrikus

[hendrikus]

A. An improved pdf viewer
B. A reliable djvu viewer
C. OO is critical for business and non-profit acceptance
D. A database to interface with MS Access is important
E. Complete and reliable Internet multimedia support
F. Reliable interface to PDA's, cellphones, & digital cameras
G. Reliable networking with MS systems
H. Support for more printers (CUPS is great!), include Samsung lasers

The absence of these features have caused Linux to be rejected byseveral
businesses and non-profits with whom I am familiar.

This is somewhat bizarre: "Absence of these features".

While Puppy may not give you all of those yet in its humongous 70Mb (and a lot of it already is there), there are several distros that already give you all of those and much more. D is provided by OO so is redundant. G is overconstrained. You can have networking with MS systems, and you can have reliable networking, both is asking too much.

I can't think of many businesses where multimedia support matters a rat's rear to anyone, except at TV or sound companies, but maybe my limited experience (I've mostly worked with education, government, and finance) blinds me to that one.

I'm working on a Puppy based server concept and put two IT guys on it to develop this..... I like the idea to have it plug & play.... indeed, it's hard to get people on Linux.... I follow the confusing struggling of Linux, too many distro's, nearly all the same, but not one is really fitting to company needs, so they only find their way in dedicated solutions like webserver, some fileservers. The problem is

[VariEze]

I'm really impressed that anybody would even try to replace XP in a business enviroment with Puppy. I help out with the computers at a local office, and would never dream of trying to get those users to change over. Unless Puppy could be made EXACTLY like XP, there would be riots at the office, and no bill gates to blame, only me. I use linux for the unseen things, like the backup box and the router. I'm watching this thread, I'd sure like to see how close to XP Puppy can be made to look, and how the users take to it.

--Karl

[marksouth2000]

The it's going to be hilarious when the users discover that the Vista interface has been heavily mangled, and is quite different from the XP one, which was different from Win2k which was different from Win98 which was.....

[GeoffS]

I don't think it has been mentioned:- Puppy has to be made CrossOver Office friendly. Yes you can run Wine but CrossOver takes all the hassle out and does things I can not make work using bare Wine.
For US$30 CrossOver is a bargain. I think it will require a little co-operation between Codeweavers and the Puppy community to make it work.
It solves a number of the issues mentioned.
PDF - just use Acrobat if the Puppy solutions are inadequate.
QuickBooks runs perfectly.
Many little Windows programs can be just installed and they run.
Word and Excel work perfectly, if you must use them.
I'm not sure about MSAccess, I still have to do some testing. I have a couple of quite large MSAccess applications which should test it. There are many business applications developed in MSAccess. The real test for all MSOffice applications is the use of the inbuilt Basic.
With all this, don't let Puppy slow down. The beauty of Puppy is to be able to turn on your computer and have it working before you have managed to arrange the pens on your desk
Geoff

[Lobster]

If you wish to consider commercial software

use WP textmaker-fe (Pupget)
and spreadsheet planmaker-fe (pupget - free version has only 256 cell usage)

http://www.softmaker.com/english/ofw_en.htm
They are bringiing out a Linux version - give them some encouragement

[hendrikus]

I'm really impressed that anybody would even try to replace XP in a business enviroment with Puppy. I help out with the
computers at a local office, and would never dream of trying to get those users to change over. Unless Puppy could be made EXACTLY like XP, there would be riots at the office, and no bill gates to blame, only me. I use linux for the unseen things, like the backup box and the router. I'm watching this thread, I'd sure like to see how close to XP Puppy can be made to look, and how the users take to it.

--Karl

You are totally right, I would not even think about when I worked in Europe... thats true. Indonesian companies/government buying new pentium4 systems for let say $500, till now it's filled with illegal copied software. This has to be changed at this moment, Microsft is doing regulary surveys over here what means that they have to choose, or buy WindowsXP+Office for $500 or choose something else witch is doing the same in company perspective.

The company critical software is running on a intranet webserver, either the mail, calendar, document management and others. For the company it's important that they use a good performing webbrowser.

I deal with company owners, not with the users, I don't care if some games not running on Linux. I provide tools for doing simply their job without wasting time being a system manager for their PC system.

It's hard for Puppy to become the friend of the end-users, or it has to be an Linux freak. Puppy could become the friend of the business owners because the security, centralization of data, stability and plug & play facility, and important, they don't depend on IT people and system managers.

Hendrikus

[Rhino]

I will release an early proposal for Puppy Professional that could fairly easily be hammered into many of the things that are wanted here.

Changes from Puppy Office 2.02ce:
-new icons for desktop, menus, and some mimetypes.
-Gimpshop
-XFCE4 and JWM can switch back and forth from the menu in XVESA or Xorg
-XDG menus in XFCE4 and puppy wallpapers are available
-Open Office buttons on JWM tray and XFCE4 tray
-Added Opera Browser
-Gxine extra codecs
-changed JWM activity monitor to blue rather than red
-several wallpapers in a variety of tones
-Open Office Impress templates
-LTris

Still to add or change:
-XFCE4 to IceWM with themes
-CUPS
-RutilT
-Simplified menus
-Java-I'm very concerned about space with this and not sure how it can fit in 256Mb with all that is already there...any ideas?
-browser themes for seamonkey and Opera
-fix browser home pages
-wifibeta.pup ?

I will not put this on the announcements thread since it should just be considered an early alpha version so we can hammer this thing out with Puppy Professional being quite large, but very nice

I would like some feedback on this to make sure everything is OK so far. My big concern is the size and how it works on your machines.

Mirror1:
puppyprofessional202.iso
md5checksum

Mirror2:
puppyprofessional202.iso
md5checksum

Thanks for the hosting MU and TedDog!!

[GuestToo]

i seem to remember that when i made a few XP Icewm theme packages, that i modifed the themes slightly ... for example, i didn't like the start button in one theme, so i used the button from another theme, and maybe the wallpaper from another theme

i like the Aqua themes ... but some themes have actually used screenshots from a Mac to make their buttons, apparently, which might not be quite ethical ... i don't know about the XP themes

[jam]

At work Microsoft has done a good job on it own of selling Linux to our high ranking execs. Awhile back when the Melissa virus was running wild our network administrator was forced to take down the Windows servers/workstations for fear of contamination - yes we were running anti-virus software on the Windows network but he was justifiably paranoid that one of our wandering laptops could infect and bring down the Windows network, and he also wanted to make sure the Anti-Virus vendors had correctly updated the virus definitions.

Meanwhile our Linux-based point of sale clients and backend AIX server running our ERP/POS software continued humming right along, happily ringing up sales and totally immune to the attack. That incident alone, not to mention the steep cost savings in software/hardware costs, were enough to guarantee a future for Linux. Besides the work I'm doing with Puppy at home, I'm also involved in a pilot program at work using Puppy, very similar to what this thread has been undertaking and the work being done at home complements this project. However, we are focused on using a minimalistic version of Linux and keeping bloat to a minimum while maximizing functionality - we'd like for our custom Puppy to run in RAM with <= 128 Mb memory. Therefore, KDE, Gnome, OpenOffice are out and AbiWord, Gnumeric, Wine, and UltraIceWM are in. Puppy is able to cruise our corporate intranet at lightning speeds and bring up all of our MS Excel/Word and PDF documents, and multimedia is easily handled via Mplayer. With Mark's latest release of the Software Installer, installing new software in Puppy is easier than ever. Just today during testing I had one of our accountants bring over one of his most complex Excel spreadsheets to see how Gnumeric 1.6.3 could handle it. His jaw practically dropped when he saw the speed at which Puppy brought up the spreadsheet, and all his formulas and formats were preserved.

I already have a highly customized version of DSL(Damn Small Linux) used in our live production environment for our point-of-sale terminals. It loads right from a CD and once loaded runs completely in memory. We also have this CD distributed to our stores running Windows clients just in case the hard drive fails or they manage to corrupt their machine installation, but eventually we will be standardizing completely on Linux across all our stores.

The cost savings and uptime are staggering, and we are able to recycle our "old" hardware, thus prolonging hardware expenditures for years. We also waste less computing cycles by not having to run anti-virus/spyware programs, which also directly impact the wear and tear on the hard drive. As an added benefit, by using Linux we also don't have to concern ourselves with legal expenses involved in BSA software audits and legal challenges.

One other issue our Help Desk runs across continuously is store personnel who bring in their own software from home and load it onto their Windows machine. Although our store policy strictly prohibits this, we often get MS Windows workstations sent back to our corporate offices which for some "unknown reason" are non-functional. It usually takes our Help Desk 4-5 hours to restore the machine to its original state, plus the cost of shipping the machine back and forth. With Linux we can restore a local machine in 6 minutes flat, and if the machine is at one of our stores, we can restore the machine remotely in a few hours after the close of business. Meanwhile, store personnel can use the customeDSL Live CD to continue running the POS program under Linux until their hard drive is restored to its original state. The Linux POS workstations run a custom version of the older ClusterKnoppix, and have the DSL Live CD as a backup in the event of hard drive failure.

At my place of business the Linux distros we use are DSL, ClusterKnoppix, and CentOS with Puppy already on the scene making a splash. Since we have IT staff onsite, our software licensing costs are $0, although we do make it a point to donate to open source projects to provide funding in the event we decided to use the products to run our business. Puppy is now in our pilot phase, and I'm looking to roll it out to a test audience at work in a few weeks. At the same time, I have another target group for my home project with similar goals of OLPC. Thus, both projects are complementary and the work I do with one benefits the other. Since all the software is open source, there is no conflict of interest.

[jam]

As it relates to an enterprise-grade messaging and collaboration business suite, you should really consider downloading and integrating the open source version of Zimbra (http://www.zimbra.com), which is a bleeding-edge Ajax-based e-mail/calendaring/VOIP/Web authoring/sharing and MS Outlook/Exchange alternative with enterprise capabilities. I downloaded the 150 Mb of binaries just to see if it would install on Puppy, and although I installed the missing libraries, there were some requested components that I could not find. By incorporating this open source product into Puppy Pro, it could considerably boost your chance of corporate adoption, especially after management has a chance to view the demo of what this product can do.

[edoc]

As it relates to an enterprise-grade messaging and collaboration business suite, you should really consider downloading and integrating the open source version of Zimbra (http://www.zimbra.com), which is a bleeding-edge Ajax-based ...

I am fascinated by your customized enterprise-quality yet small Puppy and would love to
learn more as it comes together.

I frequently come upon small business users, non-profits, and financially-challenged
families with older hardware who would be blessed by such a reliable and highly
functional version.

I could use it!

I seem to recall reading fairly recently of a significant vulnerability in Ajax, I presume that
it has been thoroughly researched and repaired?

doc

[Lobster]

I believe this commercial project evolved from Hancom Office
http://product.thinkfree.com/purchase/pc_tfo.html

anyone try them?

Online services are another way of augmenting and keeping mobile with data . . .

http://tmxxine.com/Wikka/wikka.php?wakk ... eResources

[marksouth2000]

[quote="hendrikus"]...it

[hendrikus]

[quote="marksouth2000"][quote="hendrikus"]...it

[sunburnt]

The XP Desktop & apps. interfaces are a mess, most folks just don't know the difference.

Making Puppy as good as XP isn't hard at all, it'll never be a carbon copy (thank God).

The apps. are the really critical & hard to reproduce part of the mimicing act.

As I'd said before... the file chooser & some of the other controls in Linux leave alot to be desired.
I'm not saying that the Win. equivilents are much better, but that folks are use to them.

Linux apps. are real good & in some cases better, but the polish & functionality needs help.

[hendrikus]

I think I made an mistake when I mention that a XP theme would create a quick acceptance of Puppy as workstation. Marketing technical I had to know this.

Putting a XP theme the users will pretend it's a real XP clone, but when they using the filemanager (Explorer) they are already confused... in their opinion it hasn't the functionality of WindowsXP. The same with other applications.

Last week I changed the workstations in a fluxbox theme, no startbutton, black menu's without any logo's, some icons on the desktop for the main applications. They see it as professional without glamour. Actually they liked to work with it and told me that Linux is indeed much faster then Windows. They don't spend time to compare with XP applications but accept the small learning curve to change to Linux.

Maybe it's indeed better to just create a professional functioning Linux Desktop to avoid all XP/Puppy comparison questions.

Hendrikus

[richard.a]

Folks, not going to take sides, but a lot of dis-service has been done to Linux and Unix through what one side sees as name-calling, and the other side sees as being truthful.

The Geek/Nerd (I'm not being unpleasant, that is what Joe Public calls the back-room techo's) folk do think differently from the users and the admins in the user environment. It is not surprising, because their two approach views are different.

The end-user, and in the business sector, the end-users' management, are those that a non-Microsoft product promoter has to consider very closely. Not so much the tech's who can usually work their way around most things, even changing the look completely as in a previous post.

I've been around a number of forums, and the knives that come out regularly on some are quite frightening, actually. Please let's just pull together for the sake of the product - which surely is why we are here?

I remember posting a comment on one of the LQ forums which I lfted from elsewhere, an interview with the Chairman (I think) of Amiga who was asked about the Linux distro wars and he opined sadly that it was his opinion that what had killed Commodore/Amiga was the ruthless attacks on one another by Amiga afficionadoes. And he suspected Linux could be killed off as an acceptable (to the public) choice to Microsoft if Linux users didn't stop flame wars.

Not suggesting this has become a flame war. But I think we all would rather it didn't take the next couple of steps in that direction.

Puppy is Great.

Puppy Pro will be greater.

I would love to buy Crossover Office if I knew how to make it work with Puppy.

Perhaps that's our tech friends' penchant, eh? To help us users work it out?

Have fun, puppy is wagging his tail.

So is my cat Maximus

[richard.a]

looks great, a iso certainly would be good.
Can you upload it somewhere?

We can mirror it then.
If not, I can send you the data to upload on dotpups.de , from there I can move it to htb65.de and puptrix.org

Going asleep now, I'll send you a pm.
Mark

I could mirror one or two smallish isos for you. I have an ADSL2+ connection.

If I start doing that I can then lean on my ISP to offer to mirror too.

slightly new topic:

Been looking everywhere for the XP themes and apart from the basic one that comes with v2 (JWM) I can't find the wallpaper shown at here nor the theme it supposedly goes with.

I wonder if the Redmond people have claimed it infringes summat?

Richard in Australia

[MU]

thanks, we have mirrored it already, see:
http://www.murga.org/~puppy/viewtopic.p ... ght=#68676
Mark