Eating My Own Dog Food

Yesterday, I suggested that CIOs should be constantly running micro experiments. I've found it keeps your I.T. employees engaged and growing through lifelong learning and who knows, you might even uncover a big productivity or cost savings opportunity.

After telling YOU to experiment, it suddenly occurred to me that I haven't been experimenting as much as I should! So I took one of my own recommendations and tried it out.

I decided to install Linux on an old PC. More accurately, I had the Quiet Creek Tech Team (my 15 year old son, Jeff) do it.

The "patient" was a 4 year old Dell laptop (who's battery gave up recharging long ago). It was (barely) running Microsoft XP and MS Office.

Jeff downloaded Ubuntu to his MAC, (which took 30 minutes) and burned a boot CD (another 30 minutes). The Ubuntu documentation says you can boot Linux from the CD, just to try it out before deciding to install. You also have the option of partitioning your hard drive to allow your legacy O/S to co-exist (Ubuntu does this for you), or you can simply replace your old O/S with Linux.

We tossed the CD into our laptop and after 5 minutes of "playing" we decided to go for broke and install it. We had nothing to lose. We kept the old laptop so Jeff could us MS Word for school projects and even if the entire experiment was a disaster, we had other PCs he could use.

From the time we hit "Install" the process took about 2 hours. We decided to try Linux as the ONLY O/S on the laptop. The Ubuntu version of Linux comes complete with OpenOffice 2.2, Firefox browser, self updating anti-virus software, Email, IM, DVD and Audio players and several games - pretty much all the basics.

Jeff is not a huge fan of documentation, preferring instead to look around and "play", but for those of you who like to read, Ubuntu comes with decent documentation.

Once installed, with literally 2 clicks of the mouse, our Linux system was attached to our wireless home network and we were using Firefox to surf the net. Ten minutes later, Jeff had the email client configured. The process was surprisingly simple and intuitive.

So after an evening of experimenting, we now have a Linux system up and running. The real test will come over the next few months as we use it for "real world" applications, but so far the results are encouraging. Stay tuned.

Oh, and just for fun, I took a look at a cheap Dell desktop PC ($699). Bundled in the price was Vista Home premium ($111.99) and Works 8.0 ($49.95). At list price, the bundled Microsoft software accounted for 23% of the total price of the machine. And this savings doesn't include the anit-virus software that you must add.

Any CIOs out there interested in reducing the cost of each and every desktop/laptop by 23% AND eliminating all the licencing headaches that accompany them? Just asking......