KDB Systems

Well the exper­i­ment to only run Linux while on a road trip was a par­tial fail­ure. I had to boot into Win­dows to get some work done that involved email and Exchange. I can’t seem to wean myself from Exchange. I thought I had Evo­lu­tion work­ing but it keeps lock­ing up on me. I’ve always had prob­lems with Evo­lu­tion but I had high hopes for the cur­rent ver­sion and Fedora 11. It works flaw­lessly while directly con­nected to my Exchange 2003 server. Work­ing remotely is another story alto­gether. It works spo­rad­i­cally. There will be long pauses of up to five min­utes where it seems to be locked up then sud­denly it’s work­ing fine for a few min­utes. Even­tu­ally it will lock up com­pletely. I switched to using OWA (Out­look Web Access) instead. The OWA expe­ri­ence with Fire­fox is not the best. OWA in Exchange 2003 really needs IE with ActiveX to be pro­duc­tive. I’ve tested Exchange 2007 and it has a much bet­ter OWA Expe­ri­ence with a non IE client. I’ll be updat­ing my Exchange server to 2007 in the near future. Hope­fully the com­bi­na­tion of OWA, Exchange 2007, and Fire­fox in Fedora 11 will be more productive.

My other prob­lem is my Black­berry. I haven’t found a way to sync the BB and Exchange in Linux. I could setup a Black­berry Enter­prise Server. This will sync Exchange and the BB over the cel­lu­lar car­rier in real time. It would cost me more money. I’d have to upgrade my wire­less plan from BIS to BES. I’d also be run­ning another server. Even vir­tu­al­ized it seems like overkill.

Other than the Exchange prob­lems the exper­i­ment has been a suc­cess. VPN and RDP access to the net­works I man­age hasn’t been a prob­lem. I’ve recieved some Excel attach­ments that Open Office had no prob­lems with. I received some .PDF files that weren’t a prob­lem. So far I have to say I pre­fer Win­dows 7 over Fedora 11 but it has noth­ing to do with the OS. It’s all about the appli­ca­tions and it seems as long as I’m mar­ried to Exchange I’ll be run­ning Windows.

I’m leav­ing this morn­ing for a three day trip to Ottawa for a CIRA board meet­ing. I depend on my Black­berry and my lap­top to run my busi­ness while I’m on the road. I’m going to do an exper­i­ment this trip. I’m going to run Fedora 11 exclu­sively on my lap­top. I’ve always had a multi-boot setup on the lap­top of Win­dows Desk­top, Win­dows Server, and Linux. The cur­rent setup is Win­dows 7 Ulti­mate, Server 2008 R2, and Fedora 11. I’ve set the default boot to Fedora 11 and hope to keep it that way for the next three days. I’ve tried this in the past with var­i­ous dis­tros of Ubuntu and Open­Suse. Nei­ther worked out. For some rea­son I always had to boot into Win­dows some­time dur­ing the road trip. It was usu­ally some­thing to do with Exchange or my Black­berry. I rely on my Black­berry and Exchange to man­age my time, email, and basi­cally my busi­ness. I’ll try to keep this blog up to date with my expe­ri­ences and at the end I’ll post the results.