Running both Linux and Windows environments within an organisation isn't always plain sailing. Australian IT pros offer some tips on getting it right.

Following a poll in last week's IT Manager Update newsletter, a number of readers have written in with their tips and opinions about dual booting Linux and Windows operating systems.

Sam Johnston, director at Australian Online Solutions, said that he supports anything which helps with the introduction of Linux into businesses. "Having just wasted 15 minutes of my day trying to reactivate Office XP Professional after moving to a RAID boot disk I certainly appreciate the freedom OSS offers," Johnston said.

Johnston believes that the startup process still takes way too long, especially at the BIOS stage, which he finds annoying given that most of the work done by the BIOS is redone by the PnP operating systems.

"Efforts to replace the BIOS with the Linux kernel certainly have my attention, as boot times as short as three seconds have been recorded," Johnston said. "As such, minimising the number of reboot cycles is important. Also, users are likely to be more productive if their machines stay up (ie, don't crash and need to be rebooted to accomplish different functions)."

Johnston said there are a number of options for providing access to both operating systems, including Cygwin libraries which provide a Unix environment within Windows, a virtual machine approach, or by operating a remote desktop.

Although project leader Matt Tavani doesn't use dual boot at all at the organisation he works for, he said that with the integration of two departments earlier this year, the IT department was now faced with the prospect of having a couple of hundred Windows 95 and Windows 98 boxes, on what had previously been a pure Windows 2000 network.

"Not only has this caused headaches for the IT department, but also for users who are forced to migrate between sysetems if they transfer divisions [or] roles into an area which is managed by the other merged group," he said.

Tavani believes that both business managers and the IT department need to be involved in deciding whether or not the organisation opts for dual boot.

"Those kinds of decisions can't be made in isolation and usually lead to angst if IT rejects it out of hand, or a rogue business manager gets one of their own people to install it by stealth," he said. "The business owner should have a legitimate business need--and not just because it is cool--and the IT department need to recognise that just saying 'no' doesn't always work either."

An IT division should assess this on the merits of the case, and provide agreed service levels to the business unit which has the dual boot requirement, he argues.

"This way the business owner can get on with their work, and the IT department knows it does not have to service the entire organisation as dual boot," Tavani said. "If all of a sudden, or even over time, the rest of the organisation needs such functionality then it gets worked into the next round of IT planning, which means it can get planned for, budgeted and staffed to support."

Another respondent to the IT Manager poll said that in his experience managers do not have the technical knowledge to accurately assess what is better for business when it comes to a technical solution.

"I believe that the selection process needs to go something like line management--the direction is provided by the top, the familiarity and input on experiences provided by the bottom and the IT professionals provide the recommendations on the workable solutions."

Nor does everyone believe that dual boot is necessarily the answer for organisations. Although Daniel McHugh, research analyst of IT trends at Gartner Asia Pacific, believes that in certain cases it could be warranted, he believes that dual boot from a desktop point-of-view increases the complexity of management.

McHugh also said that in an enterprise environment It would increase the overall total cost of ownership to run dual boot on all desktops. "I can see the situation if someone was migrating from a Windows environment to a Linux environment that they might want some level of stop gap...where users could be proactively moved across," he said. The use of dual boot within organisations also won't necessarily increase over time, McHugh said.

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