"If you find yourself in a sea of Windows at work, find the
official and unofficial policies towards alternate operating
systems. Don't expect to change a rigid prohibition. After all,
your employer owns your computer and your time on the job, and if
your organization makes it a firing offense to use something other
than an abacus, stone knife, and bear claw as your computing tools,
well, then you're stuck.
"Another item in the common sense department is compatibility.
Which applications are taken for granted? In IDG.net's case, we
complete most of our work with browsers that connect to IDG's
public Web sites, which is no problem for the common Linux
browsers. On the other hand, we use our browsers to throw the
levers and turn the knobs on the Oracle database that controls
www.idg.net. Some HTML code on our internal Oracle server is
tricky, and I discovered that not all Linux browsers render it
properly. The other critical compatibility issues I needed to
resolve at IDG.net are the company-wide deployment of Lotus Notes
and the use of AOL Instant Messenger. Failure to resolve any one of
these would scuttle my plans for a Linux desktop at work..."
