James R Sullivan » Open Source

Eee PC

James Sullivan — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 17:07:01 +0000

I Picked up the Eee PC 1000h, a 10″ little netbook with a suggested battery life of over 7 hours for $475 shipped. At this price, I can get a new netbook every year and I’m better off than my previous habit of buying a workstation class notebook every 3 years.

It is running Ubuntu, and can’t turn off the webcam, bluetooth, and USB, so my battery life isn’t as nice as Windows but it’s an amazing little computer. One of the most amazing things was that I used the Ubuntu 8.10 live CD and had a working desktop with visual effects comparable to Vista, modern coding tools (Eclipse), and a web development environment with working WiFi, Bluetooth, Webcam (for Skype), Audio, etc…

Ubuntu/Debian is my server operating system of choice, and I feel like it is quickly becoming my desktop operating system of choice as well.

Something of note is that there is an amazing trend of people running Mac OSX on netbooks with really great results. It is tempting to run OSX on my netbook as well since I run Macs for my workstations, but at the moment I feel very comfortable with Ubuntu.

Free Software Foundation Membership

James Sullivan — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 19:30:25 +0000

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization based in Boston, MA, USA. It relies on individuals like us to support FSF’s mission to preserve, protect and promote the freedom to use, study, copy, modify and redistribute computer software, and to defend the rights of Free Software users.

Helpdesk

James Sullivan — Thu, 11 Jan 2007 01:13:20 +0000

We’re implementing an internal helpdesk tool at a small business. We reviewed a lot of the Open Source systems out there and found one that was just like an enterprise-level system but also customizable, runs on LAMP (easy setup/easy maintain), and is pretty popular.

Eventum

It’s used by MySQL as their external product helpdesk. There were only a few points that we customized and made it a very slick offering for what we need:

1. Project = Internal
2. Priority = 1. Can’t Do Business / Mission-Critical to 5. Project / Scheduled
3. LDAP integration so people don’t need another password
4. Email integration = Not perfect out of the box.

After having the system work for us in an all-internal aspect, we’ll look at offering it to our customers as our company helpdesk for our customers. This could give us a central location to manage project work for both internal and external endeavors and a great point to integrate with our CRM system. Plus, the per-seat license is $0 since we have LAMP expertise in-house.