Linux in the work place

elrasho

elrasho

elrasho

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12 Jan 2009
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Why learn Linux? This is coming off a thread I was following in the careers section.

I spent some time looking for recent Laptops that will support running Ubuntu out of the box and I could only find a handful. I would have thought with Ubuntu being around for a long time it would be much more universal. So there musnt be many end users in the work environment using Linux as their OS.

So where is Linux used in the “industry”. I’m thinking most Sys Admin types will use it but anything else? Is there anywhere I can go to see where in business Linux is actually used?
 
We've got a mixture here.

Server side it's predominantly infrastructure, so mail gateways and web servers running Postfix and LAMP stack. Our application is PostGreSQL based as well, so we've got a couple of DB servers out there too. Preferred distro is Debian.

Desktop we've got a couple of users who also use Debian based distros, but they're slowly moving to Windows to take advantage of collaboration tools and running their distros as development VMs locally.

Then on the testing and assurance side we've got a host of distros (Mint, Ubuntu, CentOS etc) for bug finding and QA. Oh and a couple of build hosts.
 
Not business, but University Computer Science department here. With few exceptions every PC runs Linux (Fedora mostly, some Ubuntu). Getting half-decent with the terminal is essential.

elrasho said:
Why learn Linux? This is coming off a thread I was following in the careers section.

I spent some time looking for recent Laptops that will support running Ubuntu out of the box and I could only find a handful. I would have thought with Ubuntu being around for a long time it would be much more universal. So there musnt be many end users in the work environment using Linux as their OS.

So where is Linux used in the “industry”. I’m thinking most Sys Admin types will use it but anything else? Is there anywhere I can go to see where in business Linux is actually used?
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Few laptops come without Windows or OSX installed but that doesn't mean they don't support Linux. I can't imagine any machine you could buy today wouldn't support it. Its probably more a case that anybody who wants Linux can install it themselves anyway so no point in including it. Plus it's Free, which is not going to excite laptop builders. ;)

Back to the topic of business users, I'd think of Linux and Unix-like OSs all together which bumps up the numbers a bit. I did a few months with a company that use mostly OSX devices (Macbook Pros) for software development, and they leveraged the Unix-like nature of OSX more than the average person. The kind of skills you're talking about with "learning Linux" are quite applicable to OSX use too.
 
Well .... off the top of my head ....

Web servers
Oracle/MySQL database servers
SAP servers
Quite a few clusters
SFTP Servers
JBoss servers
Other Application servers
LDAP Servers
Various custom applications
Infrastructure servers (patch repos, terminal servers)

Many thousands for many customers .... we don't run it on the desktop though.
 
I'm an advocate of using Linux where possible/practical, bit tbh Microsoft have got it so nailed down post Server 2012. I do the work of two sys admins via powershell and rsat and still cram a couple hours of procrastination in a working day...

While I long for the day Linux is everywhere, it's not any time soon. OTOH my best mate is a cent/redhat/Unix type in the online gaming/gambling arena and earns at least £300 a day on contract, so it's out there if you have the skills and determination.
 
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I've worked for a lot of different companies in a lot of different roles and I've never really seen Linux in use directly at the user level - either it is one level removed behind a front end application i.e. point of sale devices, notification boards and other embedded systems or used in the back end server environment.

EDIT: There have been a couple of specialist users i.e. simulation tools in the engineering department in one place but that is about it.
 
'Normal' office based servers run windows, mail, dns etc

Companies that run custom software, for example trading hft firms, universities, etc where they want power and a high level of customisation will use linux

Linux is the perfect OS to start with nothing and build what you want.
 
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Thanks for the replies :) I'm going to sit down and start the Linux Essentials course and see how I get on. For someone coming from no experience with Linux I've got a long way to go.

My end goal is to learn the stuff and maybe introduce what I've learnt to my work colleagues and implement it.
 
I work specifically on embedded Linux work, and even here from the user/dev perspective we don't all use Linux natively. Small company of 4 people but me and one other run Linux natively (Ubuntu iirc for him and Linux Mint for me), boss has a Windows laptop and Ubuntu desktop machine, other colleague uses Windows on his laptop but ssh's into Ubuntu server on his own machine for all the work.

Even then sometimes I need a VM to test or whatever, or when the customer insists on using Ubuntu on the embedded system (which is a complete pita), yuck :p

Like others have said you won't see many laptops sold with Linux but most will work fine with it, my Lenovo Thinkpad 'just works' with Linux Mint, never had any issues.
 
The backup software we deploy on servers is built on rhel/centos. But other than that the majority of people's workstations are windows based. Test servers and test VMs are a mixture. And very few aix servers in the environment, but only for testing and poc related work.
 
We basically do whatever the customer wants, but specifically around the embedded linux area, with a bit of a focus on 'fast booting' (got some demo's that boot into applications in under a second etc)

Sometimes that's bringing up everything on brand new hardware, sometimes it's simply taking a SoC vendors linux bsp and tweaking it to suit. Right now I'm working with a Jetson-TK1 devboard, using Yocto to create the system, the customer is working on their application and also has a hardware department currently making a custom variant of the board. So my work is to make changes/additions to the bsp as required for their application, and when the time comes I'll make the tweaks needed to get everything booting on their custom board.

Often the work I do ends up ending far before any product is released which is a bit weird, did some work in 2014 that still hasn't been released, but also got a few products out there that I worked on which are quite cool, like some boot time work on a supercars dashboard setup, that was/is pretty cool :)
 
It's used a lot for enterprise back ends; web servers, application servers hosting java, tomcat, jboss, etc. I love Linux and once the server is up it tends to just stay running fine forever. Our Windows servers tend to need rebooting occasionally to stay stable. But I have to say that the new guys and girls find supporting systems hosted on Windows far easier than Linux.
 
Hades said:
But I have to say that the new guys and girls find supporting systems hosted on Windows far easier than Linux.
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I'd say this is hugely down to what you're used to. I've grown up with Unix-like OSs with very little Windows exposure (for someone who is technical), and Linux is a doddle compared with Windows. I've only heard Windows to be an illogical frustration from the perspective of my fellow Linux chaps, never the opposite. Though that comes with the territory.
 
My company uses Linux in the workplace. CentOS, Debian and Red Hat comes to mind.

I myself use Kali and Ubuntu in a virtual environment.

How did everyone get on with the recent Critical glibc Vulnerability? Lots of emergency patching ;)
 
I would love to learn Linux Server Admin and then introduce this to my current workplace. We currently have a couple of Linux based servers, one is our Web firewall called SophosWeb. I'm keen to learn Linux but not sure how I would apply these skills to my current work place.

It would be amazing if I could propose a change to our network infrastructure based on the advantages Linux provides.
 
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