This is a brief note that small professional offices here in my neck of the woods typically overspend by ridiculous amounts when buying phone systems and copiers.

In my experience, its not uncommon for professionals here to spend $3,000 or more on a telephone system that delivers no more service than $300 worth of off-the-shelf AT&T Speakerphones.

The server running egroupware had been doubling as a workstation. Nothing ran quickly anymore.

We decided not to start gnome on that machine in the future and devote all available ram and processor cycles to serving the network. The monitor, keyboard and mouse were removed.

I'm using the Emperor Linux laptop (Lenovo & Ubuntu Breezy) for all work now.

We've added freenx clients secure remote logins to our network. Excellent.

We've also added egroupware for shared calendar and contacts lists over our samba network. Also excellent. Egroupware appears to have potential for coordinating and centralizing other shared data (e.g. time records).

Secure shell is up and running today.

Port forwarding is set up from the dsl modem that acts as a router for the office.

As the year closes, the open source code successfully used in our office includes the following:

Ubuntu 5.10 with Linux kernel 2.6.12-10-386.

Gnome 2.12.1

Open Office 2.0

Evolution 2.4.1

Firefox 1.0.7

Nvu 1.0

Gimp 2.2.8

Samba

Ubuntu is installed on my desktop and though XP Pro is installed on another partition, I do not need to boot it and have not booted it for most of the last quarter of 05.

Firefox was inexplicably failing to load pages when used with Linux. It was a problem under both Mandriva and Ubuntu but not a problem under XP Pro. It did work fine with Ubuntu Linux on my home machine but not my office machine. The two machines use different ISPs but are otherwise substantially identical.

The problem was ridiculous but driving me nuts. Some kind souls on Ubuntu forum posted the fix which was distressingly simple. Now all is well in my Firefox world.

Evolution does not appear to share calendars the same way that Amicus Attorney shares a calendar. Amicus Attorney has one calendar that can be read and written to over a local area network. Since everyone on the network is required to use a Micro$oft operating system, there's no compatibility issues.

Our goal is to banish M$ from our office forever and ever. We want to be liberated from M$. We need a kludge for this calendar sharing problem to do it.

Here's the problem:

The linux desktop in my office is now networked so that our office machines interact basically the same way they used to under the peer-to-peer Windows XP setup.

I used the simplest smb.conf setup I could find and set my directory permissions with this command:



chmod -R +rwx home/



That directory contains all of our forms and matter files and can be browsed by the Windows XP machine that my secretary uses.

This is a short note to say that between a firewall, ssh and samba, the correct first thing to work on (in my world) is a firewall.

Why? Because its impossible to relax enough to leave my office computer powered up when I go home unless I feel reasonably good about the firewall. If the machine is not powered up, then I have to stop working on all three projects after I leave the office.

In the ongoing adventure that running my office with open source code has become, I've set aside Samba, SSH and PGP questions for the time being to consider a more philosophical question.

The question is whether its better to use wyswyg word processing or to consider using only raw text.

A little over five years ago, I became interested in open source while managing a Legal Services Corporation-funded office that primarily served low-income survivors of partner violence across eight rural counties in Montana.

I saw that the money in my scant budget expended for software licenses and technical support of products offered by companies that refused to share source code could be used instead to serve clients.

This book by Shelley Powers, Jerry Peek, Tim O'Reilly and Mike Loukides is a well written balance of historically grounded concept articles and straight forward how-to information.

I'm using the book to assist me in my ongoing (started as a hobby) project of migrating my small law office to full open source code. Now that I no longer boot Windows on my office desktop, my need for and interest in command-line syntax has sharply increased.

It turns out that its easier and more effective to use the spreadsheet from Open Office to handle office finances. Gnucash is not ready.

I created one spreadsheet each for accounts payable, accounts receivable, trust balances and timekeeping.

The timekeeping spreadsheet tracks my time and expenses on one sheet and describes my activities on another sheet. The sheets are grouped by financial quarter.

Linux is working out well on my desktop machine in my law office. I haven't had to boot my XP partition for about two weeks now. The system does everything my former XP system used to do except run Quickbooks. Gnucash imports from Quickbooks so that problem ends this week.