When my employer came to me and said that a linux computer was needed, I was overjoyed. I finally had a concrete way of demonstrating a way to save the district tons of money.

I immediately attempted to build a solution using my old reliable Absolute Linux. Absolute is a Slackware derivative that adds a few helper programs to make it more user-friendly.

The email system has a company provided Linux client and it was working fine. Open Office 3 can open MS Office 2007 files, so after that was installed, things were looking good.

The only thing lacking was a way to authenticate to Active Directory. Every user here has a small personal drive and I wanted to map to it. Also, our Altiris solution has a linux client that would allow Help Desk and System Engineers to monitor the computer and handle updates. All it needed was a way to authenicate to AD.

Then, I had issues.

Turns out that Slackware has a few issues to work through when it comes to AD. Not really a bad thing, just needs a bit of work on my end to get it to work. After some research, I decided that Likewise-Open was my best solution.

First, though, I needed to build PAM in Absolute. See, PAM is not included in Slackware and therefore not in Absolute, either. That was simple enough, followed a slackbuild for PAM and a little configuring later, I felt good about my progress.

Likewise-Open provides source for building it. However, after days of searching for documentation and getting a non-answer on the forums, I realized that I would have to figure it out. After 2 weeks of pulling hair, I realized that there were a lot of assumptions written into the code that I couldn’t overcome. I could not configure a build, I couldn’t build the code correctly, I had no way of troubleshooting errors. I gave up.

So I decided that maybe I could download the rpm files. You see, sometimes the rpm2tgz utility can convert rpms to files Slackware uses. That was when I discovered that the files promised just the rpms do not have just the rpms. I could only get debian/ubuntu files. Again, after some non-answers on the forum and no simple way to get help, I decided that I would have to use a Debian/Ubuntu solution.

Okay. Not happy, but the machines were brand new and had the firepower to run anything, even MS Vista, with speed.

I tried Xubuntu, Ubuntu, and Linux Mint. I settled on Linux Mint because the interface would present a smaller learning curve. It had one taskbar, like Windows, it had a straightforward Start Menu, etc.

Once installing Mint, I was able to install Likewise-Open and join the AD here. Reinstalling the email client, and I was on my way to peace,love,and happiness. Added an experimental build of Open Office 3, and sat down to finally get around to installing the software that necessiatated the Linux box in the first place.

Cafeteria Software. Uses Linux and terminals to manage student accounts, menus, etc. It didn’t rely on the network, so in older schools, it ran reliably for years without a reboot.

I found that I could install the software easily enough. But then my troubles began, as I will detail in another post.