Head Office of Powerpets, Inc. has switched to Ubuntu Linux

by Michael Smith (Veshengro)

In 2002, a small Canadian company was started based on a small idea and big dreams – to create an entertaining virtual world with many educational aspects and a company goal to support and spread awareness of abused and abandoned animals.

Less than half a year into the project, powerpets.com was experiencing explosive growth and an explosive amount of problems, mainly e-mail based viruses.

The company would be affected by the next big threat, weeks before large anti-virus companies such as McAfee would have a fix for it. More time was spent by those involved in the IT part of the business and nigh on everyone else in fixing the Windows based office computers than what was spent working on the business itself.

A switch to Linux was then made, with quite a few hurdles, but, as Elizabeth Routliffe, the President of the company said, “it was nice to know once a system was set up, you wouldn't have to worry about it. You wouldn't even need to restart it.”

The, unfortunately in 2008, the 'flavor' of Linux that they had chosen for their office sold out to another company, the latter who pretty much abandoned the operating system.

A bit like ASUS abandoning their version of the Linux OS that they used to have for the Netbooks and small Laptops.

Much research then went into selecting a new Linux operating systen that will be able carry the company through the next decade without headaches or an overload of IT expenses.

It was Ubuntu that very quickly caught their attention. Elizabeth Routliffe said that they actually waited for about a month because they could not find an option to purchase one copy of the Ubuntu OS and felt uncomfortable requesting a free CD. Because of the fact that the company has only satellite Internet, they were unable to download the ISO of Ubuntu OS.

Having then requested a free CD this arrived a few weeks later in the mail.

It was not until June 2009 that they finally were able to experiment with the OS, when an old test laptop was loaded with Ubuntu. The installation went quick and without a hitch, despite hardware being well outdated.

The the remainder of the office went through the overhaul and in a matter of hours everyone was using Ubuntu. Some changes were hard to get used to, so Elizabeth Routliffe said, such as the SAMBA shares, but overall everything was a success.

Powerpets, Inc. say that they are very happy with their Ubuntu solution and from what can be understood from what has been said they would recommend Ubuntu to others, as do I.

Personally I find Ubuntu Linux – though I only use it for the workhorse PC that does all the writing work – a great system and will carry on working with it and testing it.

In my opinion Linux is the way forward and the Netbooks from ASUS, for instance, with ASUS' own version of Linux prove that everything works out of the box.

To me Linux, especially Ubuntu, is so very intuitive that I can never understand that people seem to have problems with using it, while I can well understand that there ate sometimes hardware issues.

Ubuntu rocks!

© 2009
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