Book Excerpts:

The goal of this IBM Redbook is to provide a technical planning reference for IT organizations large or small that are now considering a migration to Linux-based personal computers. For Linux, there is a tremendous amount of "how-to" information available online that addresses specific and very technical operating system configuration issues, platform-specific installation methods, user interface customizations, and so forth. This book includes some technical "how-to" as well, but the overall focus of the content in this book is to walk the readers through some of the important considerations and planning issues that they could encounter during a migration project. Within the context of a pre-existing Microsoft Windows-based environment, this book attempts to present a more holistic, end-to-end view of the technical challenges and methods necessary to complete a successful migration to Linux-based clients.

This second version of the Linux Client Migration Cookbook builds on the content strategy started in the first version. Although anyone interested in using Linux on the desktop could benefit from different portions of this book, the primary audience for this book is existing business IT environments that need to begin an evaluation of desktop Linux, or in a broader sense, any organization whose strategy is to move toward greater adoption of open source software and open standards. For this version, this book has a complete end-to-end refresh and a significant amount of new content. Some key areas that this book has focused on include the following:

- Greater emphasis on illustrating the technical details of the Linux client operating system stack, and understanding how to best leverage those differences in a migration scenario from Microsoft Windows
- The tremendous amount of flexibility that Linux gives the readers to design custom client operating system images
- Deployment models: Understanding how Linux's flexibility allows for new, innovative, and cost-effective approaches to deploying and managing desktop operating systems
- In larger IT environments, the importance of automating the capture and migration of user's client-side personalization data