http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=280702

The Electronics Corporation of Tamil Nadu (ELCOT) in India is rolling out SUSE® Linux Enterprise across 30,000 desktops and 1,880 servers in Tamil Nadu’s schools, after ELCOT itself has migrated its entire IT infrastructure from Microsoft* Windows* to SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop from Novell®.

“The open source software in SUSE Linux Enterprise is superb,” said C. Umashankar, managing director of ELCOT. “In addition, we estimate that moving to Linux has reduced our general hardware costs by nearly 25 percent. In the case of high-end servers, the savings could be as much as 80 percent. Even more important are the benefits for Tamil Nadu’s students. There is a growing trend towards the corporate adoption of Linux, both in India and elsewhere, so it will be a real advantage in the job market to have experience working with open source software. It gives us tremendous freedom and choice.”

ELCOT has been procuring hardware and software for the various departments of the Government of Tamil Nadu, which serves a population of more than 70 million, since 1977. ELCOT’s main objective is to offer the best possible IT solutions at the lowest price, thus maximizing the return on investment of public money. ELCOT is also involved in consulting, implementation, support and training to help meet the state’s ambitious e-governance objectives.

Before the larger and more ambitious rollout of SUSE Linux Enterprise to the schools and government offices across Tamil Nadu, ELCOT first migrated its own in-house IT systems to Linux*. ELCOT was immediately impressed with the user-friendly, cost-effective and very secure SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop. The organization then worked with teachers to design a pre-loaded set of applications which could be delivered to the 30,000 new PCs along with SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop. ELCOT also rolled out SUSE Linux Enterprise Server to the schools’ 1,880 servers, which are now 100 percent Linux based.

Roger Levy, Novell senior vice president and general manager of Open Platform Solutions, said, “ELCOT was able to eliminate tens of thousands of proprietary software licenses by moving to open source software, in addition to their tremendous savings from making better use of hardware resources. The decision to move to a new platform rests not only on immediate pricing considerations, but also on the potential long-term hardware, software and infrastructure costs. Based on those criteria, SUSE Linux Enterprise is proving its value to customers around the world.”

The next-generation platform for the open enterprise, SUSE Linux Enterprise is the best-engineered, lowest-cost and most interoperable platform for enterprise computing, from the desktop to the data centre. For more information on SUSE Linux Enterprise offerings from Novell, visit www.novell.com/linux. For more on how customers around the globe are leveraging Novell solutions, visit www.novell.com/success.

Source: http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/BU0708/S00318.htm

I want to say first that this is not the only way of setting up such a system. There are many ways of achieving this goal but this is the way I take. I do not issue any guarantee that this will work for you!

Tutorial avaible on: http://www.howtoforge.com/the_perfect_desktop_fedora7

Tutorial avaible on: http://www.howtoforge.com/perfect_server_centos4.5

Learning unix is not so simple. but this can be done in 10 minutes.This is something a professor had given out to students (CAD user training) in years past………

Orginal link: http://freeengineer.org/learnUNIXin10minutes.html
My link: http://thavarajah.dk/data/linux/learnUNIXin10minutes.html

So you’ve installed a flavor of Linux such as Ubuntu or you have shell access to a Linux system and you want to start doing some damage. The admins at LXPages.com compiled 10 commands that every Newbie Linux user should definitely know to start being effective.

1) ls

This basic command is your eyeball into the filesystem. Use it to list the contents of a directory.

A) To view details such as the file permissions, user and group owner, last time file was modified pass the l option as such
ls -l

B) You can search for filenames by using wildcards. To list files that start with the letter f, use

ls -l f*

2) find

Where did you save that file? Use the find command to find your files. The find command will search where you want it to search and find directories or files that match conditions such as name, date last accessed, file size and more. It has got many abilities, and they’re all listed in the man page.

To search for files starting with the letter f recursively starting from the / root directory use the following

find / -name f*

3) man

What did we mean by the man page? man stands for manual, so “man page” really means it’s manual page. Most linux commands have manual pages that describe how the command is utilized. So you can usually type man to view it’s manual page. Great when you’re stuck and don’t know what the command is for or how it’s used. You use it by passing a command line as an option like this

man vi

4) vi

The editor of choice for serious linux users [sorry Emacs fans ]. Use the “man vi” command to read details on this prince of editors. Maybe this is why I love editing and coding in linux, I never have to lift my hands to do anything. Here’s a quick and dirty list of vi commands for you to start using.

A) If you notice on your keyboard the letters (H,J,K,L) are adjacent to each other, which makes them ideal keys to use for navigating this editor.
a) l (move right)
b) h (move left)
c) j (move down)
d) k (momve up)
B) YY – type in Y twice to copy a line
C) DD – type in D twice to cut a line.
D) P – type in P to paste a line.
E) :q! – quit without saving
F) :wq! – save and quit
G) :w! – save

5) cat

How do you view the contents of a file? You can let the “cat” of the bag with the cat command! HA! Here’s how you can use the command

cat filename.txt

6) more

What if there the file you cat fills more than 1 screen? You can pipe the cat command into more which will allow you to view the contents one screenfull at a time.

cat filename.txt | more

7) grep

And what if you need to search for certain phrases or words in a file? And for this we can use the grep command. Say we want to search for all the occurances of the word “passwd” in a filename, we can use the following command

grep “passwd” filename.txt

If there are matches, the lines containing “passwd” will be printed.

chmod

You have a script that you need to run, and oh no it won’t run? By utilizing the “ls -la” command you learned you can see if the script has execute permissions. If it doesn’t you may give it execute permission by running

chmod +x scriptfile

And of course, you can run the scriptfile if it is a script by running it with a ./ preceding the filename on the shell command line like so
./scriptfile

9) ps

What are you running in the background? How can you tell? By using the “ps” command of course you can view What processes are running under your account.

10) cp, mv, rm

How do you copy, move or remove a file? There’s actually three different commands for each of these functions.

A) copy
cp oldfilename.txt newfilename.txt
B) move
mv oldfilename.txt newfilename.txt
C) delete
rm oldfilename.txt

Source: http://blog.lxpages.com/2007/02/25/top-10-linux-commands-for-newbies/