Got a little slack time and loaded a copy of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS  both the 32 bit and the 64 bit flavors. 

Some of the base configuration of samba file sharing to talk to windows machines had to be configured to talk to my network address range, but when that was done, and wine, winbind samba and cifs were all configured, a wonderful thing happened

They fixed whatever was not handling the windows name resolution for certain avimark modules, which caused an ubuntu/wine station to fail without first doing an explicit file system mount.

Now I can just navigate to the avimark directory using the normal file browser, and click on avimark and go.

I can finally have an ubuntu workstation run Avimark peer to peer from a windows or a linux server without having to have any special commands or scripts to mount the file share.

What this means is that xp workstations can now be converted and used as avimark workstations running Ubuntu, without having to make any changes to an office's server/network configuration. 

Good way to dip your toe into the water.. it finally works 

Wow has it been that long?

I checked the blog based on something posted on the avimark yahoo group, and saw that it has been Since February.

For anyone keeping score, my office is running pretty well, and the architecture is as follows.  8 core motherboard with 12 gig of memory running Ubuntu 12.04 LTS.  Still set up the users and rdp sessions using the script obtained from Scarygliders.net.

We have upgraded all of the xp and vista machines to Win7.  All stations log into a remote desktop on the linux server, and can start up a session of avimark running under Wine.

Machines include 8 hp thin clients with embedded win7  4 laptops running win7 1 laptop running ubuntu linux, 2 desktops running win7.   So we run as many as 15 rdp sessions at a time, with no appreciable speed penalty.  I had to increase the memory to accomodate that many sessions concurrant.  The sessions would have trouble as multiple sessions of avimark and open office were loaded, if the memory use approached 90% or more.  I think it was probably related to disk/memory swapping.  More breathing room fixed us right up.

Avimark has proven relatively well behaved.  In all honesty, we do have the occasional session hang on an rdp session, which seems to coincide with a user walking away from avimark with multiple specialty windows open and then letting the avimark session time out.

I may increase the user time out setting in avimark to avoid this.   Easily fixed by opening a terminal window on the server and issuing the "sudo pkill -u username" command.  Session closes and then can be restarted by the user.

All in all the heterogenous network seems to be pretty happy, even the printing, some of which happens under windows, and most of which is handled by linux/cups.

I will probably look at Windows server 2012 again this fall/winter, but the economics of what I have done are hard to beat.