13.4.5. Office Suites
Office software has long been seen as lacking in the free software world. Users have long asked for replacements for Microsoft tools such as Word and Excel, but these are so complex that replacements were hard to develop. The situation changed when the OpenOffice.org project started (following Sun's release of the StarOffice code under a free license). The GNOME and KDE projects are still working on their offerings (GNOME Office and KOffice), and the friendly competition leads to interesting results. For instance, the Gnumeric spreadsheet (part of GNOME Office) is even better than OpenOffice.org in some domains, notably the precision of its calculations. On the word processing front, the OpenOffice.org suite still leads the way.
Another important feature for users is the ability to import Word and Excel documents received from contacts or found in archives. Even though all office suites have filters which allow working on these formats, only the ones found in OpenOffice.org are functional enough for daily use.
THE BROADER VIEW Libre Office replaces OpenOffice.org
OpenOffice.org contributors have set up a foundation (The Document Foundation) to foster project development. The idea had been discussed for some time, but the actual trigger was Oracle's acquisition of Sun. The new ownership made the future of OpenOffice under Oracle uncertain. Since Oracle declined to join the foundation, the developers had to give up on the OpenOffice.org name. The software is now known as Libre Office.
These changes occurred after Debian Squeeze was frozen, which explains why the repositories still contain OpenOffice.org… but Libre Office is already available in the backports.debian.org package repository, as well as in more recent versions of Debian.
OpenOffice.org, KOffice and GNOME Office are, respectively, available in the openoffice.org, koffice and gnome-office Debian packages. Language-specific packs for OpenOffice.org are distributed in separate packages: openoffice.org-l10n-*, openoffice.org-help-*, and openoffice.org-spellcheck-* (which can be a virtual package provided by myspell-*).
13.5. Emulating Windows: Wine
In spite of all the previously mentioned efforts, there are still a number of tools without a Linux equivalent, or for which the original version is absolutely required. This is where Windows emulation systems come in handy. The most well-known among them is Wine.
→ http://www.winehq.com/
COMPLEMENTS CrossOver Linux
CrossOver, produced by CodeWeavers, is a set of enhancements to Wine that broaden the available set of emulated features to a point at which Microsoft Office becomes fully usable. Some of the enhancements are periodically merged into Wine.
→ http://www.codeweavers.com/products/
However, one should keep in mind that it's only a solution among others, and the problem can also be tackled with a virtual machine or VNC; both of these solutions are detailed in the sidebars.
Let us start with a reminder: emulation allows executing a program (developed for a target system) on a different host system. The emulation software uses the host system, where the application runs, to imitate the required features of the target system.
The simplest way of using Wine is with an instance of Microsoft Windows already installed on an existing partition (which will be the case on machines dual-booting with this system). When no installed Windows version is available, Wine works in a less complete way, and fewer programs will be able to run.
The Windows partition must first be mounted (for instance under /windows/), and the wine user must have read and write access. The following fstab entry grants this access to all users:
/dev/hda1 /windows fat defaults,uid=1000,gid=100,umask=002,nls=iso8859-1 0 0
Now let's install the required packages:
# apt-get install wine ttf-mscorefonts-installer wine-doc
The user then needs to run winecfg and configure /windows/ to be used as the C: drive. Other settings can be kept to their default values. Running Windows programs then becomes a simple matter of running wine /windows/.../program.exe.
Note that you should not rely on Wine (or similar solutions) without actually testing the particular software: only a real-use test will determine conclusively whether emulation is fully fuctional.
ALTERNATIVE Virtual machines
An alternative to emulating Microsoft's operating system is to actually run it in a virtual machine that emulates a full hardware machine. This allows running any operating system. Chapter 12, Advanced Administration describes several virtualization systems, most notably Xen and KVM (but also QEMU, VMWare and Bochs).
ALTERNATIVE Windows Terminal Server or VNC
Yet another possibility is to remotely run the legacy Windows applications on a central server with Windows Terminal Server and access the application from Linux machines using rdesktop. This is a Linux client for the RDP protocol (Remote Desktop Protocol) that Windows NT/2000 Terminal Server uses to display desktops on remote machines.
The VNC software provides similar features, with the added benefit of also working with many operating systems. Linux VNC clients and servers are described in Section 9.2, “Remote Login”.
Chapter 14. Security
An information system can have a varying level of importance depending on the environment. In some cases, it is vital to a company's survival. It must therefore be protected from various kinds of risks. The process of evaluating these risks, defining and implementing the protection is collectively known as the “security process”.
14.1. Defining a Security Policy
CAUTION Scope of this chapter
Security is a vast and very sensitive subject, so we cannot claim to describe it in any kind of comprehensive manner in the course of a single chapter. We will only delineate a few important points and describe some of the tools and methods that can be of use in the security domain. For further reading, literature abounds, and entire books have been devoted to the subject. An excellent starting point would be Linux Server Security by Michael D. Bauer (published by O'Reilly).
The word “security” itself covers a vast range of concepts, tools and procedures, none of which apply universally. Choosing among them requires a precise idea of what your goals are. Securing a system starts with answering a few questions. Rushing headlong into implementing an arbitrary set of tools runs the risk of focusing on the wrong aspects of security.
The very first thing to determine is therefore the goal. A good approach to help with that determination starts with the following questions:
What are we trying to protect? The security policy will be different depending on whether we want to protect computers or data. In the latter case, we also need to know which data.
What are we trying to protect against? Is it leakage of confidential data? Accidental data loss? Revenue loss caused by disruption of service?
Also, who are we trying to protect against? Security measures will be quite different for guarding against a typo by a regular user of the system than they would be when protecting against a determined attacker group.