Installing A Workstation > About This Series

About This Series

I wrote this series as proof that I can write such a manual. There are reasons, in turn, why I chose to do so, but at this time I won't go into them.

The workstation described in this series is most specifically

a workstation from Gateway
running Windows 2000 Professional
connecting to a local-area network
using Novell NetWare.

This type of workstation is used at my ex-employer, but it can easily describe any workstation on a Novell network. Ball State University has such a network, for example.

The basic software set is more or less universal, but I should explain two items among them:

1. Citrix is a common program to remotely launch applications with a set number of licenses. When used together with its Metaframe program on a powerful enough server, Citrix frees you from having to install software on many workstations and then to keep track of them.
2. Admittedly Lotus Notes/Domino, the corporate messaging and collaboration system from IBM, is not widely used except by very large companies and organizations. But since I worked with it a lot, I added that, too.

update (5 february 2008)

Now I can reveal the reason I chose not to go into the details of why I wrote the manual.

I worked for a company whose workstations and network were as described in these Web pages. I was told by the head of the IT department to write such a manual for the edification of my co-workers. But I never had to the time to do so.

Then I found myself with plenty of time to do so: I was fired in 11 November 2003.

Bitter over the way I was dismissed, I wrote this manual to prove that I could. I never told anyone at the company about the manual. In fact I never again saw or spoke to anyone in the company's IT department. I avoided them like a contagious disease.

Most of the stuff in these Web pages is out of date, anyway.

• Microsoft still provides secondary support for Windows 2000, meaning it will still provide security updates but no more service packs.
• Novell no longer actively supports NetWare, which it sidelined in favor of Linux. Ball State is now a Microsoft shop, and all its Novell networks are gone. I do not know if NetWare is still in use at the company.
• Lotus Notes still has the backing of IBM, which has added support for the XML-based Open Document Format and has made its client available for Linux and Mac OS X. But it still sucks. And somehow it is hard to be supportive of a corporation that acts like it is fleeing the country — to reincorporate in Bermuda, perhaps?

The lack of bloatedness and the activation crap with Windows XP/Vista are the reasons why my sister the freelance editor insists on using Windows 2000; and that is why the company continued to use it, too. What she and the company will do when Microsoft ends secondary support after 2010 is an issue.