Hello World,

Time for our traditional Greeting Seasons post of the year  !

Our Best wishes for 2022…

The year 2021 was more challenging than ever and you probably knows why.  Year 2021 was really one of  the most difficult period not only for our business, but also for our people and our customers.   It’s more than time to leave this year 2021 behind us…We can only hope that 2022 will bring some positive changes and that the sky will finally clear out for all of us…

We would like to take the opportunity to thank all the people who have followed us during 2021 and provided feedback, shared their comments and technical info, remarks that helped us improved proposed solutions.   Thank you also to all the people that have been supporting us and helping us in improving the information provided through this blog.

We would like also to thank our customers and partners for the trust and confidence they have placed in us and to and helped us in providing high quality work….considering the really difficult situation during this year 2021.  

We would like to present our best wishes to all of you for this new year 2022.  We hope that the coming year will be much better than the previous one……

Quick Look back at 2021…

Since Year 2021 was really a ‘special’ one and one of the most complicated (in all aspects) for us, we were not able to publish as much posts, tips and tricks, update and tools as we wanted to.  However, given the current situation, we have been able to provide useful information through our blog such as 

• Our famous xrdp-installer.  Through the year,  we have been publishing and releasing incremental version of our famous xrdp-installer script. Each version included either support to the Interim Release of Ubuntu OS or included some improvements.  The latest version (version 1.3) has been extended to include support for Debian Operating system as well.  A lot of minor improvements have been included which makes the script really useful and stable.  Thank you to all our readers for their feedback in order to improve and adapt the script as required
• We managed to update the Change GDM Background script which help users customizing even further the look’n feel of their Ubuntu Operating system. This is really a free utility that we created for fun and nowadays we are simply trying to maintain it and follow the Ubuntu release cycle…
• We have tackled some password manager solution that can be used on Ubuntu and Linux and we have been able to describe how to use Keeweb utility on top of IIS server. This post has received quite a lot of feedback.  The solution was used by some of our customers in their environments (Microsoft based infrastructure) with a lot of success.  However, one point that came regularly was the possibility to grant granular access to some passwords only.  We will try to tackle this point this year  in some other posts and using different software solution…
• A great feedback came from our post about how to join Ubuntu into Active Directory.  Canonical is doing smart moves and since Ubuntu 20.10, it’s possible to join Active Directory from the Setup.  In 2021, we have seen a greater adoption rate of Linux Operating system in corporate infrastructure. This change has been motivated mainly by the End of Support Of windows 2008/R2 operating system, licensing costs, container technology & interoperability with Windows.  The fact that Linux (and Ubuntu) can be joined to Active Directory makes it easier to manage in a central way the different servers running within Infrastructure.  One of our customer has converted quite a lot of its windows machine into Linux.  They have reached basically 50 % of Linux machines in 2021…

 

What to expect in 2022…..

In 2022, Ubuntu 22.04 Operating sytem, the next long term service release, will be made available by Canonical (in April 2022).  As usual, we think that this could be an important event and we are looking forward to see which new features and improvements will be made available.  In 2022, companies and people would need to decide to stay on previous Ubuntu version (i.e. 20.04 or 18.04) or to start moving or preparing their migration to Ubuntu 22.04. 

Since we are following the Ubuntu releases, our xrdp-installer script will be adapted as required in order to include support to the latest Ubuntu LTS release.  We do not foresee to introduce major changes in the script…

Windows 11 has been released and we have made already some tests on it.  All in all, the experience is pleasant and the new operating system is workable for sure.  The fact that more stricter hardware requirements are needed, we do not see a lot of companies migrating soon to Windows 11.  We have some customers still running Windows 7 (with ESU) and they are just starting their migration to Windows 10 because their hardware are simply not compatible with Windows 11.  

We have some customers that are planning to skip Windows 11, not only because of the stricter hardware requirements but also because of the Microsoft strategy to enforce you to connect to their cloud services, to offer more and more apps through the Windows Store or simply because Microsoft is focusing mainly on the Cloud solution rather than on-premises solution.  Some companies or environment can simply not take advantage of the cloud approach. Companies can choose to stick with Windows 10 till end of life but some companies are also looking in converting/transitioning their workstation to Linux machines.  

We will still be writing about Windows technologies as we have a large base of customers relying on it and we will publish our findings and share some tips and tricks.  We do not know yet which specific area we will be discussing but we hope that we will be able to write again on RDS (Remote Desktop Services) technology…. Let’s wait and see…

We have been working extensively on VMware and Virtualization technology this year… we might want to write and publish some posts about the Virtualization topic as well 

Final Notes

As you can see, there is still a lot to do and a lot to speak about but some little time available.  We will try to enjoy the short holidays to rest and come back with some news posts, ideas and some free tools or scripts… 

This is it for this post ! Enjoy your holidays and get ready for 2022.  We wish you all the best for the future…Let’s hope that 2022 will bring us some good news….

Till next Time

See ya