I am evaluating Zorin OS to replace most/all the Windows boxes in my organization. Can someone point me in a direction of documentation where I can via Windows Group Policy (or some other equivalent tool) to map/admin drives and configured printers ?
Thx!!
hello and welcome, you can take a look at this
Zorin Grid looks like what I am looking for. I will be waiting (impatiently) for it to be released!
Thank you!
Unfortunately, it might still be a while. Zorin Grid was announced a long time ago, but no release date has been announced yet.
Bummer. Well - to the Powers-That-Be at Zorin OS - I have a municipality with 200 desktops where the CIO is very interested in migrating away from Windows.
Yes, this lack of clarity makes planning really difficult for companies. Zorin Grid was first announced in 2020 to be released in the same year, but we still don't know any more details.
You could try the method outlined by Zorin help documents on migration.
An alternative would be to take a look at Q4OS. They offer business support but you would have to contact the developers/maintainers directly. They have a superb snapshot utility that i only recently discovered myself. They have helped one organisation migrate to 300 desktops just by creating one image, including company branding successfully - no specific details are available just what I searche for in respect of enterprise support. I recently made an S4-snapshot of a VM to use as an istallation for a client - the only thing that stopped me was the client's external drive would not load in live mode - if they had let me do the install it would have loaded post install. That said Linux MInt Debian Edition picked up the external drive in live mode. Q4OS are also noted in using one image to install to a Library's EOL date Chromebooks - the only OS capable of doing so. Q40S has a very good 'LookSwitcher' provided by a third party so you can make it look like any version of Windows (XP, 7, 10 and 11).
Be aware though that it uses a low-end kernel (6.1.xx) so may be problematical if very new equipment and you would have to manually apply the copyfail, dirty frag and fragnesia bugs - but once applied to an image it should stick.
Scrap Q4OS - it cannot be added to Active Directory without complicated method of using Samba and Winbind, but it can connect to Printers on a Windows Network.
In fact, when I was at work when Zorin 10 and 11 were out I was able to join a non-networked Samsung Notebook to a School Network (because I knew the backend settings without referencing to IT) and was able to connect Integrated Resource classroom printer to the non-networked machine. By non-networked I mean it was not officially connected to the Network but I could access necessary network resources due to my login credentials.
If migrating from Windows, wouldn't it be better if the enterprise migrated to GNU/Linux servers?