The Security Mentor

A company called Xandros sells a Linux package designed to appeal to Windows users. You can get it pre-installed on a $200 Wal-Mart PC.

Small Business Computing took a look at Xandros in their buyer's guide to Linux for small business, and PC magazine praised an older version in their Xandros review. For your technical friends/advisers, here's a propellerhead's review of Xandros Linux as a Windows replacement. Xandros meets one of your most important needs by including a program called Crossover Office that lets you run Word, Excel and so on as if they were still on Windows (but that's only in the Deluxe edition which costs around $100).

Crossover Office is important because OpenOffice, the free Office replacement, isn't completely ready to take over from Microsoft. It didn't even have a databae to compete with Access until recently, and compatibility with Microsoft Office documents is a gamble.

Linux might interest you because very few viruses target it and the engineering behind it is solid. A recent Stanford study of Linux bugs from Wired magazine discovered that Linux has many fewer bugs per thousand lines of programming instructions than most commmercial software does. And most of the bugs the Stanford researchers found are already fixed.

There's an IBM guide to converting to Linux, which they wrote for big-company planners. It has some ideas that a micro-CTO could use; try skimming it and picking out just the good parts.