Real penguins don’t use Linux

Talk about dedication! In preparation for “Microsoft and Linux square off in InfoWorld‘s Exchange migration challenge” — a shootout pitting Microsoft Exchange against four commercial Linux-based mail servers — Test Center Senior Editor Ted Samson took a vacation … to Antarctica.

The Antarctic-dwelling penguin, of course, is the Linux mascot. Even so, Samson was unable to apply lessons from his icebound adventures to the task of editing this week’s cover story — unless you count the ability to identify penguin species from 20 feet away. “It was a fairly low-tech trip,” Samson says. In fact, even though his group visited two research centers, “there wasn’t all that much going on there, mostly penguins milling around outside and research center staff selling T-shirts and souvenirs.”

Our own researchers, authors Jamie Bernstein and Test Center Senior Contributing Editor Oliver Rist, were considerably busier than their Antarctic counterparts. The test they cooked up was audacious: swapping out entire back-end mail platforms in real-time. “We wanted to stick to a real-world migration process,” says Rist, “where people depend on their e-mail and can’t afford any disruption in service.” Even more remarkable, Rist and Bernstein repeated the trick five times. Then, just to see if it could be done, they tackled the problem once again, using a mix-and-match collection of strictly open source tools. They succeeded, but not without struggles.

Meanwhile, back at the InfoWorld office, we had a few struggles of our own, specifically figuring out how to graphically represent this complex story and what to put on the cover. We all know that penguins don’t actually fly. But when we presented the story to Senior Art Director (and illustrator extraordinaire) Ben Barbante, he decided to take a few artistic liberties.

“I wanted to create a heroic penguin image, inspired by old WPA posters,” Barbante explains. “And since this was a migration story, I thought of geese in a V formation, which ultimately led to this flock of penguins in fight.” As for the aviator penguin gracing this week’s cover, that’s entirely Barbante’s creation (you can download the screensaver here). In other words, don’t expect to find it in nature.

“Definitely a hybrid penguin,” Samson notes, who stepped back 20 feet before rendering his verdict. “Probably a cross between a Chinstrap and a Gentoo.”