Univention Server 4.3 Endless Os 3.3.11

One learns to appreciate a well-designed management interface when battling the common cold, as a snuffly Shashank Sharma discovers…

- Shashank Sharma

As with most of its peers, Univention Corporate Server is aimed at SMBs and enterprises. While its does enable users to install the KDE desktop environment, it’s far too specialised to ever appeal to casual or home users.

The distribution boasts of a rather uncomplicated installation process. Its choice of Debian as the base makes Univention incredibly safe and secure, and you can easily install additional components such as an anti-virus and a firewall.

In addition to a 1.3 GB installable ISO image, the project also provides an online demo. If you wish to skip the installation and get straight to using Univention, the project also provides the choice of pre-installed images for both VMWare and VirtualBox.

The installation makes it possible to configure the partitioning scheme and even choose the packages you wish to install. You can, for instance, choose to install the KDE desktop and Fetchmail, Cups and various other essential components.

Thinking with portals

Unlike other server distributions, Univention provides a severely restricted root account, and you’re advised to log in as the Administrator using the root password that you configured during the installation.

When you first log in, you’ll be dropped to a sparse portal page, which provides a central view of all available services in your Univention installation and a link to the Univention Management Console (UMC). You can think of UMC as the central configuration hub of the webbased interface. It features a number of labels at the top of the screen such as Users, Devices, Domain, System and Software. The interface is fairly intuitive and easy to navigate. You’ll find most of the configuration options tucked away under the System label on the dashboard.