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Open Source Software in a Windows Environment?
brennan73 asks: "Like many people, I work in a Windows NT/2000 shop that has absolutely resisted bringing *nixes into our environment. Everyone has their reasons - my boss has resisted because it would be more difficult and expensive to find a replacement admin if I leave, since said replacement would need to be able to administer both Windows and *nix boxes, which I can understand. But I'm still curious...has anyone out there replaced major pieces of Microsoft software with open source equivalents in a medium-to-large business environment, while still running on the Windows platform?"
"Like many people in such shops, I've just about had it with IIS's security problems. I'm also highly unimpressed with Microsoft's new licensing schemes. In other words, between security and money concerns, I can see good reasons for businesses to look for alternatives to Microsoft's standard offerings, for apps and utilities if OSes are ruled out by management.
So, I'm thinking of replacing IIS and Office with Apache and StarOffice for Windows, and I'm open to other examples on both servers and the desktop. Why did you switch? How painful was it for both you and the users? Any experiences that anyone could relate, even failed experiments, would be great."
Lots of people run it on Windows.
HTH,
"Nothing was broken, and it's been fixed." -- Jon Carroll
I am forced to use W2K for my job. Having Cygwin installed gives me almost a complete *NIX environment (Openssh, Bash, Perl, Python, Postgres, Xfree, etc) that runs seamlessly in a Win32 system. It is completely awesome.
CVS is an easy and useful replacement for source safe. I didnt see this mentioned anywhere, but it is about the only case I know where open software actually does better than (or even as good as) pay software.
KDE runs on Windows. It uses the Cygwin POSIX emulation layer (they claim they only had to change about 100 lines). Currently it requires an X server, but they are working on eliminating the dependency.
I also remember an older project, using a non-free POSIX toolkit. Can't remember the name, tough.
And if I REALLY need to get into windows there's no need to reboot. Double click the VMWare icon and load the suspended image file of Windows. No more than four seconds and I can do whatever I need to do in Windows. The only thing that's still problematic is integrating samba browsing in Nautilus in a good way. KDE is of course a good alternative, but personally I don't like that environment.
I got some screenshots up at my site.
my company is almost exclusively macos on the desktop. we use team agenda for calendaring and ms entourage for mail (with pop3). we're planning to move to imap and would like to integrate calendaring if possible. i read the bynari docs on using outlook with their server, but outlook 2001 for macos requires an exchange server. the bynari stuff doesn't emulate an exchange server; it's just integrated imap, pop3 (cyrus), smtp (exim), and ldap (openldap) servers. it stores calendar info on the server by having the client ftp up vcalendar files.
in short, i don't know if the windows version of outlook requires an exchange server, but if not, i'm sure it will soon.
xn
HP's OpenMail can replace an Exchange server. It allows Outlook as a client and supports calendaring. I don't know what other clients it supports, or whether other clients can use the calendaring features.
This is something I see as one of the biggest obstacles for large scale acceptance of Linux/FreeBSD/... in business environments. Suits like it a lot, it seems they can't live without it. A viable alternative should be high on the priority list!
This sig under construction. Please check back later.
(I'm assuming you're speaking about GUI programs. The vast majority of command-line programs can easily be recompiled for Windows using DJGPP (for DOS) or Cygwin (for Win32). These environments exists of a POSIX emulation layer and most of the GNU development utilities (gcc, make, bash, etc.))
The fact is that most Unix programmer's don't know how to program for Windows. I mean, if you primarily develop for Unix, you're not going to spend (waste?) time learning something ugly as the MFC.
What about Windows programmers? Well, DOS/Windows doesn't have (and never had) an open source culture. Instead, most programmer's distribute their programs as shareware or freeware. But they would never let you see the code.
In fact, most Windows open source software comes from Unix people who are forces to work on Windows. Just look at the open source programs available on Windows: Apache. PuTTY, an ssh client. Vim has a Windows port (which is able to integrate in Visual Studio). Cygwin which I already have mentioned above.
That's what we are using to automate our windows environments ! windows has no embedded scripting language as for example OS/2 with REXX. We use it for nearly everything - automated installs, login scripts, database management, system administration, etc. It makes life a lot easier and extensible, and the support (newsgroups, internet) is excellent. If you try to do this with a microsoft method, you would have to learn several different programming and scripting languages, pay for compilers (VB), click a lot around, and would require much more personel, and have a crap support !
Thanks for stereotyping Open Source software developers. Unfortunately you are wrong. Many people who become involved in Open Source software do so because they want to share software with people and not because Micro$oft sux0rs. Simply because most of the posts on Slashdot typically mindlessly bash Microsoft and call it the Great Satan doesn't mean that people developing software that they want to benefit users of software will divorce themselves from the Windows platform.
What makes you think that Open Source development is restricted to users of a certain platform? Open Source Developer != Linux user even though a lot of them are.
Apache and Star Office are exceptions, because they want to become standards and that means being available for the most popular desktop platform.
Exceptions, huh? How about
Yet programs can't access NTFS disks unless the programmer recodes them.
What do you mean by that? NTFS is just a file system - Linux supports dozens of different file systems, and you don't have to rewrite applications to support each one. Same with NT/2000 - the only applications that need to be rewritten are those that are filesystem-specific, like a disk defragmenter or disk diagnostic utility.
-Entropy [think outside the system]
I deal daily with a nontrivial program coded directly to the windows API (no MFC or anything of the sort). It runs across several flavors of Windows (98, ME, 2000) though being developed on 98 and never targetted to 2000. Additionally, it was developed without MS tools using an open source (though not Free) compiler.
Bleh!
Emacs is ported to Win32 too, if I'm not mistaken...
Linux: The world's best text-adventure game.
Here are just a few of the tools that are considered traditionally in UNIX/Linux/BSD territory that are available for Win32. In all actuality, there's enough out there to get as much of Linux running on Win32 as Win32 running under WINE.
/ ruby-install.html
t ml
i ls.html
s .html
XFree86: http://sources.redhat.com/cygwin/xfree/
KDE: http://kde-cygwin.sourceforge.net/
GTK/PHP/Libglade: http://gtk.php.net/download.php
Apache: http://www.apache.org
PHP: http://www.php.net
PHPTriad: http://www.phpgeek.com
Perl: http://www.activestate.com
Ruby: http://www.pragmaticprogrammer.com/ruby/downloads
Python: http://www.python.org/download/download_windows.h
TCL/TK: http://www.pconline.com/%7Eerc/tclwin.htm
MySQL: http://www.mysql.com
MySQL ODBC: http://www.mysql.com/downloads/api-myodbc.html
PostgreSQL: Included in cygwin (only works on NT)
ATT's U/WIN* Unix for Windows: http://www.research.att.com/sw/tools/uwin/
Cygwin: http://sourceware.cygnus.com/cygwin/
DJGPP: http://www.delorie.com/djgpp/
Native UNIX command-line binaries: http://www.wzw.tu-muenchen.de/~syring/win32/UnxUt
vi: http://www.cs.vu.nl/~tmgil/vi.html
Emacs: http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/voelker/ntemac
OpenOffice: http://www.openoffice.org
Mozilla: http://www.mozilla.org
GIMP: http://user.sgic.fi/~tml/gimp/win32/
List of GNU software for Windows: http://www.gnusoftware.com/
And so on . . .
There's a list over at DMOZ.org of a lot of this.
The Glass is Too Big: My Take on Things
In short it would cost HP lots to give away something unusable and likely not worth fixing up.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
This is a very timely discussion!
:(
My company is in a pretty tight situation. Changing over to Microsoft's subscription based licensing scam is expected to increase our costs by well over $200,000 per year in an industry with already razor thin margins. The verdict: No bloody way.
So we are very much looking for alternatives. Thankfully the management (so far) does not seem to be very biased nor can they afford to be with one of our major competitors already making a switch to a *nix based system.
However, we have been having real difficulty finding adequate commercial quality open source replacements. My recommendation was to take a "modular" approach: don't look for the one solution to fix everything and don't try to replace all at once.
The easiest to switch over will be the Web Servers: Heavy usage but it's over TCP/IP rather than hands on. Switching to a BSD box running Apache with our "existing" JRun enterprise server slapped on top should do the trick. Goodbye IIS!
Workstations is where it will get ugly. We want to keep our NT boxes for now and concentrate on finding software to replace Office/Outlook that will run on both NT AND an alternative open source OS to ease migration down the road when M$ finally pulls the plug on NT. Backwards compatibility with M$ document formats is also a must for both internal and external reason. So far - not much luck. Open Office is really nice, but its a replacement for MS Exchange that's gonna suck. Tried StarOffice and simply was not impressed. I should also point out that the vast majority of the employees are NOT in IT so Windows look&feel is also required to mitigate resistance.
One of my recommendations has been centralize everybodies personal folders on a central filesystem running Linux/BSD and using Samba to integrate it seemlessly with the rest of the NT based LAN. Coupled with tighter restrictions on who can install software on any given desktop should help to pull us away from NT.
BUT... It's the database backend that is going to be really hard to replace. Currently we use SQL Server but years of bad programming habits resulted in software that is tightly coupled to the existing system. It's gonna be hard to break that link but we're working on it. SQL Server was chosen because of its costs (free, believe it or not) but now its gonna be one of the biggest contributors to the increasing costs because of the new stupid client access licences. Does anyone know of a database system fairly compatible? Needs to handle stored procedures of course hopefully similar to Transact SQL. Heavy usage, transaction support, tight security, and all that are also requirements. Oracle was suggested by management thinks its far too expensive. And of course - it must be stable. Knock MS all you want but SQL Server has worked for us well so far.
Since the parent post didn't go into details about how to make your editor of choice the source code viewer for IE, I thought I would explain. It's easier than you think, and doesn't require registry hacking.
:)
.html or whatever file type you just edited.
.pl.)
(The following instructions work for Windows 2000; if you're using 98, please adjust slightly.
1. Go to Tools/Folder Options in My Computer or Windows Explorer. Click the "File Types" tab.
2. Scroll down until you find HTML, PHP, or the file type you are currently viewing in your browser.
3. Click the Advanced button.
4. Edit the "Edit" type, or create a new type called "Edit."
5. Browse until you find the application you want. (I use EditPlus, which does source code highlighting for PHP/JSP/Perl.) Make sure the "Use DDE" box is unchecked.
6. Click OK until you are out of all of the dialog boxes.
7. Make sure the Edit button is showing in IE's toolbar. If it's not, make it show up by right-clicking on an empty area of your toolbar and clicking "Customize."
8. Open a new browser window and go to a URL that ends in
9. The "Edit" button should show up, and you should be able to edit the page in your preferred editor. (Note: for Slashdot, you have to edit/create a file type in Windows for
The real advantage of this is that you can set different types of files to open in different editors. For instance, I set HTML to open in Dreamweaver, but I set PHP to open in EditPlus.
HTH,
Erica
We couldn't get a license for Microsoft SQL server from Management...
Not to take anything away from your use of MySQL, but Microsoft does have a free (as in beer) alternative to SQL Server: the Microsoft Data Engine (MSDE). It's free for Visual Studio users and I believe some versions of Office. It's essentially an untuned/mistuned version of SQL Server stripped of the admin tools. The license is actually amazingly useful. I think you can even redistribute it, use it for commercial production use, etc. It should take away anyone's excuses for treating Microsoft Access as if it were an actual database.
You are limited to 5 connections I believe. Re- read the license lest you get inot trouble
You're limited to five concurrent "tasks" (queries, inserts, updates, etc), after which it starts serializing them. This is usually quite adequate for development and workgroup-scale serving.
My problem with MSDE is that I can't seem to get it to recognize the existence of its users. I can create users, give them ownership of databases, but the moment I try to use GRANT, it claims there's no such user...
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
No, it is just tuned for five connections. And it is free (beer) for MSDN users.
MSDE
-jerdenn
Umm, you actually think it's smart to buy something that's on support life-support?
Clue -- the 5 years are so existing OpenMail customers can plan migrations. Not so you can buy in and immedately start worrying about getting out.
Though I'm a server jockey, and working on mostly server apps that are deployed on linux, I am currently being forced to use W2K at my office for development, which are then ported to linux for deployment. Screwy engineering process, but one I've learned to cope with because other developers have felt our pain, and made life better for everyone by porting the best of the open source tools.
I use Cygwin for most of my CLI tools. It provides a bash prompt and an incredibly useful set of tools such as grep, find, diff, ssh, tar, gzip, autoconf, automake, make, gcc and others. Beyond that, many other useful tools have been ported or are easy to port because of the services provided by cygwin. I have had problems getting cvs to work correctly. I have also had problems getting emacs to look correct in the console window.
I also use emacs for all of my text editing and devlopment needs. Not only does it give you a powerful development environment in conjunction with visual c++, it can also be hooked into cygwin. I tried VisEmacs and didn't like it (YMMV) as much as simply setting the proper environment variables and churning out programs with emacs 'compile' set to run nmake.
- You don't know how to maintain a station wagon either!
> For intsance, user-level applications do not
> have to be rewritten to move from FAT to NTFS
> or to support zip disks. Porting between
> versions of Windows is less effort than
> porting between versions of Unix.
Errr - yes they do if they want to do any security work - which isn't available on FAT.
Or if they want to use the many API's that are "only supported in Windows NT/2000, but not on Win9x" (just look in the MSDN - there are many of them). Locking API's are completely different between Win9x and WinNT/200 for example. Why is LockFileEx unsupported in Win9x ? Why are such basic things as locking a region of a file different between Microsoft platforms ?
Porting between Win9x/WinNT/Win2000 is a *nightmare* compared to porting between UNIX varients. Not if you're doing simple "hello world" window GUI stuff, but if you're doing anything of any complexity you run into such issues (security, file locking etc.) all the time.
Regards,
Jeremy Allison,
Samba Team.
The initial reaction in most (70%) of cases was "WTF is this. How do I start my Excel?" Actually people STILL refer to StarCalc as Excel :(
Most people slipped into using it quite well. The biggest question was "Where do I find xxxx?" and the answer is usually "That menu item is over there now...". There haven't been any requests for features that StarOffice doesn't have - it's just a matter of locating the feature, and most people are fine doing this themselves.
There are of course a few people who insist on calling me every time they can't find what they want, and for those people I make a FAQ web site, and direct them to it. If they still give me problems, I complain to their supervisor, and they are told to pay attention and stop wasting time. This group of people represent probably 3% of users.
On the flip-side of the coin, there are probably 40% of people who admit regularly that StarOffice 5.2 is actuallly BETTER than Office 97. I get comments like "It's much easier to lay out columns", "The help system is better", "The formatting features are more powerful", "Things are where they should be" and such... I expect there are a further 40% who really don't care / notice the difference, which leaves 20% of users wishing they still had M$ Office, and I just remind them that 1) we are saving a LOT of money, and 2) a new version is on the way which addresses most of their issues (what happened to my desktop)
The general nature of the business? Well everybody does a little word processing, which is actually a large change for us because 2 years ago we employed 2 Word Processors full-time. This is fairly basic stuff - 2-3 page reports to clients. Our account managers use StarCalc for their own internal calculations, but MOST spreadsheets we send out to clients are produced by Excel (see below) by the analysts. Our accounts department is running StarCalc, and our billing department is about to switch (ETA 2 months).
For those interested, our business NUS Consulting: http://www.nusconsulting.com is a utilites cost-analysis company. We analyse our clients' energy, fuel, fleet and telecommunications costs, find them savings and form consortiums to give our customers some bargaining power.
Our analysts, as I said, are quite dependant on legacy VB code in Excel, so they are the only ones stuck with it for now, but we will HAVE to get them away from that, because we are outgrowing it. Most of our Excel workbooks will initially be replaced by Access / SQL Server, and eventually Kylix / MySQL.
Windows NT (I assume that's what you're talking about since 9x is not worth even metioning) has a very good HAL
Actually it is a very poor HAL, in that it still makes or rather forces too many assumptions about the underlying hardware. Like 32 bits (NT for Alpha didn't run 64 bit), like little endianess (NT has never been successfully ported to and shipped on a big endian processor architecture -- NT on PPC, Sparc and MIPS was stillborn). Anyway you look at it, NT and its siblings are likely to be basically x86 only for the forseeable future. Linux on the other hand runs on quite a variety of processor architectures, and most software written for Linux is just a "./configure; make; make install" away from running on most of them. On the other hand due to the fact that 9x (and ME) which are 'not worth even mentioning' still are the bulk of Microsoft OS installations, you've got to be careful which subset of Win32 and Microsoft's other APIs you are using to write code that works on both 9x/ME and NT/W2K/XP.