Australia, China and Snowboard Shops Use Linux

Miscellaneous stories about Linux usage today: the Australian government has allowed (but not required) its agencies to switch to Linux. China is apparently going to go all-Linux for the 2008 Olympic games in Beijing. And business2.com has a story about chain of snowboarding shops (and other businesses) deploying Linux cash registers and desktops.

Comments

Re:Ideal for many of my friends.

[hdparm]

Let them check

http://linux.gen.nz/supply.html

There's a list of companies that supply Linux preloaded on new machines. No dual boot, just pure Linux.

Re:RedHat is mollycoddling Chinese dictators

[pamri]

The problem is solved.

Re:What are they running?

[Soko]

I've been actively researching this for quite some time now. I've come up with a few:

L'AnePOS - written in Perl, uses Tcl/TK for admin, PostgreSQL backend. Nice system, but the code needs cleanup. The project admin told me he should be updating it very soon.

Compiere - Whole ERP/CRM package including POS. Too big for small shops, just right for medium. Oracle backend, tho - expect to pay a bit for that.

BananaPOS - Not sure, development seems erratic.

There's JPos as well, though I'm not sure what backend it uses and Mercator, which is still in Alpha. I'm trying to get a project called Poszilla off the ground, too - Point of Sale based on Mozilla, which would truly be be platform independant, maybe even DB independant.

GPLed Point of Sale is getting there, I guess.

Soko