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UK Councils May Dump Windows For Linux
An anonymous reader writes "Local authorities in Newham and Nottingham are expected to migrate more than 10,000 desktop computers from Windows to GNU/Linux.
ZDNet has the story. "If this is seen to work in Newham, it has the potential to be a significant project, changing the perceptions of other councils," said Tim Dawes, director of local government technology consultants Nineveh."
Eddie Bleasedale, of Netproject has been one of the UKs most prolific advocates of the Open Source movement. Hes been running seminars, Discussions and meetings with a large variety of "movers and shaker" within the UK for several Years now. This is the not the first large scale project in the UK but it is certainly the most important. The Architecture employed to move everyone to the Linux Desktop , which I have seen , is certainly the most influential and consistent to date. We at 3aIT wish Eddie and his team all the best in this project and the future.
Though I am wondering when the UK Magazines are going to start including Eddies Name for Linux Advocacy nominations.
And if youve ever tried getting your boss to understand the benefits of Open Source in business then look out for Netprojects Day Conferences ( next on is 10th June 2003, London ) where Netprojects put together a excellent series of dicsussions and topics detailing issues and concerns over the Linux Answer.
And thats why Firecrackers and kittens don't mix.
Personally I would believe that they are thinking about it, as with most companies you have to consider all the options. A lot of small business get lured in with the fact that Linux is free, but they don't think it though and realize that particularly for the end users Windows in the best thing for them. Yes I know some of you hate the evil empire, but the fact remains that no software package is so well supported by consultants, is known by all server administrators, and is easy to use for your end-users and operators. Has anyone attempted to have a local user work a Unix server that disconnected from the network. Most frustrating thing I have ever done. While with Windows 2000, it's a familiar interface for them much easier for you to walk people though. Now yes Unix is more reliable on average, and more secure, but that has to do with settings and access rights. Too many people try to do too much on their Windows servers because it's so easy. I know at a company where I came into to consult for, they owner did all his work, on the file server (obviously I suggested that wasn't best use of the server resources).
Mansfield LUG (In nottinghamshire) currently has a discussion going on this. On the members works at the Mansfield council and has been pushing Linux for years. The only realy barrier is that the guy in charge of IT is anti-linux - but he's Unix programmer. Another member works for another local council. He has managed to get linux onto their servers by way of stealth. Their mail servers were orignially just a 'test' to see if linux would be able to cope. Since then they've ditched their previous server OSes and have replaced them with Linux. They've been trying to get Linux on as the desktops too. No success with 'those with the say' there at all. This decision by the Nottingham council may be more pursuasive.
I can only say this:
You'd be very, very surprised. Off the top off my head, my IT Dept support and maintain around 22 applications other than Office apps. Not including the fact that we run almost all these over Citrix, and have to look after about 14 Oracle 8-9i Databases too.
We're a busy bunch.
"I hate Cthulhu, Cthulhu hates me, I kill his cultists, He eats worlds for tea"
The point is, making a complete move to Linux if you're doing real work (i.e. you're not an HS/undergrad student or dilettante dabbler, to use the words of the *BSD-is-dying troll) is extremely difficult. Even if the features are there, e.g. if you only need to do simple WP work in OO and are sure that you'll never need to import a complex Office document, I would contend that OO is an example of a Linux app which is not as stable or efficient as its MS counterpart.
The OEM cost of MS Office over OO is irrelevant when use of an inferior product (for many scenarios) results in huge amounts of lost time. Even running Office under stock WINE, unstable as it is, produces less crashes and more successful views of documents sent to me than the most recent stable OO.
Have you used OpenOffice recently? It's still quite slow to start, but once there, 1.1 Beta in my opinion is superior to MS Office.
Maybe time you took another look.
What you have said here is very interesting.
Don't worry about Linux on old systems, however. I run Linux on a 233 MHz computer that I rescued from a customer's upgrade a long time ago. It works fine. My experience is that Linux is much faster on old hardware than Windows.
I have only had 1 major glitch in a PowerPoint file being read in OpenOffice 1.0.1. All other files I have read in OpenOffice made from MS Office (mostly .DOC files but excel too) have rendered to such a degree that I could not see any difference. Not to say that there wasn't an error, I just could not see it, which ought to be good enough.
All of these have been the Win32 build on Win2k sp3
The error that I did see was in 1.0.1 I think but after that in 1.0.2 and 1.0.3 everything is working great. In my experence
Disclaimer: your milage my vary, see store manager for details, batteries not included, some assembly required, not for small children or big babies, offer not valid where prohibited, MS zelots need not apply
Yup, in Spain, in Extremadura actually. The GNU/Linux distribution used is Debian 3.0 Woody, but has been adapted for users and called Linex
In here you may find more info http://www.linex.org (link seems temporarily down?)
I asked my dad to try using OO instead of MSOffice for a day at work to see how well he could transition. Couldn't use it for more than 10 minutes because all the Excel files they have had specific macros to kick off printing and do weird formatting and calculations. OO wasn't able to deal with them. Sure, you could try to rewrite them, but why do that? They're already working in MSOffice. If/when Excel can import and use those, he'd switch.
creation science book
I am a university professor, and I've tried OO.o many times, to see if it's ready for prime time. I have found that OO.o falls a bit short even on simple documents. I've been using OO.o for quite a while, and although its problems are fading, they aren't gone. Most recently, I found that font was incorrectly changed in the middle of a simple 3-page document, upon export to MSword. By "simple", I really do mean simple! The document had no tables, no figures, no formulae. Sure, it did have a few words in bold and italic, a few words with yellow underlay, and a few footnotes. But if OO.o cannot export such documents to MSword, then it's not suitable for shared work.
PS. I didn't report the bug because the document had confidential information. Plus, I had done my opensource duty on a previous bug report (formula export -- fixed in an OO.o upgrade).
PPS. I'll still keep using (and recommending) OO.o for work that doesn't need to be shared, since there seems to be little downside, now that it doesn't crash as soffice used to, a few years back.
First time I tried to use OpenOffice spreadsheets, it failed me - I was sent a sheet with embedded radio buttons (quite why it had these, I don't know). Anyway, they didn't appear. Back to Windows for me :(
I applaude the wise folks in charge in Munich, and in Britian. It seems to me that the U.S. is getting slower and slower to respond to potential money saving efforts as the "win to lin" platform switch. I guess local and state governments in the U.S. just dont want to save money. They HAVE to spend it. Taxpayers should demand the saving (but since when has the U.S. government actually listened to us?). Also i saw posted that only a dummy would completely quit windows. Paint me stupid but i dumped Windows three years ago entirely. I wonder what amount of money is to be realized by the switch. Surely it isnt chicken feed. About the only parallel i can draw is to redhats Open Source Now! project and I think the pilot scholls running Linux are very happy with their savings. Once you completely transition from windows you dont even miss it. You just do things differently. It may cost a little more to switch machines that have win modems in them but factor in the cost savings over 3 or 4 years and it really makes sense. I wonder what the government in Munich will spend their new found money on now? I just think that its great. What do you call 20-30K workstations running linux? A damn good start.
It is pretty good. I've found that old Word documents that I wrote probably using Office 95 actually render better in OOo than in Office 2000.
On the down side, I just recently needed to open a 44Mb PowerPoint presentation - it contained nothing fancy, just a lot of slides with hi-res images. OOo takes f-o-r-e-v-e-r to open the document and requires approx. 512Mb memory to do it! When you re-save in the native format it manages things better though.
Aside from that, I've found odd things like date/time cells in Excel appear using the wrong date/time format in OOo.
And lastly, OOo is slow opening and closing any documents - I click on the Save icon and it will take several seconds to complete even with a small document.
I do really like OOo - it is very good. Somethings I prefer, but overall it needs a little more polish.
As an experienced Windows administrator, I have a few questions that are not BASHING, so FLAME OFF...take this as an opportunity to prove something.
.02 as well, this forum could be very interesting.
That said, here they are.
Windows does make a few things very easy for administrators. For example, I work as the only administrator in a 100 computer, 2 server company. Windows security settings (windows 2000) makes it almost impossible for the average user to install any applications on their PC, making my life a lot easier. If people could install anything they wanted, I'm sure that every attachment with a virus would be opened (ok admin access doesn
t prevent that, but local user access limits that damage thatcan be done)...I'm sure that every version of every media player would be installed on every machine, conflicting with this and that...every version of instant messenger would be on, etc...
On the few PCs that DO need local admin access, this all has already happened.
I think it's a GREAT thing that PC's are a member of a domain and that being an administrator of said domain automatically grants me FULL access to every PC in the domain, while limiting access to every PC for people that aren't admins.
I think that it's GREAT that from a central location (server), I can change a login script and get systems changes to happen on EVERYONE'S PC automatically (install printers, apply system patches, change global settings, add registry entries, etc...).
So that's that...there are other things that make Windows nice and pretty (like support from EVERY HARDWARE VENDOR and no hunting for special obscure drivers) but for my job and not my own personal entertainment, the above reasons mean the most to me. (Try calling ANY CD writer vendor and tell them that you're having a difficult time getting the writer to work in Linux, and see how much help you get, seriously).
Ultimately, can anyone present a way to get all of the mangement features mentioned above on a 100 computer, 2 server LINUX network?
You're not selling me, you're selling the entire WINDOWS community. Write up a little white-paper case study that shows how you can do all of these management functions in a Linux environment. Or, if not a whitepaper, how about just a reply to this post with a HOW-TO. I'm interested.
As a windows administrator with forsight, I see that where once there was a competition between Novell and Microsoft for the network/desktop (well, not novell on the deksotp, but you know what I'm saying), there is a competition on the horizon between Linux and Microsoft.
I'll take anyone's
I agree. I also have been transferring things home to check for compatibility. All of the stuff at work IS pretty simple: docs are nothing in the word docs but headers, footers, text formatting and pagination; spreadsheets are just enough formatting to visually separate ctaegories with simple summing and averaging math. Nothing has been a problem with OO 1.0.2. This is all I've ever tried, so I can't speak about earlier versions.
Now here's the thing: I haven't had ANY problems with OO converting Office 2000 files. However, when we converted to Office 2000 from Office 97 about 1 1/2 years ago, we had all sorts of problems! All of our manuals are done in Word and, as far as I know (it's not my job) almost every one had to be touched in some way or another for the new Word version. It was enough hassle that my boss made a decision never to upgrade to Office XP. That decision plus the increasing pressure that MS is putting on moving to XP is the reason that I am looking at Open Office at all.
Somebody prove me wrong. I've got Office 2000 and Open Office 1.0.2 here at home; post a demo file here (Word docs are my primary interest) that has problems in Open Office (and, obviously, no problems in Office 2000). Like the parent to this post, I have heard a lot about conversion problems and I would like to see an example.