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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 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
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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.
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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.