Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Will Munich's Linux Desktops Be Running Windows?

Posted by timothy on from the fingernails-on-the-well dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Remember that story about the city of Munich choosing Linux to power 14,000 desktop computers? One aspect of this story that most people don't know about is that up to 80 percent of those Linux desktops will be equipped with VMWare, a virtual machine emulator, under which they will run Windows and Windows applications. That's right, folks: The majority of those 'Linux desktops' will be used to run ... Windows." This Gartner report from early June seems to be the one mentioned in the article, though I'm not sure exactly where Thurrott gets the 80% figure.

5 of 581 comments (clear)

  1. Source of 80% figure by DeepRedux · · Score: 4, Informative

    The article asks the source of the 80% figure. The original report is here (in German). On page 34, footnote 1, there is the assumption that 80% will be using VMWare for 4 to 5 years.

  2. Re:Not at all by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    Terminal Server seat licence costs about the same as an XP Pro licence. So there's no savings that way.

  3. Won't VMware running Windows be horribly slow by technofeab · · Score: 4, Informative
    I Run FreeBSD 5.1 (as a guest OS) under VMware. XP is my native OS. I was trying to find a good alternative to dual-booting. Unfortunately, I find that my system is terribly slow (1.5 Ghz with 256 RAM). Even on a 2 Ghz with 512 RAM, there is a considerable lag. Both the native OS and the guest OS putz along as they compete for memory and whatever else.

    I suspect that the actual users will become highly motivated to run VMware as little as possible and will soon learn to love linux (as they should).

  4. Re:Licensing? by arivanov · · Score: 5, Informative
    At least in the US - can't say for Germany.

    Germany is the only country in the world where this MSFT practice has been shot down in courts as a restraint of trade. AFAIK In Germany you can recycle windows licenses and they cannot be tied to machines and you can resell them as well.

    In btw: I see nothing wrong in using vmware as a transitions strategy. Been there myself until openoffice reached a point where it became really useable

    --
    Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
    http://www.sigsegv.cx/
  5. Re:Makes perfect sense to me... by nathanh · · Score: 4, Informative
    Furthermore, maybe only 50% of their users will need to run Windows/VMWare at any one time, so they may only need to buy half as many Windows licences as they have machines.

    I daresay they won't need to buy any Windows licenses. Their existing Windows 98 licenses will work just fine. The usual reasons for buying new versions of Windows is for new hardware, support, patches, or integration with Active Directory. As Munich will be using Linux as the host operating system they can run older versions of Windows (in VM sessions) forever.