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Will Munich's Linux Desktops Be Running Windows?
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.
Isn't that... kinda, betrayal? I mean, they were switching to Linux, not 'Linux so we can use VMWare...'
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Would you not have to pay for a SUSE linux and windows license to run windows in vmware? Maybe they are going to run their OLD versions of windows?
Running VMWare under Linux, not under Windows, could provide a needed security blanket for those people that aren't used to sudden change. If they weren't serious about the move they wouldn't be doing this transitional thing; remember that these are mainly office paper pushers, not computer geeks.
Trolling is a art,
I think it is sick that any organization, city, government, whatever, would buy a bunch of linux machines just for the PR they would get by running linux machines and then use them for Windows applications!
If they want PR, they should get it elsewhere, but this, in my opinion, is a sickening way to obtain media attention for Linux, and I think Linus Torvalds would agree.
There's always OpenOffice.org, instead of MS Office....
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Sure, I also think that Linux is perhaps not ready yet for GENERAL desktop use and replacement for Windows for all, but this article is a lot like Yellow Journalism, where the facts are more BS, fluff, and stretched fact than anything else.
They're also forgetting a major thing. If they were to use SO many computers with Windows anyway, WHY DIDN'T THEY JUST TAKE THE MICROSOFT DEAL? Instead of blowing several million euros on SuSE's Linux and IBM's machines?
In all, this article makes little or no sense, cites only one reference, gives no source for the statistic, and stretches many facts in the sole reference, to the point where it makes little/no sense. The very fact that this crap could be MENTIONED on Slashdot really makes me question the integrity of this news source.
My Computer repair class last year switched to linux my behest and because my instructor wanted to anyways. we setup VMWare and a win2k install on all of our machines as a stepping stone, throughout the year, people stopped using windows as much, as they had to start IT up from inside linux and that was "too much of a hassle" to lazy high school kids. However, they did start using linux more and more, and ultimately the b3ecame more proficient. So I believe Munich is using these VMware installs to allow their workers to be able to go back to a familiar enviroment while they learn the new one and how it functions
why does the porridge bird lay his eggs in the air?
Did anyone think that the vmware may be used to access the Windows that was previously installed on these machines?
And I thought the bulk of these machines were embedded devices like cop cars, etc.
This seems a bit fuzzy...
int func(int a);
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they want to be in *control* of their computing environment.
When this is done, they will be able to take advantage of any Linux or Unix based application easily. Why? Because their desktops are open ones, not closed.
No amount of money spent on the Microsoft deal will allow them the level of choice they have now.
That is going to be worth something more than the few million extra euros they spent today.
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If most of their current operation is Windows based, wouldn't it make even more sense to equip all of their Windows boxes with VMWare and run Linux in a virtual session for the new, forward-moving apps, eventually switching over to a native Linux install when appropriate?
It sounds like this is completely a political and/or religious choice rather than a practical choice. Now each desktop has the licensing costs of Windows, Linux and VMWare. _S_M_R_T...
That approach was tried by IBM with OS/2. Unfortunately, since OS/2 did such a nice job of running Windows apps, developers like WordPerfect Corp. (don't laugh, they were a force back then) abandoned their OS/2 ports. Why? Because the OS/2 users could just use the Windows version of the product!
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They'll have lots of legacy Windows apps that will need to be progressively ported to Linux, so it makes sense to do this in a planned, application-by-application manner rather than go for a 'big bang' approach.
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. Over time, this would decrease, as more and more apps get moved off Windows and onto Linux, and the number of users that need Windows decreases. And before anyone says "this is illegal", remember that we're talking about Germany, and they have much stronger laws restricting licence tying than they do in the US. I'm not an expert in German law, but this is quite likely to be "more legal" (if that term makes sense) in Germany than it would be in the US.
Are the licenses tied to the user, or is it just n concurrent sessions? If it's the latter, they could probably share a relatively small number of them.
I've never tried running VMware over X, but that might be another way to share a pool of winboxes.
The advantage over what they're doing is that everyone would have access to the services yet they wouldn't have to buy a license for infrequent users.
One interesting support model I'm seeing someone do right now is to have every single desktop running Linux and a Linux version of VMware, regardless of the "actual" client operating system. Boot the box, VMware starts, then without any manual intervention the client OS (usually 'doze 2000) starts up and goes full screen.
... the entire image can be pulled back remotely, then fixed/upgraded/replaced, and shoved back down to the actual physical location. Sweet!
Sounds silly? When there's a problem, or a need to upgrade, or whatever
The long-term answer to tech support problems is to migrate towards true thin-client or lean-client computing, making the actual desktop device irrelevant. But this is a nice stopgap.
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Absolutely ridiculous. To begin with, Windows supports by far more hardware than Linux, so having Windows as the base OS almost certainly gives one more flexibility in the hardware that can be effectively utilized, and the featureset that can be utilized.
Secondly, the old "stability" mantra is so dated that it really makes people look like they haven't pulled their religious zealotry out of 1997. Even as of NT 4.0 (presuming you didn't have ATI video card drivers on your machine) system crashes were extremely rare, with Windows 2000 upping the stability quite a bit further (over 3 years of intensive use I recall my own crashes relating to a, surprize, ATI TV Tuner card). With Windows XP this stability exists at the consumer level, whether you're a gamer or a software developer. Please show me some metrics proving that Linux is a more stable OS in actual day to day usage (i.e. not a "could be done better in firmware with a $4 chip" acting-as-a-trivial-firewall box, which is the usually pathetic example given).
More importantly, though, with the speeds of current x86 hardware, and by using some sort of binary translation, it should be possible to run PPC software on an x86 at least as fast as the first PPCs (and probably significantly faster).
So yes, one should "try again" on modern hardware. :-)
NSA supposedly no longer exposes Windows directly to the net. It is run on top of Linux using vmware. So, if good enough for the NSA, then it is good enough for me (assuming that we both have the same versions with all the same patches ).
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I'd say Linux is more stable for people who do less than similar people who use a flavour of Windows. I've had this same install of XP since it came out. I remember stuff getting screwed up in RedHat and having to reinstall because it would no longer boot.
-]Phreak Out[-
All of the vmware discussion is based upon guesses in the Gartner report. It is assumed that the bulk will be web based and a small remainder will need something like vmware or win4lin. These unknown apps may run well enough under wine or crossover office.
It seems that IBM and Suse understand enough about the current apps that Munich currently runs to have accomodated this in the proposal where they gave a solid price. The Gartner group is making guesses, seems like they don't need to base reports on solid facts does it?
Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see. - Mark Twain
The average user shouldn't be running as root, the ability to screw stuff up normally resides as root.
admining your own system when unfamiliar to linux is quite different to this situation.
in the worst case they'll just restore the users home directory from backup and all will be as it was.
'There is a Light that never goes out.'
Why not just run Windows? Is this some sort of way to dodge costs or is it a plan to move Linux in over an extended period of time?
I suspect that since people in general are more au fait with Windows applications (ask a man in the street what Star Office is and he'd go "whu??", ask him what Microsoft Office is and he'd complain bitterly about its shortcomings) that it simply makes sense to run them over less well known Linux apps. That way you dont need to re-train people and people get less irritated by change.
The only fact here is that no matter what anyone tries to say, Linux simply does not yet have the fully-fledged desktop application base that Windows has. Therefore it makes plain sense to run established software until Linux ports come along. The story doesnt suggest that VMWare will be used to run everything, just that It Will Be Installed, presumably to run stuff that Linux does not yet have an acceptable clone of.
Nice reaction to this story by the way, the Linux trolls are really showing impressive arrogance and pomposity as usual. Good on you guys, without people like you, Windows users might actually want to be associated with your OS of choice, instead of thinking you're all a bunch of degenerate bitter underdogs using a 'complicated' OS to look clever. An operating system is a tool not a religion or political standpoint, so get over it.
Note that yes I run Linux and yes what a handy piece of software it is too. I dont run Wine or VMWare. I have a Win2k box for that.
I have FAR more crashes and reinstalls in Mandrake, Red Hat, and SuSE than I have EVER had with XP, and I use XP far more.
Not trying to start a flame war here but you said so yourself that you use XP more and are therefore "far more" familiar with it than linux. The crashes and reinstalls are probably related to your inexperience with linux. I know when I first started out with linux I probably did 20 reinstalls within the first 3 months b/c I'd screw something up and have to do a reinstall(a more experience user probably have been able to fix it though). However, each time I screwed something up I learned from my mistakes and soon had a decent understanding of how things worked and what not to do.
My suggestion is buy a distro like Redhat(so that you get the manuals and actually read them) and a book like Learning Red Hat Linux or one of several other books to go along with it and read through some of it and try stuff out. Soon, you will find that linux is "far more" stable than windows XP or 2000 for that matter.
BTW, once i learned that basics I haven't been forced to do a reinstall b/c I screwed something up and I've never had a crash(apps crash on occasion but never bring down the whole system). I don't own a windows machine but I've used XP at school and at my g/f's house and have had at least 5 crashes in the past year. And no they weren't b/c of me screwing up something, it was while typing in word or surfing the web(I don't know how many times I've had IE crash on me and bring explorer.exe[the taskbar,desktop,etc..] down with it resulting in a system crash at least once.).
Well, I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of current linux users bailed off windows after using like ME or '95 and use that as a reference for how stable windows is. And if someone wants to try to tell me that ME wasn't a PoS, then I want to know how much Microsoft is paying you.
The NT, 2000, and XP line on the other hand are quite nice. Sure, an individual program will lock up/crash now and then, but I honestly can't remember the last time I was forced to reboot my work machine with 2000 on it. Same machine with a different harddrive running Redhat has frozen up on me a couple of times and didn't respond to anything without powering down.
My 2000 home machine on the other hand crashed on me when I fired up RtCW while I have the TV tuner on the card already going, which I figure was just kind of silly of me in the first place. Frankly, I think both just boil down to knowing how to deal with a potential freeze and not setting your system up some stupid way that makes it crash.
Here are a few facts for everyone to chew on:
Let me also point out that this isn't some little "ThirdWorld" (tm, USA) country with no economics or tech savvy we are talking about - this is Germany - probably the economically most powerful nation along with USA, and the driving force behind Europe. These guys have what it takes to do an evaluation of this sort, and come out tops.
And they have proved that *again* with their decision to switch to Linux while also giving their users the psychological crutch that they will be able to use their existing windows applications. In one fell swoop, they have swept all objections off the table, and have set up a scenario where people will now actually begin using Linux/OSS apps, rather than just reading about them.
And as we all know, that is the *one* single obstacle that Linux/OSS has been facing in the past - getting people to actually try it.
Go, Germany! Show the world how it is done!
You aren't remembered for doing what is expected of you
Maybe they know like I do that you can run NT stable this way? There is something in the hardware abstraction layer of VMware that makes NT much more stable.
It also lets you run NT on hardware that it wouldn't run on normally (Sony Vaio C1XD Picturebook in my case). So they can keep NT and run it on any hardware IBM has on offer today.
realkiwi
Running Windows Media under VmWare, you can swipe the bitstream and copy DRM crippled content. Seeing as how blank media and CD-Rs are taxed in Germany, Munich probably reckon that they should get the most from their tax dollars.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
BTW: Did anyone notice ?
Nikos Drakos - one of the Gartner consultants who is the author of that report is the writer of the famous latex2html tool.
The other point to note is that if MS-Windows crashes regularly, the people using it think nothing of that (another day, another document trashed), and don't report it. What's the point in reporting it? Nothing ever gets done about it. I see this regularly when empenguinning older machines - they crashed six times a day under MS-Windows, and continue to crash under Linux until I fix the broken hardware (typically a dud SIMM else replace the mobo). OTOH, people often report kernel panics under Debian because they are unusual and something will get done about it if it's Linux's fault.
When people read "Where do you want to go today?" they miss the emphasis. It's "Where do you want to go today? Not likely!" - and in similar vein, few people ever realise that the "My" in "My Computer" is one William Henry "Trey" Gates III, not themselves. Once you realise these things, you start to understand what MS-Windows is for.
If you've not seen any blue screens from XP recently, perhaps it's because you changed the default background colour. (-:
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
So, they put Linux on the desktop, only to run VMWare with a Windows sessions. Sounds to me like they have a lot of extra cash to pay for licensing. VMWare licenses AND Windows licenses?? Why would they do that when they could SAVE MONEY by simply installing Windows. If they really need to run Linux apps, build one (or two or three..) Linux servers and use Putty to tunnel an X session.
Complete waste of money and poor planning on this one..
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