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Germany Publishes Windows to Linux Migration Guide

Posted by michael on from the german-efficiency dept.

Bombcar writes "This Migration Document is also available. It has details on going from WinNT to Linux/FLOSS/Samba et.al, with less detail on RedHat/Ximian/GNOME and more on SuSE/Mandrake/KDE. See Kurt's post to Samba Technical for more details."

10 of 221 comments (clear)

  1. Migration = Salvation by heironymouscoward · · Score: 3, Informative

    Not in any religious sense, but just from the tedium of managing a PC park.

    Like many techies, I help friends and family with their PCs. I've started saying, "it's Linux or nothing", and we install a nice distro like Xandros or Knoppix on the PCs. No device problems, no viruses or spywarez, no calls to the "help desk".

    The only problem is that people are used to just switching off their machines, and don't shut down correctly. This seems to have caused a couple of machines to loose configurations. So I'm looking at using a pure CD-based install like Knoppix with a USB key for /home.

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    Ceci n'est pas une signature
    1. Re:Migration = Salvation by Spy+Hunter · · Score: 3, Informative

      You can set it up so that the power button does a proper shutdown instead of immediately cutting the power. Some distros do that by default.

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      main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
    2. Re:Migration = Salvation by Ed+Avis · · Score: 3, Informative

      If 'just switching off' causes problems because of disk corruption, you could try ext3 with data=journal. This makes sure that _everything_ is committed to the journal as soon as it's written. Another way of looking at it is a 'no lies' property - if the operating system says to the application that the write completed then you know it did complete and isn't just sitting as dirty buffers waiting to be flushed. So you could switch off the machine immediately the 'save' command finishes. (This assumes your hard disk isn't doing its own slightly dishonest buffering, of course.)

      If the corruption is caused by the applications leaving things in an inconsistent state if they don't get closed properly, then obviously no filesystem can do anything about that. Using a USB key for /home would stop the system being corrupted but still the user's files might be, and that's probably more serious.

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      -- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
  2. Google Cache to the Rescue by robbyjo · · Score: 2, Informative

    Here you go.

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  3. Re:Sounds like a good idea by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    Even if you know how to say "Good luck!" in German, you wouldn't be able to type it...

    "Viel Gluck!"

  4. Re:Sounds like a good idea by Sique · · Score: 2, Informative

    No. Gluck was an bohemian-austrian composer. There is nothing to say against "viel Gluck" per se, but you are surely meaning: "Viel Glueck". The u-umlaut gets transcribed to 'ue' if not available, according to the Duden (german official orthography), Vol I pp. 105.

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    .sig: Sique *sigh*
  5. Re:Sounds like a good idea by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    I don't know how to say "Good luck!" in German.

    Viel Glueck! (It should really have an umlaut by Slashdot isn't non-english friendly)

  6. Re:The IDA Open Source Migration Guidelines by danimo · · Score: 5, Informative
    (Tiny rant about the EU guide following:)

    I read both quite carefully, the EU as as well as the German one and I came to the following conclusion:

    The EU one does not:
    • go in-depth
    • contain retability calculations (which points out a very significant strength of OSS: the price)
    • is mostly a (quite incomplete) listing of solutions, especially in the groupware or database area (Kolab, SAB-DB?)

    Another important aspect of the German migration guide was that it always kept the comparison to the "continuing migration" which shows the trade-offs and advantages of OSS migration and thus gives a balanced picture. I can't really blame the EU guide for this, since it simply didn't have this goal.

    But I think there is a very significant point of critisism left: The German migration guide had co-authors from experts (see co-authors section in the PDF for reference), which ensures that the descriptions are more in-depth and exploit all features of new version (This is very important for Samba for example. The EU guide is more a list of applications with features listed "as advertised". The EU left out Debian completely. While I am not a Debian zealot, I know of quite some successful migrations to Debian and the German migration guide acknowledges this. It doesn't take a RHAS or SLES to migrate to Linux!

  7. OOoSwitch by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative


    Hentzenwerke publishes a book called OOoSwitch: 501 Things You Wanted To Know About Switching to OpenOffice.org from Microsoft(R) Office.

    Dunno if it's a good book but I'm glad someone wrote it.

  8. Re:Works for me except for by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    try HRBlock.com; they cost about the same as turbotax and they work online, so I did my last one with Mozilla in Mandrake. You do have to do a paper filing with them the first year, but after that you can be online forever.