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Germany Publishes Windows to Linux Migration Guide

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."

9 of 221 comments (clear)

  1. woes along the way by grosa · · Score: 3, Interesting

    my university has been testing out replacing NT/2k/2003 machines with Samba boxes, and they've hit a lot of speed bumps. It's nice to see that someone is actually documenting all the necessary steps so that doing the conversion doesn't end up being a huge beast of a project.

    afaik, Samba supports even the more advanced domain controller features, but it's not all very straight-forward or intuitive. this should make the PHBs with anti-commercial-solution tin-foil hats breath a little easier. documentation goes a long ways in a managed environment.

  2. The IDA Open Source Migration Guidelines by jsinnema · · Score: 4, Interesting
  3. Re:Network effect by ajs318 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Exactly. With Open Source, everybody benefits when anybody contributes. The dividends are shared, yet not diminished by the act of sharing.
    Consider a bank paying interest at 5% and run along traditional lines, but with just three investors: Anna, Bob and Charlie. Anna invests $1000. Bob invests $200. Charlie invests $3000. A year later, they get their interest payments.
    Anna receives 5% of $1000 = $50.
    Bob receives 5% of $200 = $10.
    Charlie receives 5% of $3000 = $150.

    With a bank that worked the way Open Source works, Interest Calculations would be done more like this:
    Anna has $1000. Bob has $200. Charlie has $3000.
    Anna receives 5% of $4200 = $210.
    Bob receives 5% of $4200 = $210.
    Charlie receives 5% of $4200 = $210.

    --
    Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
  4. Re:Migration = Salvation by lgftsa · · Score: 2, Interesting

    USB drives are block devices(512bytes/block for the few I've used) and can be treated like any block device. They usually appear as SCSI disks(/dev/sda, etc) and have partitions(/dev/sda1, etc) which can be fdisk'ed, mkfs'ed and mounted with whatever filesystem you care to use.

    I usually use vfat for compatibility, ext2 for deliberate incompatibility, or a raw device/partition for a bestcrypt container.

    Even though modern [USB|IDE]/FLASH bridge chips use tricks to spread writes across cells(to stop bits wearing out too fast), I also mount them nomtime,noatime to reduce writes. Oh, and ext3(or any journaling fs) is a good way to prematurely wear them out, too.

  5. Re:Migration = Salvation by grosa · · Score: 2, Interesting

    i did this as well, and it worked out great. i got my folks to use linux/kde for about 8 months, and then when it came time for hardware upgrades, they decided running unix at home was a great idea, but they bought an iMac instead of upgrading the PC.

    can't say I blame them, while PC Unix was great because they didn't get viruses and I could do software upgrades and minor fixes remotely (they have DSL), it meant that they were entitled to pester me about it as much as they wanted. I got pestered a lot with questions like "How do I do X like I used to in Windows?", and lots of times the answer was "well... you don't"

    it's particularly bad with more savvy users because they have their pet software titles, and often the open-source equivalents have very different interfaces, or just different enough for them to shun it.

  6. Re:biased? by Nighttime · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Coo, imagine that. Germany, a country in Europe, pushing its home-grown distribution and that of a neighbouring country. Such shocking behaviour!

    --
    I've got a fever and the only prescription is more COBOL.
  7. Re:Network effect by ultrabot · · Score: 4, Interesting

    And banks would be going bankrupt pretty fucking quickly if they followed your idiotic logic.

    That's because banks operate on a scarce resource (money). Knowledge/code/data is a scarce resource only artificially, and therefore sharing it increases the total amount that is available.

    Obviously, this reduces the bottom line of huge corporations that charge lots of money of what should/could/is starting to be a commodity (OS and Office Suite vendors). Most of them are in the US (MSFT and SUNW), so Europe doesn't really have that much motivation to preserve their status. Europe loses nothing and gains jobs, expertise, openness and wealth.

    --
    Save your wrists today - switch to Dvorak
  8. linux user @ 56years by sireenmalik · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I have never got involved in MS Vs. Linux religios wars! However, this summer my mom came to visit me in Germany (from Asia) and from her experience with both OSs i have a better opinion!

    I am a PhD. candidate. My work is wrapped around simulations for which I trust Linux/Debian. At house i've Suse 8.2 simply because it was the most painless installation of any OS i had ever made in my life.

    My mom has an incurable habit of reading and writing. When she arrived i thought i would use the holidays to teach her to "use-the-mouse" and if that succeeds then treach her to do "google and surf" . I thought internet would probably catch her interest. I have to admit what follows was a lesson for me too.

    Agreeing to the user-friendliness of Windows, i contemplated of installing XP as i thought it would make the job easier for her. It took some days before i could do that so for the intermediate phase i exposed mom to the already installed Suse. Partly because of my under-estimation of her IQ, and mostly because of her determination to prove to me that PhD is "just another degree" she could do "mouse" and "google" in a couple of days (half an hour after her first lone journey into the internet, i found 50+ empty mozilla browsers running!).

    About a week later i installed XP (partition) and asked her to use it instead. Here is the summary of her questions/discussion before i switched her back to Suse!

    1. Who are Carina, Angelaxxx, SusyDeep, TOM, etc? and why do you have friends like that??!?!?!

    I use t-online. Unsolicited messages are norm. People familiar with these messages would know the content of these messages! No matter how much i try to convince mom that i have nothing to do with "those friends" she is still suspicious of me :-)

    2. "People have lost fortunes in gambling. Its the slippery back of the snail. Stop gambling."

    You see, when she opened a website in Explorer she recieved web-advertisements. A lot of them. I do not know the reason and i do not have the statistics to back it up, but i have also felt that the number of advertisements/pop-ups are far more in MS Windows/Explorer as compared to Mozilla/Linux. She had seen advertisements from online casinos!

    3. There is something wrong with your computer because i can not read the text?

    It is one of those things that is almost unbelievable but the website (our local newspaper in Urdu language) which she could read in Mozilla simply did not show the text in Explorer. I know you would say "font" but hey which OS had all the fonts on its side!

    4. There is something wrong with your power-supply plug!

    Thats what she thought was the reason for the machine "rebooting" itself every now and then. Honestly, i have not had the time to figure out why XP does this on my AMD Athlon machine- auto-reboot 2/3 times per week? Till the time i know the exact reason i would just think that there is something wrong with power-supply cable!

    etc. etc.

    You get the picture why i simply switched back.

    I will add one thing before i pen off. I installed Suse 8.2 from DVD and it was the most painless installation experience of my life... 14-15 minutes and everything was working, including nVidia card and the DSL! I got to tell you that it went so smooth that i really thought that something was wrong! Once the system was running i could update everything (patches etc.) within half an hour with 2-3 clicks of mouse. I love Debian's "apt-get" now i love YAST too.

    I have a much better opinion now. Thanks mom.

    p.s.
    Back home, she is insisting that my younger brother install the "soosey" too :-)

    --


    Voltaire: God is dead.
    God: Voltaire is dead!
  9. Re:Bad for economy by adrianbaugh · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Why would people put icons in the kernel? (Well, other than the Tux boot logo..)
    I suggest you try tunning a distribution from 2 or 3 years ago, maybe Red Hat 6, and then comparing that with Red Hat 9. Or the equivalent Mandrake numbers or whatever else. There is a huge difference.

    Oh. Sorry. I have been trolled, I have lost :)

    --
    "'I pass the test,' she said. 'I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel.'"
    - JRR Tolkien.