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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."
In my humble opinion, migrating from Windows to Linux is bad for economy. Think about it. While new versions of Windows are packed full of advanced, bleeding-edge innovations, the new Linux versions are mostly indistinguishable from each other. Or can anyone here claim that migrating from Linux 2.2 to 2.4 brought a single new icon to their desktops ? Maybe 2.6 will bring a much-needed improvement to this. Back to economy. It's a well-known fact that a healthy economy demands an increase in spending. This, in turn, requires people to buy things. If people can get what they need for free, then they don't pay, spending decreases, economy suffers, and so do people. Therefore, it's the duty of every patriotic citizen to help economy by avoiding "free" stuff. Furthermore, it's a well-known fact that Linux lasts almost forever without maintenance; there's still people running 2.2 ! Obviously, this is a bad thing for economy. With Windows, there's the healthy drive to update every few years, followed by an equally healthy drive to update your hardware as well. Besides, think about it - the biggest Linux distributor is REDhat ! Now what does that remind us of ? That's right - when you're downloading Linux, you're downloading Communism !
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
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: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!
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!
With every migration, there is always the issue of "does the new product implement all 25000 features of the old product".
When you start your migration with the assumption "the new product must do everything the old product did plus possibly more" you will not only limit your options, but you will also migrate to more and more complex systems.
Instead, you should look at the requirements of the organisation, and define the properties of the system that will be implemented. Maybe Outlook/Exchange implements them, but that does not mean that it is the only solution to the problem.
Don't try to implement an Outlook/Exchange replacement, but define what your company needs and implement that. Possibly it does not need all the features of Outlook/Exchange and thus they do not need to be present in the "replacement".
We run an IMAP mailserver on Linux, with LDAP address book, and a separate web-based calendaring system. All are accessed from Mozilla on the (Windows) desktops. It works fine.
The only thing I would want to be improved is the maintenance of the LDAP address book by nontechnical users.