City of Vienna Chooses Linux

Bill Kendrick writes "Back in January, ZDNet reported that the city of Vienna, Austria was looking to move at least a portion of its desktops to Linux. Well, it looks like it happened (in German; use the fish). Their official distro is based on Debian with KDE, and is called WEINUX." Update: 07/06 12:49 GMT by T : Several readers wrote to correct the spelling here: the correct name of the distro is "WIENUX."

Comments

The distribution is called "WIENUX"

[quigonn]

It is called "WIENUX", not "WEINUX", as the city of Vienna is called "Wien" in German, not "Wein" (which means wine in German, and has nothing to do with Vienna).

Re:The distribution is called "WIENUX"

[Anonymous Coward]

Because the english names are the old/middle- german names, as the English-source-race Angles and Saxons left what is now Germany a long time ago, whereas the English-source-race Normans came to england from what is now France much later. Like still calling "New York" "New Amsterdam".

Re:The distribution is called "WIENUX"

[Sique]

It's not only that, it's also connected to the fact, that French is a roman language, related to the Latin, which in the middle age was the language of choice for international relations, where German is... hum... a germanic language ;)

So English often has a romanized version of the german name for german towns, while for french towns the name is already roman, thus no change.
An example would be Muenchen -> Munich.

A second factor is that the west and south german towns often have roman roots and were founded by roman soldiers as frontier towns and castles to defend the Limes (the roman border) against the Germans. Those towns have a 2000 year old latin name, which is still reflected in English, but the german name was heavily changed due to bad spelling and pronounciation by the inhabitants.

Examples for the later:
Koeln, latin name Colonia Agrippina -> Cologne.
Wien, latin name Vindobona -> Vienna
Trier, latin name Augusta Treverorum (this one is Trier in English too ;) )

For north and east german towns the english name often is the german one, because those towns were founded much later and started out either with a german name anyway (Hamburg, Bremen...) or have a name that is derived from the old slawic name (Berlin [this one is still slawic], Drezdany -> Dresden, Lipa -> Leipzig, Kamenice -> Chemnitz), where only the german name survived.

Re:The distribution is called "WIENUX"

[Anonymous Coward]

It is supposed that the latin "Vindobona" is based on the celtic "Wenia" (meaning rivulet), who where the inhabitants before the Romans came.
But it seems that nobody in the area agrees on a common place name for the same thing: http://www.gemi.at/Ortstafeln/WienUrsprung.htm (sorry, German), so Vienna=Viden (czech)=Pecs (hungarian)=Dunaj (slowenian).

Just for completeness, shouldn't it be called "KWIENUX"?

Re:The distribution is called "WIENUX"

[oever]

Vienna (Wien) was originally a Roman settlement called Vindobona which is latin for 'good wine'.

Spelling Mistake

[dr.matrix]

Because Vienna is "Wien" in German, that's "Wienux".

Re:All right

[eobanb]

In case anyone doesn't get this joke, it's in reference to a Japanese video game called Katamari Damacy (Damachii) with a cult following. It involves rolling a small sticky ball around through towns, cities, and the countryside that picks up objects (starting with small objects, like thumbtacks); as the ball grows bigger, the ball is able to obtain larger objects, like cars, and so on, eventually being able to pick up entire large pieces of the landscape. This is actually a great analogy to the growing popularity of Linux, I think. As the marketshare and mindshare of OSS grows, so do its chances of scoring a big customer, like municipal Vienna. Hobbyists are the paperclips, and the cities are, well, the cities. I applaud both OSS developers and Vienna for making this happen.

Re:Neutralized

[Hrshgn]

And Switzerland is in the UN since 2002.

Re:Ambitious targets

[g4LastingNFree]

Also from the article:

..confident that the voluntary migration to WIENUX and OpenOffice.org will be a positiv experience. "we assume the number of people who will change to WIENUX will not exceed some hundred in the first year. Many will just watch how well it works, before they decide" means Lic. Engineer Gillich.

The move to Linux in Munich is on a massive sale, whereas in Vienna it is just a small experiment (some 100 users). The move to OpenOffice is not on a small scale though. OpenOffice will be installed on all computers in Vienna, not just the ones running WIENUX.

Human translation of article

[Anonymous Coward]

Since the babelfish translation is beyond discussion, here's a human-translated version. I'm not a native speaker of English, so excuse some mistakes. I omitted some paragraphs at the end, otherwise everything is complete. Pretty interesting article actually :-).

---

Correspondence of the Office of the Mayor (July 5th, 2005)

WIENUX-Day: Viennese Solution for Open Source

Open Source in Vienna (Wien) - Presentation of WIENUX

Vienna (RK). Today Stadtrat (city councillor) member Rudi Schicker presented the current status of OS-usage in Vienna during a media conference in the main public library of Vienna. Together with Gemeinderat (councillor) A. Schieder and Nationalratsabgeordnetem (member of national parliament) Josef Broukal, WIENUX was presented, the version of Linux prepared for use in the city of Vienna. During a WIENUX information day, employees of the city of Vienna could get information about WIENUX and OpenOffice.org and try out Linux and OpenOffice.org on the spot. As Schicker emphasizes: "it's not about making decisions so to say from above, but giving the employees individual freedoms where possible, for a creative administration, ".

Vienna has already used OSS products for several years in the server area. Because of the positive experiences made, the development of OSS standard componentes for desktops has been observed for some time, and their use been investigated in study. The MA 14-ADV (IT department???) administrates 18,000 PCs, 8,200 printers and 560 servers. Most desktops run under Windows 2000, whose support by Microsoft will last until 2010, but there is not that much time. "Every five to seven years, a great pressure to migrate evolves, even if you skip over one to two versions" points out department head Dipl.- Ing. (engineer) SR Erwin Gillich. Therefore a migration of the systems would be due three years earlier, at the latest 2008, in contrast to Munich [another Linux deployment], where the time pressure was much greater because of obsolete hard- and software.

Open Source study

During a study, a comprehensive inventory of the sw used on every PC was made and used as a basis for finding the migration potential. The results of the study "OSS in the Magistrat Wien" show, that about 7,500 PCs could use the licensing-cost-free OpenOffice.org instead of MS Office. 4,800 of these PCs could even be switched to an OSS operating system.

In October 2004, a working group was started, which worked on the use of OS sw on the desktops of the Magistrat. The requirement was to develop an open source platform which can communicate with the existing MS infrastructure. The results are the custom-tailored operating system WIENUX and the use of OpenOffice.org. Both are offered by the MA 14-ADV in the course of a "gentle product introduction" beginning in June 2005.

Voluntary switchover

The most important consideration is voluntariness: Those who want to can choose the open source way; who is attached to the old products, may stay there. The licensing-cost-free operating system WIENUX was developed based on Debian with the KDE (Kool Desktop Enviroment) desktop. Firefox is used as the web browser, emails can be accessed using MS Outlook WebAccess, there is also an SAP-access and various additional tools. WIENUX is under the so-called GNU/GPL (GNU General Public Licence).

OpenOffice.org

OpenOffice.org, which is also free of licensing cost, is the counterpart to MS-Office, which the Magistrat currently uses. It can be installed in a cross-platform fashion on both WIENUX- and MS-Windows-PCs, an can be used in parallel to MS-Office under Windows2000. OOo comprises the programs Writer (for writing documents), Calc (for making tables), Impress (for presentations), Draw (drawing program), Base (DB module) and Math (scientific formula editor).

Making experiences

In order t

Re:Please, people. Lets not start a distro war...

[jaavaaguru]

Ubuntu, folks. Ubuntu. It defaults to Gnome (and you can always switch to KDE)

Kubuntu, folks. Kubuntu. It defaults to KDE.

IE and EI

[poenn]

I often see Americans changing these in german words. I think it is because of the pronounciation. Wien for example only sounds like Wien, if Americans write it Wein. You can see this in any word containing these 2 letters. I've seen Weiners instead of Wieners, etc... Well, at least you know that Bier is Beer and not Beir... :-)

Re:when sahll we have a critical mass?

[XTbushwakko]

I agree that Dell pushing linux as the main OS and Windows as an expensive addon would be better. However it's very unlikely.

Even if, for example, DELL started offering Linux as an alternative, most people would probably stick with what they know, MS Windows. Sure, the market share of Linux would increase, but I don't think it would be widely used by your average consumer.

Well, that little market share increase would be in the newbie/inexperienced/regular joe sector.

If like one inexperienced guy could get a linux alternative from a "trusted" source like Dell and then being able to tell his friends it suddenly is main-stream. It's a whole lot diffrent then a newbie which has gotten linux pushed on him by his geek friend (read: me).That user will think he's using a hard to use OS, while if Dell sold it to him, he'll think of it as an alternative. AND he'd probably have support.

Re:Clarifications

[RasputinAXP]

Having been to Austria twice (Vienna and Salzburg, nothing in between unfortunately),

* Nope, there's no kangaroos
* No, there's no Nazi government
* The Wiener Schnitzel IS quite tasty. I've always loved veal.
* It DID snow both times I was there, and both trips happened to be in April. Snow doesn't stick to the ground in Wien though.
* No sauerkraut to be found
* Certainly not German.
* I only saw Lederhosen once, and that was on TV. I didn't catch all of it, but I think it was a German character anyway.

I plan on going back ASAP after I visit a friend in Germany.

Re:Ambitious targets

[sloanster]

Amazing how quick the battlecry goes from "users should have choice" to "users should use linux"

drsmitty misquoted the poster and confounded "should use linux and ms windows" with "should use linux" - and this error somehow adds up to "insightful"?