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City of Vienna Chooses Linux

Posted by timothy on from the penguins-ah-kuhl dept.

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."

3 of 268 comments (clear)

  1. The distribution is called "WIENUX" by quigonn · · Score: 5, Informative

    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).

    --
    A monkey is doing the real work for me.
    1. Re:The distribution is called "WIENUX" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      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".

  2. Human translation of article by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative
    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 :-).

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    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