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

Gawd

[Craig Davison]

Buncha Wieners.

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".

Why must...

[concept10]

We get the report when a decent sized city and/or organization switches to Linux? I would rather read some reports of how the transition to Linux was, what software they use, initial user reactions to the OS. You know basic shit like that.

Clarifications

[ardor]

I'm Austrian, and want to clarify some stuff I keep hearing about Austria by tourists:

* no, we are not the country with the kangaroos
* no, we don't have a Nazi government (I keep hearing that from Americans all the time)
* our Wiener Schnitzel is really tasty, yeah
* our kids don't go to school by skiing (well, most of them don't)
* we don't eat much sauerkraut. That's what Germans do.
* never confuse us with Germans. We really don't like that. Its like confusing americans with canadians. They eat us alive if we do this.
* We don't wear Lederhosen all the time.

Re:Clarifications

[mabinogi]

I'm a New Zealander, and I want to clarify some stuff I keep hearing about New Zealand by Australians.

* Yes we are the country with the sheep
* We use the sheep for meat and wool, and are not entirely sure what Australians think sheep are kept for, or why they would immediately jump to the conclusions they do.
* Every famous Australian is really a New Zealander.
* Every one of them.

Follow Up Story

[gregarican]

I have read a decent number of articles about cities choosing to adopt Linux but would be more curious to read a follow up story of how the transition went using hindsight, say a month later, a year later, etc. What were the major obstacles and how were they overcome? After the dust settled how does worker productivity and cost effectiveness stand? These sort of facts could help start a domino effect where other IT execs could build cases to present to their respective PHB's in order to make the switch.

Kind of like some of the countless U.S. reality shows where people and houses are made over (e.g. - The Swan, The Biggest Loser, Extreme Home Makeover). Rather than short term focus I'd love to see the shows check in a year later to see how things look. That's more indicative of true success and failure.

Re:Ambitious targets

[Freaky Spook]

Im just coming from the economical side, I work as a technician in public schools and the money that the Government spends on software licences for M$ products is huge.

90% of all my problems are troubleshooting desktop problems with WinXP and also problems with Word, Excell & Outlook. I am not saying that by using Linux these problems will disapear, but it will be cheaper to support these Programs because less is being spent on software licencing.

Its simple economics the only difference between a Linux system & Windows system for users who only need to use the basics is price, why spend X amount of dollars on one thing when you can get the same result much cheaper.

I do believe in choice, but I don't see the logic in going to the expense of something because its believed to be easier, I am not completley Pro linux, but in a government environment where Tax payers are paying for everything, the best value alternative seems much more appealing.

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:Ambitious targets

[replicant108]

Nice attempt at a straw man argument.

The battlecry (as you term it) is actually "customers should have choice".

In a corporate environment the customer is the organisation.