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Major Retailer Chooses Linux for its Tills

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the another-one-bites-the-dust dept.

An anonymous reader writes "ZDNet is running an article on how Matalan has installed several thousand point of sale terminals running Linux rather than Windows. The reason? Reduced cost of ownership. It was a big consultancy that did the work, Capgemini, and IBM on the kit side. Sounds like some people can get Linux to work in an 'enterprise environment' after all."

6 of 316 comments (clear)

  1. Work.. by Tesko · · Score: 5, Informative

    I work as a cashier at a grocery store, and they run MS XP Embedded. We have at least 1 till crash at least once a day. Causing major headaches, I wish we had them running on Linux...

    1. Re:Work.. by rm69990 · · Score: 5, Informative

      Same with Canada Safeway, where I used to work. They moved their cash systems from Unix to Windows Server 2003 and WinXP Embedded, and now the actual terminals have to rebooted periodicly throughout the day as they lock up. It is actually something new cashiers are trained to do.

  2. Maplin allready use Linux for POS by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    I work for an electronics company in the UK called Maplin.

    They allready use Fedora for all their equipment.

    Thunderbird for e-mail and firefox for web browser.

  3. I work at Pizza Hut by Headcase88 · · Score: 5, Informative

    We run DOS.

    --
    "When the atomic bomb goes off there's devastation...but when the atomic bong goes off there's celebraaaaation!"
  4. Re:easy decision by tmasssey · · Score: 5, Informative
    OS/2 used to be very well used in IBM POS machines. OS/2 was used for more than just ATM's. It could be stripped very small and put into all kinds of places!

    It was also a popular OS for vertial applications such as bank terminals. NationsBank grew from a tiny bank to the 6th largest bank (before they were bought by Bank of America) on a plan of aggressive acquisition. A large part of this strategy was their computer infrastructure. It was heavily based on OS/2: Each branch had a single centrally-administered OS/2 Workspace on Demand server. All computers in a branch would actually boot from the server (LTSP-style), with all of its applications ready to go. If the bank wanted to update their software, they could push these changes from a central point to each branch overnight (or over time), and schedule the switchover. The next day, everyone came in and was completely updated.

    You can do the same with Linux (I already mentioned LTSP, but this was almost 10 years ago.

    Like they say, what's old is new again.

    --
    Linux IT Consulting and Domino Development in Michigan
  5. Re:Aren't POS systems usually dumb terminals? by vastabo · · Score: 5, Informative

    4690 is Digital Research FlexOS with IBM's name on it; IBM didn't even bother to grep the help files for DR references or change "dredix" to "ibmedit" or something. I'm really not sure why they went with FlexOS either, but I'm sure they had their reasons.

    The registers CAN run Windows or OS/2 but 500MHz Celerons (or lower) tend to die. So, like you said, it tFTP boots a basic OS which includes a funny little Java Virtual Machine and some TCP/IP utilities (I think you can telnet into them, but I haven't tried). The JVM will load whatever frontend the vendor soaked you for (usually some kind of Java/XML type deal that pulls stuff from the database back on the store controller). We use a really god-aweful Swing app for display. The registers usually have uptimes in the 3 month range unless something bad happens on the store controller (like IBM Deskstar hard drives).