Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft's Bulk Deal With New Zealand Collapses
vik writes "The latest 3-year, pan-government deal that Microsoft has been establishing with the New Zealand government since 2000 has collapsed, opening the doors to the wider use of open source software in government. The NZ State Services Commission (already a prize-winning user of open source) says in a statement that it '...became apparent during discussions that a formal agreement with Microsoft is no longer appropriate.' Having lost their discount, individual government departments will now have to put their IT requirements out to tender individually."
What if you have an unattended install, how hard is windows to install then?
-- if you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine
It depends on who's doing the slipstream.
I was able to get a fully updated, SP3 XP unattended install with DriverPacks for everything in less than an hour my first time ever working with the programs.
Doing an attended install means no million restarts due to the install disk I have only being up to SP1, not having to mess around with drivers, and not having to mess with the activation key.
If I wanted to go even further I could have set it up to autoinstall Firefox, Foxit Reader, and OpenOffice by doing a browse and finding the installers for each.
Now of course this preparation work is extra when compared to say, Linux or OS X, but any slashdotter worth his salt with a Windows install can make a slipstreamed disk that does an unattended install without any particular headaches, and the end result is a XP or Vista (if your using vLite) disk that is actually easier to install than Linux or OS X.