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Munich's Move To Linux Exceeds Target
jrepin writes "In May 2003, Munich's city council resolved to migrate municipal workstations from Windows to Linux and open source. Munich's LiMux project has announced that it has exceeded its annual target for migrating the city's PCs to its LiMux client. To date in 2011, the project has migrated 9,000 systems; it had originally planned to migrate 8,500 of the 12,000-15,000 PC workstations used by city officials in Munich."
He says that 1,000 staff had been maintaining 15,000 Windows computers. Fifteen computers per tech? Not impressive, by an order of magnitude.
Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
If they were smart, $200.00 base PC's netbooting from a central server.
Doing this with linux = support heaven. Weneed to update Libre Office? ok, 20 minutes later it's done for ALL MACHINES.
Update the OS for security issues? Ok, 1 hour later ALL MACHINES are now up to date.
Push out a new application.... the same.
etc...
Plus a dead workstation is a 10 minute fix. replace the box with a new one, power it on. I can fix a exploded desktop computer while the person is on a smoke break.
Lost documents? don't exist, they all are on the servers and backed up regularly. with an advantage that is hard to achieve in windows. If a user deletes a file, It's still there in the repository. in fact all changes are saved there as well. so a disgruntled employee has zero damage impact capability.
For 80% of the staff and executives this system works perfectly. the 20% which are IT staff, engineers, and Programmers they have their own separate stand alone desktops and/or laptops. All the IT staff have both, a Thin client on their desk and a stand alone laptop.
Number of high power servers dropped from 8 to 5 when we switched, we no longer need a stupid powerful exchange server so that was re-purposed as a application server. and we have a hot backup application server as well.
If you have ran a Citrix farm, it's much like that except easier. the servers need a buttload of ram and fast drives, but configurations allow the thin clients to take advantage of local ram and processor+video. so the browsers, java, and other processor wasting apps run locally to the thin client but store all data to the server and load from the image.
It required competent IT admins though, so we pay 2X the typical MS drone rate, but have 5X less employees in IT to deal with every possible issue.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Well anyone who has seen Steve Ballmer hooting like a madman while leaving sweat pools across the stage would know that Ballmer is waaaay more offensive than Goatse. Frankly i think he makes the Pepsi guy that ran Apple look like a fricking genius.You know its bad when Gates actually had to come out and say "I'm not coming back to MSFT, quit with the rumors already' because so many are unhappy with Ballmer they were hoping for a Jobs style saving of the company.
As for TFA its nice to see that some that try switching aren't doing it for the WRONG reasons, because they always seem to lead to failure. if you want to switch to Linux because its open? Because it lets YOU decide how long support will last? Because it allows you to look at and modify the code to suit YOUR needs? Congratulations you have switched for the RIGHT reasons and will most likely succeed. Where you see Linux fail time and time again is at these companies where they only care about "free as in beer" and they quickly find out that if all you want Linux for is to save money you are gonna lose and lose big.
Lets face it folks Linux isn't gonna save you a dime, not in the short or medium term anyway. You are gonna need more expensive Linux admins instead of dirt cheap MCSEs, you are gonna have to hire developers to code FOSS versions of any and all niche programs you have, you are gonna have to pay people to get your files out of proprietary formats and into FOSS ones, its not gonna be cheap friends. That is why the ones that ONLY care about price are doomed to fail, as when they don't see their budgets magically drop by half and in fact see costs initially rise they are gonna bail.
But if you do it for the right reasons listed above you will stick with it and end up probably better off than you were before since you won't be tied into any products by proprietary vendors like Adobe or MSFT and buy hiring internal coders and admins will be able to DIY instead of going out and buying solutions that will have to be re-bought when the support date ends.
So its nice to see someone looking like they are gonna have a happy outcome by doing it for the right reasons after all the stories we have seen of Linux being used for the wrong reasons and failing. I bet if you looked at their budget they probably haven't saved squat yet and possibly have even had the price go up as they have paid for all of the above that I listed, but they now have more control and can pay to have it customized any way they desire.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.