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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."
in 2003 steve balmer travelled to munich to convince the city council to keep running windows
The article says, "Last year, Florian Schießl, a LiMux project director, stated that he and his team had been naïve and had underestimated the extent of minor problems."
"naïve" links to another article on the same site, h-online.com, from March 2010,
* LiMux project management, "We were naïve", http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/LiMux-project-management-We-were-naive-958824.html
This one states: On his blog, the IT expert admits that "We were naïve," and confesses to a "miscalculation".
This links to
* http://www.floschi.info/2010/03/quality-over-time-in-munich/
but floschi.info just says "It works". The Internet Archive records only cover up to Feb 2010 (http://wayback.archive.org/web/20100501000000*/http://www.floschi.info)
http://stephan.sugarmotor.org
Anyone have any information on what LiMux looks like? What DE does it come what? Screenshots would be nice... I googled around but couldn't find any information on it.
I'm more interested in if the users are satisfied. Or works faster? Or works slower? Or users rate the overall experience as positive? Negative?
A sheer number of workstations migrated is about as useful as a McDonald's "X Billions of Billions Served!" number. Don't tell me how many you served . . . where they eaten . . . ? . . . and how did they taste . . . ?
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
I don't see why they roll their own distro. This means they have to maintain all sorts of stuff themselves, while there are already so many viable alternatives. If they used, say Ubuntu, support would probably be much better.
The licenses do not tend to be much of a saving but once you have fired the 200+ college drop outs that are looking after the Windows computers and hired 40 people that actually know what they are doing you can save a lot on salaries and the reliability of the system causes a massive saving indirectly. I saw this in reverse several times when places that I dealt with replaced their Sun systems with Windows and had to take on loads of teenagers with a piece of college paper and no idea of how DHCP should be set up. Down times jumped from less than an hour a year to days per year.
But at least the staff could see the acne ridden youths working, they never believed that the old guys with beards and tank tops did anything as the system just worked...
I love stacking my barbecues in the shed at the end of summer - you can't beat a bit of grill on grill action.
Yes, one place I was at there were 10x the support staff per Windows desktop compared to the Sun workstations. Sometimes I was the *only* Sun support guy for over 500 machines, which was quite hard work but do-able. Actually, they were so low maint that an audit discovered 100 or so Suns that we had forgotten about and that were doing their jobs just fine! (This was a long time ago...)
And still, the effort that has to go into keeping Windows boxes (even W7) running is hugely more than the Solaris and Linux servers that I have deployed all over the planet, in my experience, though less so than previously.
Rgds
Damon
http://m.earth.org.uk/
As much as it is about German efficiency.
The real amazing thing is that they beat the communists.
Linux uber alles!
At every turn I am faced with more Microsoft lock-in. Most recently has been an inventory tracking database system. They advertised a "web interface" option but were unable to provide a demonstration of it. After the company bought the product anyway, it was revealed that their "web" interface was actually Silverlight. I realize that Microsoft just released an update to Silverlight, but isn't it already slated for extinction? And when I asked the vendor if they have any HTML 5 intentions, they had no answer at all. So here I am facing yet another application which requires Microsoft Windows, MSIE 8 and a proprietary control set which cannot easily exist in any other way. We already have Documentum which is supposed to be able to use Firefox and the like but thanks to Mozilla's insistence on their INSANE version escalation practices, every update is an X.0 update meaning Documentum thinks it can't support it.
Frustration all around. Thank you Microsoft for shoving your crap through developers and vendors. Thank you vendors for buying into their crap only to find yourselves having to re-write your software AGAIN as Microsoft drops support for the platforms you built your apps on. Thank you Firefox for making the task of trying to migrate to your client all the more difficult. Thanks go around pretty evenly.
Continue playing with your GI Joe toys. You just blurbed two words I never heard here in Germany since I was born in the 70s (in Germany to German parents).
If they can't be bothered to check the "Web Interface" by qualified IT personnel (who would have found out about the Silverlight thing), then the situation you describe appears to be primarily the fault of your employer.
Unfortunately you are not alone with this, I have seen lots of instances of companies buying $hitty software after having been nicely talked to by a seasoned salesman. "Leadership" personnel is quite often extremely sloppy when it comes to software purchasing decisions and they certainly don't even ask for expert advise. They leave it to their experts to attempt a fix of the mess they bought.
They require fewer service personal, the developed Debian/Ubuntu based distribution can be shared with other cities, and all the money spent for services by the city stays in Germany and with German companies which is very clever for a Municipal, as this results in jobs and taxes. Instead of a money transfer to the US.
As a city you should not think in business and macro-economic terms, you have to look on it from a macro-economic viewpoint. And you have to look at the long run. Well you should look on long term results in a company as well, but a state hast to do so. Otherwise it goes bust.
The amount of computers I can personally maintain could be as high as thousands or as low as one. All depends on what your requirements are.
For example suppose my job is to do nothing but maintain the systems in working order. I don't help users with problems at all, I just make sure the computers and software works properly. I'm allowed total control, all systems are one make and model and are under warranty at all times, they are replaced when they fall out. They all run a single, unified, set of software, none of it custom. Users have no admin access, all data is stored on a highly reliable, supported, central server.
Well hell in that situation, I can maintain a virtually unlimited number of systems myself. Only real limit is in terms of how often hardware fails and I have to diagnose it and call in warranty support (who will do the actual repairs). Highly reliable central equipment that is supported by the company combined with management software like Ghost mean that I'll do things once and replicate it everywhere.
Now on the other end of the scale, suppose I am expected to provide extremely hands on support. Each and every computer is custom built to the user's wishes, both hardware and software. They get it setup however they want. They also have full and complete admin access. Plus, I am expected to handle any questions or training they have. In that case, I'm not going to be able to handle many systems. 15 might well be too many. I'm going to have to spend a lot of time per system helping people, fixing their fuckups, and so on. I'll hit my limit at a low number of systems.
So it is all in what you want. The more service you want, the more staff you need. We go through that with the Dean at work all the time. He wants us to make faculty happy, which means lots of handholding and support for special research projects, but he doesn't want to spend a lot and hire a lot of staff. We have to keep explaining that you can't have it both ways.
Now they may well have had some inefficiency as well, but part of it can just be a very extensive amount of support. If your support team has a lot of jobs, they need a lot of people.
People can be productive using Windows? It all depends what you mean by "productive".
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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.
Just info for younger people on /.
In terms of large agencies that tried moving to Linux there were 3 main groups of companies
1) Companies that never had developed a Windows culture. Generally they were Unix shops (Sun, Sco primarily) and they were able to move to Linux easily.
2) Companies that were highly motivated tech companies: IBM, Oracle, Sun that all had a Windows culture. They had embarrassing failures in moving to Windows.
3) Companies that were not particularly technological and wanted to save money. The bag was mixed here but in general the costs got out of control and they threw in the towel.
Munich represents the one place where despite going way over time and budget they have kept plowing away. Demonstrating what it is actually going to take to move a large enterprise with a Windows culture over to Linux.
So 9000 copies of Windows not bought. Let's say that save you $50 per machine (perhaps less) at OEM pricing. tha'ts $450,000. Now how many linux techs did they hire to maintain this? Id assume at least 1 for every 100 machines and what is their annual salary? Compared to windows techs, linux techs get more money.
It is true that Linux admins cost more money but you need fewer Linux admins for the same number of workstations so there is an overall savings.
a German government.
"Give a woman two glasses of wine and some pad thai, and they'll agree to just about anything." the Sports Guy
And 9000 Windows machines don't need no support? You should at least have posted a link to MS's "research" on how Linux TCO is HUEG and everyone should buy Windows instead.
The 1 to 100 machines ratio is only valid for Windows machines and 1 to 20 for Windows Server w/ Microsoft platforms like Exchange, MSSQL. I personally manage 60 Linux and Mac machines, 10 Windows machines and 10 Linux/Solaris servers. The Windows machines is where I spend most of my time (cleaning up crap others do like inadvertently installing spyware or viruses even though we have antivirus, even with Windows 7 certain software requires Admin privileges) and the rest of the day I can play video games. Beyond updates and permission updates I don't need to touch the Linux servers or workstations. Mac machines are a bit more involved in updates because they don't have a central software repository and because people can muck up their preferences. The Solaris systems literally have several hundred days of uptime and require hardly an update.
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I guess it depends on what you count as admins. I figure at my company we have an admin ratio of about 300-500:1 for Linux desktop workstations and laptops. But do you count the helpdesk people who answer any question for any OS including email, and mobile phone access to corp resources? What about the user storage admins? They make the NFS/CIFS and backups work.
I guess I don't know how that compares to the number of windows and MacOS admins we have, or the number of deployed machines.
I consider all of IT as a group which helps end-users. If an IT group can't manage a 100:1 ratio then you're either extremely bad or you got extremely incompetent end-users.
I do include in my figure (me) doing all the servers (e-mail, web, database, ...), managing web content, creating disk images, managing 2 SANs doing about 100TB of storage and backups and most of my machines being shared among 250 users (it's a research lab), I receive all the phone calls for everything from 'install this program' and 'my x doesn't work' to 'I have this new gadget, help me' and 'so I have this idea to transfer data to another site, how do I do that'.
The only thing that's really outsourced for us is our Internet connection, web design and the actual construction of the network (running the wires and drilling holes in the walls).
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Not to mention the coward was talking about multi-billion dollar corps. Corps that size having to hire an army of coders to write custom apps, or paying a couple of hundred guys to convert files? Wouldn't even make line 23 of the budget proposal. When you are talking THAT level of business frankly short terms costs are rarely considered which is the exact opposite of most businesses or even small governments.
As we have seen several times on /. those that simply looked at Linux as "free as in beer" and didn't figure in migration costs ended up running back to Windows because the initial switch will cost you MORE than simply staying with what you have. This is simply common sense, a major arch or OS switch will always be more expensive than sticking with what you have, especially when MSFT sells site licenses. You have all those gotchas that nobody has figured in, like incompatible hardware, data conversion costs, having to have written a FOSS version of some proprietary app that simply won't run in Wine or paying the Wine guys to add support, etc.
Change is ALWAYS more expensive that staying where you are, which is why as you say you costs is only a small part and as I say you should change for the RIGHT reasons and not simply the bottom line.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Here you go: http://www.rfgonline.com/subsforum/LinuxTCO.pdf