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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."
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
And if the CEO of RedHat didn't travel to Munich to convince the city to convert to RedHat, he's an idiot.
Je ne parle pas francais.
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.
Well done, Steve. Should we send him a gift basket?
Prior to 2003 they were perfectly happy with using windows.
After Balmer's trip.. Wholly shit we have to switch to ANYTHING ELSE ASAP.
Photo from said trip
http://www.models.hr/models/images/stories/slike/najbogatiji/steve_ballmer.jpg
I heard several Munich city officials were later admitted to hospital with chair-related injuries
I was expecting the parent to be goatse, but no, it's actually Ballmer, which is probably more offending to the eye than goatse.
Monstar L
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!
It's still Gotse, but a different angle
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.
If they used, say Ubuntu, they would have to retrain the personnel every time GNOME or Ubuntu folks decide it's a good idea to rethink the whole UI design and human-machine interaction mechanisms. Regardless of whether the new design is or is not better than the old one, it still needs retraining. Retraining = cost. So no, I think that sticking with their own flavor was an excellent idea.
"I'm never quite so stupid as when I'm being smart" (Linus van Pelt)
Limux is based on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS with KDE 3.5 on top. They do maintain a personalised version of OpenOffice and are keeping Thunderbird and Firefox up to date. source in german (http://www.golem.de/1108/85823.html)
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 opposed to retraining when Windows completely changes?
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
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.
We find that a large part of the employees at our company has the new version at home long before they are migrated at work, so due to enterprises being slow adopters of new versions, the problem sort of solves itself.
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.
He's looks all happy because Bobba Fett brought him Han Solo.
FRA: STFU GTFO
I think all sides would benefit from seeing this as a symbiotic relationship and treat each other with mutual respect. Yes, IT staff needs that troublesome salesman who rakes in the orders. That salesman also needs IT support to be productive. And those managers are really only effective when they create an environment where their minons can do what they hired them to do.
The system breaks down when any one group deludes themselves into thinking they are more valuable to the organization than they are. In my case, I remind myself that even the "lowly janitor" who cleans my lab (always with a smile) and keeps the dust away from my sensitive instruments, the skilled tradesman who fixes the water chiller that keeps my electron microscope running, and the technician that refills my liquid nitrogen cylinders enable my productivity. They each deserves my respect - and admiration. It is honest labor; tasks that I don't like to do or am not good at. It is a much more pleasant work environment when everyone realizes that the whole is more than the sum of the parts...
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.
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.
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.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
Here you go: http://www.rfgonline.com/subsforum/LinuxTCO.pdf