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French Police To Switch 72,000 Desktop PCs To Linux
jones_supa writes "France's National Gendarmerie — the national law enforcement agency — is now running 37,000 desktop PCs with a custom distribution of Linux, and by summer of 2014, the agency plans to switch over all 72,000 of its desktop machines. The agency claims that the TCO of open source software is about 40 percent less than proprietary software from Microsoft, referring to their article published by EU's Interoperability Solutions for Public Administrations. Initially Gendarmerie has moved to Windows versions of cross-platform OSS applications such as OpenOffice, Firefox, and Thunderbird. Now they are completing the process by changing the OS. This is one of the largest known government deployments of Linux on the desktop."
For the french too!
technically, the Gendarmerie are the military police force, that is mostly managing the countryside.
I think the FBI wants people with better IQ then some of the cops out there.
There are days when you wake up proud to have French ancestry.
"The wisdom of the Patriarchs was that they *knew* they were fools." --Master Foo
grep -vir selinux would never work France!
So not only do they get lower TCO, they also get 100% less built in spyware (literally) by the NSA.
It's truely a win-win!
Gendarmerie more or less does the policing outside in the countryside, the national police (Police national) does it in city. Also IIRC they also do control of road law. Originally they were a military police.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
The custom Linux distribution is called GenBuntu and is based on Ubuntu's 12.04 LTS release.
and call it SECAM Linux (System Essentially Contrary to American Method)
You do need to be more adaptable, which cops notoriously are NOT. I can hear right now the complaint of every (L)user getting a new Linux desktop, "It doesn't look right. The icons are in the wrong place. I can't use this. Give me my Windows machine back." The secretarial staff will probably not have any issue at all, but every actual officer will hate it for the first three months.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
Based on the assumption that the NSA didn't slip in anything funny when they were helping create SELinux.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
Indeed, the question should probably have been whether they were observant enough to notice the difference (which can, to an extent, depend on how well the Administrator did his/her job).
Moving to said open source applications beforehand was a smart move. Large-scale deployments like this can fail spectacularly, mostly due to the shock of having all of their applications change, rather than the actual OS. When the end users are already using Firefox, Open Office, etc., I have found that the transition goes much more smoothly with very little resistance.
If law officers can't figure out the difference between Office and OpenOffice/LibreOffice I *think* there might be bigger issues to worry about. :)
If they need to send stuff out of house, that's what PDF is for. When was the last time they needed out-of-house Office editing??
On the contrary, I recently did support at a company migrating from Office to LibreOffice to save on transition costs. Standard issue was Office 2007, but 2010 was present and 2013 was announced, boasting yet another new interface to learn. The company switched to LibreOffice, with only a few key Office installations for things that had to be perfectly correct to leave the company.
There was no real training budget, but there was only one brief period of transition rather than several, no licensing costs, and everything just worked.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
I suppose it was around the release of the 2.0 kernel that every year was heralded as the year of Linux on the desktop. Of course it was never really practical and eventually became something of a joke. But as the years have rolled on, Linux and the software that runs on it has steadily advanced. For various reasons, I think it's finally ready and I believe this is a demonstration of that. One thing that always held Linux back was the need to work with complex configuration files and work voodoo magic in a terminal (or console if you couldn't startx) to get things working right, and then continue to have to work like that to keep the system doing what you want. This was completely impractical for the general population. With modern Linux distributions you don't have to ever touch a terminal anymore than you do on a Mac - which for me is a lot because I'm a nerd but you catch my drift. Systems "just work" and installing software is no more difficult than looking for what you need in an "app store" just like on a phone. Also, graphical user interfaces have advanced forward leaps and bounds. I am currently running GNOME 3.10 and it's remarkably intuitive. Then we have software such as LibreOffice that are finally advanced and feature complete enough to be taken seriously. Even Wine works well these days. The only problem is the extreme choice we have in the form of fragmentation - this is very confusing for the general population. When I talk about Linux being ready for the masses, I am only speaking of a few distros that I won't name for fear of starting a war except to say the Ubuntu GNOME Saucy with 3.10 (almost out of beta) and elementary OS lead the pack. elementary OS would be the ultimate consumer distro if it wasn't problem ridden largely due to being stuck on being based on Ubuntu 12.04 - My own preferences erase all of that by being a Slackware, and for that matter FreeBSD fan - but again, I'm a nerd.
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
How long before they switch back to windows and declare the whole project a twisted waste of time and money?
And Microsoft will now unleash the flying monkeys to try to refute any claims about lower TCO.
I'm sure there will be studies trotted out, and all sorts of attempts to discredit this.
There's no way in hell they'll take this lying down, or without trying to get the government to intervene on their behalf -- perhaps as a trade issue and claim they're being unfairly excluded.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Pert of the problem is that the typical requirement for an office suite is described as "Work like Microsoft Office". Of course any competing office suite is going to be less good when compared to Microsoft Office using this criterion.
I know someone who is always talking up Windows. He knows that Windows has problems but assumes that Linux has these same problems (which it frequently does not), while highlighting issues with Linux. Put another way, he is blinded to problems in Windows while he exaggerates problems in Linux. I think that this is typical behaviour that has slowed down adoption of Linux.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
They already switched to OpenOffice, I've used both and while there are some differences, if you know one, you can use the other without too many problems.
Most folks don't even use more than a small percentage of the features of a word processor anyways. I have friends who work with lawyers who say Word is no good for them, and that they have to use WordPerfect for their legal documents.
I agree that formats are very important. This organization is large enough to be able to mandate the formats they will use. But a quick check of LibreOffice Writer (4.0.2.2) shows it can handle the fol formats: odt, ott, sxw, stw, fodt, uot, doxc(MS Word 2007/2010 XML) , doc, xml(ms Word 2003 and Doc Book), html, rtf, txt, and docx (OpenOffice XML Text)
It appears that they won't have many problems accepting any common format.
I work in a very large organization. We use MS Office, and we provide training for many of our staff in Excel, Word, Powerpoint and Outlook. If we were to swtich, it would involve creating new lesson plans, but the savings in licensing would more than pay for that.
Based on the assumption that the NSA didn't slip in anything funny when they were helping create SELinux.
no, based on peer review. with these revelations by the NSA, there has been an even higher level of scrutiny has been out on SELinux. a much more likely vector of attack would be through companies that only distribute binary blobs for their hardware.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
According to Wikipedia, the French government has already moved to using XML based formats like ODF and OOXML
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDocument_adoption#France
Government agencies are required to:
Accept documents submitted in XML formats: ODF format as like OOxml format (both are in "Observations")
Use PDF/A to preserve text documents
Government agencies are encouraged to:
Install OpenOffice.org (an open-source, ODF-based productivity suite)
Use ODF to create text documents, spreadsheets, and slideshow-style presentations
So Libre/OpenOffice has already been widely adopted among the government sector. Further training should be minimal at best.
Well, in many ways, Linux *is* inferior to Windows. Don't kid yourself. Especially for business use.
The fact is, most business software is Windows only. That's the deal-breaker for Linux, right there.
And Linux has nothing to compare to Active Directory. If you have to manage a bunch of desktops, Active Directory and Group Policy have no real equivalent on Linux. Yes, there is Puppet and stuff like that. But it's a colossal pain-in-the-ass compared to the very nice GUI tools (and Powershell, now) that Microsoft provides.
Linux has lots of advantages, but manageability isn't one of them. It lags FAR behind Windows on that front.
It's great for web servers and SMTP servers. Those are the only areas where Linux clearly beats all flavors of Windows, in my opinion. On the desktop...not so much. Works great for people that just want to use a browser and OpenOffice, though.
That's definitely unamerican behaviour!
I agree about the mindset hurting adoption. It's a side effect of the decade and half we spent trying to get end users to use it when it wasn't ready. I will say that Kingsoft Office for Linux has absolute and total perfect MS Office compatibility across everything in the suite and even has the ribbon interface, but it is both closed source and from China - I don't trust it. My best suggestion regarding your friend is to issue a challenge. Wait for Ubuntu GNOME to come out of beta in a couple of weeks and then challenge him to run it for a week - if he's not sold on it being a good solid system, his Windows blinders are surgically attached to his face. As a side note, Ubuntu GNOME even though it's still (barely) in beta it's rock solid, but best to not take any chances on making a good impression.
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
How about the 72,000+ French Police desktops, or the 14,000+ Munich/Germany desktops?
Are you stating that they either don't need a large scale manageability or that they use just browser and OpenOffice?
This very story contradicts your comment, and also all the other large scale desktop Linux success stories.
http://www.mueller-public.de - My site http://www.anr-institute.com/ - Advanced Natural Research Institute
Since the Microsoft has changed their Office and Windows UIs so radically, it is equally easy to train people to use them or the other alternatives. Nowadays if one has the usual Office 2003/2007 and Windows XP combo, the change to current versions is way too big to handle efficiently without training.
Why Gnome? KDE is perfectly stable, have more features, looks great and functions in the same way then Windows 7.
In my opinions KDE is much more user friendly and have more features then Gnome, and have a round-up experience (the KDE applications are integrate very well). I run for 2 years now Fedora with KDE and it's extremely well experience.
http://www.mueller-public.de - My site http://www.anr-institute.com/ - Advanced Natural Research Institute
not to mention the headaches if you work with any other company that isn't using Open Office files themselves
It is gendarmerie we are talking about. Why are you making the assumption that they are working? Let alone with external people.
That should be 'le desktop'. Use proper French or you'll run afoul of L'Academie Francaise.
Have gnu, will travel.
But a quick check of LibreOffice Writer (4.0.2.2) shows it can handle the fol formats: odt, ott, sxw, stw, fodt, uot, doxc(MS Word 2007/2010 XML) , doc, xml(ms Word 2003 and Doc Book), html, rtf, txt, and docx (OpenOffice XML Text)
It appears that they won't have many problems accepting any common format.
It is not that simple. You cannot judge file format compatibility only based on the file type extensions that the program agrees to load or save. The general problem has been that in many cases OpenOffice messes up the formatting of Microsoft Office documents.
Are you stating that they either don't need a large scale manageability or that they use just browser and OpenOffice?
Yes.
Okay... if you seriously need more than a few minutes to migrate from one document editor to another, you're probably lacking in the intelligence department.
Da derp dee derp da teedly derpee derpee dum. Rated PG-13.
So not only do they get lower TCO, they also get 100% less built in spyware (literally) by the NSA.
It's truely a win-win!
There are thousands of separate groups of people working codes that go into open source distributions. Most openly accept patches from anyone...
So yea "Mission accomplished" Linux must 100% less big brother...
I know I know... "but...but . we have source!"...
And a lengthy historical record of innocent vulnerabilities caused by **innocent** human mistakes only being found years after the fact to prove how much having the source is worth.
that horrendous purple tinge the default ubuntu has.
And you are doing the same as the person I discussed in the GP post.
Because, while Linux doesn't have Active Directory, it has other benefits that Windows does not have. So, if you define your criteria to be "must support Active Directory", then, obviously, Linux doesn't pass. If, on the other hand, you define your requirement as (for example), "must support SELinux", then Linux is your only choice.
As for the "nice GUI tools", they may make manageability easy, but they don't make it efficient.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Don't let the printer settings affect the formatting of the documents.
It may well be that the cops need only use a few web applications from a browser.
Chrome/Firefox/Opera works the same on Linux as on Windows.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
But a quick check of LibreOffice Writer (4.0.2.2) shows it can handle the fol formats: odt, ott, sxw, stw, fodt, uot, doxc(MS Word 2007/2010 XML) , doc, xml(ms Word 2003 and Doc Book), html, rtf, txt, and docx (OpenOffice XML Text)
It appears that they won't have many problems accepting any common format.
It is not that simple. You cannot judge file format compatibility only based on the file type extensions that the program agrees to load or save. The general problem has been that in many cases OpenOffice messes up the formatting of Microsoft Office documents.
And vice versa.
The fact that open source projects accept code from others don't mean that anyone can enter code into a project. New code is checked by a maintainer before being added to the project to make sure its dont suck like closed source code often does.
Most of the old bugs are not in open sourced projekt. Most of the open source projects find that security problems is in new code.
The smart people like me are slow to change to new code unless they have to because of security reasons. Doing that
other have time to find any bugs and straighten them out before we use the new code.
Its a win win from a security standpoint to use open source. If you want - you can always do your own code review if you think something fishy is going on.
Just saying it like it are.
Given the recent revelations, it turns out that the only peer one can trust is one's self.
Pot meet kettle. Linux advocates, and in the most extreme cases, zealots, typically cite FUD against Windows that is either atypical (daily crashes, always blamed on the OS and never the hardware) or outdated (still using XP in 2013 and complaining about drivers or long since resolved problems). Many Linux devotes are blinded to the problems with using Linux on the desktop.
The general problem has been that in many cases OpenOffice messes up the formatting of Microsoft Office documents.
Microsoft Office messes up Microsoft Office documents.
You have a better chance to open a MS Office 95 document with OpenOffice than with a current version of MS Office.
His criteria was not "must support Active Directory". Claiming it was is trolling on your part. His criteria was, "an easier way to manage a large group of machines." I might also point out that X11 pretty much rules efficiency out of the equation in regards to GUI anything.
I know in the U.S.A. you can barred from being a Police Officer if your I.Q. is to [sic] high.
Whereas you can say condescending things about the intelligence of public employees without suffering the discomfort of ironic self-awareness. Smells like freedom to me.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Of course they need large scale manageability. What the GP post said was that there are no tools that offer the facilities that AD and GP do on Windows. You can do a whole lot of stuff with scripts and other tools, but that doesn't mean it's as straightforward.
The real strength of GP is the ability to modify the way the software that runs on top of Windows works, not just the OS itself. Of course, MS offers the best support for that in things like Office, although other applications can be managed too. With the sheer variety of mechanisms for configuring applications on Linux, there can simply be no equivalent.
Offer me a working equivalent of GP, and an Exchange replacement, and I'll give it serious consideration. Until then, for me, it's just not worth the hassle.
This, exactly.
I once put a Knoppix live CD in the family computer because of some potential virus issue. After my wife asked something like "Why does this look different" and I explained, she found Firefox, got on Facebook, and soon forgot all about not being in Windows.
I don't know - often its just a matter of knowing the tooling that's there, so if you don;t know the Linux ways you're not going to be as efficient as a Windows admin who does know the Windows tools. Pretty obvious.
However, In his presentation, Drumond also pointed out that the "Direct benefits (license costs) are only the tip of the iceberg (PDF Link). The force is also saving money with Linux's easier management and a " Huge decrease of local technical interventions on Ubuntu's desktops."
I guess a "huge decrease of local technical interventions" suggests that you're not right in that Linux doesn't have the same ease-of-management than GP has. I wish he's said more about it, but they're obviously making it work well. That means there must be an equivalent to GP (puppet maybe, or Canonical's proprietary Landscape tool, or possibly just webmin :) ) Maybe its because they didn't know how to administer XP, or that they had such an old Windows infrastructure they didn't have effective GP anyway.
no, based on peer review. with these revelations by the NSA, there has been an even higher level of scrutiny has been out on SELinux. a much more likely vector of attack would be through companies that only distribute binary blobs for their hardware.
Really? I'd love to know who exactly has started a new peer review of SELinux, because I haven't heard of anything new.
While WHAT SELinux does is well understood, and clearly visible in the source code, and contains no opaque structures or code, we can't know for sure that it wasn't engineered to allow some security flaws that were already in place. In other words, most people agree it doesn't add new exploits, but it may in fact leave some intentionally un-closed.
The types of things SELinux controls are far ranging, including which programs and utilities can talk on the net, access data, right down to the inode level. Its been embedded in the kernel since 2.6, sometime after the SELinux release in 2009. But That was well within the NSA's age of evil empire if you ask me.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Because, while Linux doesn't have Active Directory, it has other benefits that Windows does not have. So, if you define your criteria to be "must support Active Directory", then, obviously, Linux doesn't pass. If, on the other hand, you define your requirement as (for example), "must support SELinux", then Linux is your only choice.
Effectivly they appear to be saying "The Windows way of doing things is the best/only way to do it". (Or possibly "The only way I know of is the Windows method.")
As for the "nice GUI tools", they may make manageability easy, but they don't make it efficient.
It's quite possible for "inefficient" to equate to "hard". e.g. if they expect you click X boxes for everything in list Y. Rather than just being able to tell the machine "Do X to everything in list Y and don't bug me til you've finished".
In one prior place of employment we had Ubuntu on all the desktops and Firefox and Thunderbird. The mail accounts were all IMAP only so you could essentially blow away a machine and re-install an image on it.
Based on the assumption that the NSA didn't slip in anything funny when they were helping create SELinux.
That's the advantage of FOSS though, they can create their own equivalent of SELinux and weed out anything that came from the NSA since the codebase is completely open.
Firstly, administration of a Linux system is much much simpler then Windows. In Linux everything is transparent, the configuration is just ASCII text files. I think you could do "group policy" with a bash script and dsh (distributed shell) through SSH. Secondly, the file system is much more powerful then in Windows. For example, you can mount /home/userA to a remove file server with fuse sshfs. The user will not see any difference and you can link configuration files across networks. Linux is quite easy to boot from a remote file server, too. Thirdly, in Linux everything is a file. You can just use a simple copy tool to copy one application or configuration from one computer to the next.
This is all fundamental to Linux, so at the base it's much simpler to administer then Windows. Now the tools, why not Puppet? And I'm not quite believe you that there aren't as powerful tools as Windows's GP or AD.
Puppet is a tool designed to manage the configuration of Unix-like and Microsoft Windows systems declaratively.
[...]
Puppet is used by the Wikimedia Foundation,[5] ARIN, Reddit,[6] Dell, Rackspace, Zynga, Twitter, the New York Stock Exchange, Disney, Citrix Systems, Oracle, the University of North Texas, the Los Alamos National Laboratory, Stanford University, Lexmark and Google, among others
http://www.mueller-public.de - My site http://www.anr-institute.com/ - Advanced Natural Research Institute
You do need to be more adaptable, which cops notoriously are NOT. I can hear right now the complaint of every (L)user getting a new Linux desktop, "It doesn't look right. The icons are in the wrong place. I can't use this. Give me my Windows machine back."
What do you think is going to happen when you switch them to Windows 8? Put a Win8 machine next to a Linux machine and they'll chose the Linux machine, surely.
Systems "just work" and installing software is no more difficult than looking for what you need in an "app store" just like on a phone.
In what kind of enterprise system does any kind of "app store" make any sense at all. The "personal computer"
Also if you have a need for per anything licenced software you'd tend to also need a suitable licence tracking system. An obvious advantage here of OSS is that it effectivly comes with a site/enterprise licence.
that the Pink Panther will now be running Red Hat?
Why do people keep replying saying how wrong I am about desktop Linux in the corporate environment? I completely agree with those comments. I used to administrate Active Directory so I really do get it. I was talking about Linux as a simple home computer operating system. I never said anything about it being suitable for the corporate desktop... at all. Geeze people, either read a whole post before replying, or stop replying to OP based on another reply to without having read the original yourself. Of course Linux is not suitable for the enterprise!!! Classic Slashdot stupidity.
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
I didn't know there was enough crack in Redmond to make the Win8 GUI look like a good idea. Ballmer should have been fired for that alone.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
and others are doing well and the business is getting bigger. There are actual products available with explicit support for free software and even only free software operating systems from printers and computers to wifi cards and graphics. ThinkPenguin exclusively caters to GNU/Linux and has a broad product line up. They're not just in the US either. They have operations out of Europe & the United States, and there are dozens of little companies like ZaReason, System76, etc. offering desktops and laptops preinstalled with GNU/Linux.
I tried to help my son do an assignment using Libre Office under Mint Linux about 8 months ago.
It had headers, body text, bold/italic/underline and embedded images only.
The document layout corrupted repeatedly.
Now, I love the idea of Libre Office, but is was the worst office suite I've used since word 95 (which REALLY sucked due to major bugs such as: refusing to print; infinitely large documents that corrupted the document after _5_ minutes of saving; embedded images that disappeared, etc).
Note: Libre Office version was the latest at the time and should have been a stable release (ie. Is was an x.2 release, not an x.0 release).
I specifically refer to the general population in my post. I say nothing in support of Linux as an enterprise desktop. I specifically refer to Linux for the masses. I say nothing in support of Linux as an enterprise desktop. I specifically refer to consumer distros. I say nothing in support of Linux as an enterprise desktop. I repeatedly refer to Linux for common people. I say nothing in support of Linux as an enterprise desktop. Two words: reading comprehension.
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
FTFY,
The general problem has been that in many cases _any different office suite_ messes up the formatting of Microsoft Office documents_, including different versions of Microsoft suites_.
I once had to use Open Office as an intermediary to convert between word 95 and word 97.
Samba 4 came out the end of last year, and it supports being a domain controller, administering group policy, etc.
http://www.samba.org/samba/history/samba-4.0.0.html
So, any platform that can run samba, including Linux, is able to have much of this functionality now, as it was capable of joining a domain before.
Gnome is faster. I honestly don't know about KDE right now, but last I tried (4.6 and before that also somewhere at 4.2) it ran sluggishly on my then-high-end machine. By sluggishly I mean the menus, Kicker and animations lagging somewhere between 1/20th and 1/10th of a second. Not much really, barely noticable, but it just felt bad. Gnome is much snappier, and switching back and forth with KDE just let me feel a strong incentive to stay with Gnome.
Apart from that, both accomplish pretty much the same in a similar manner. KDE has more of the config options in the GUI, while Gnome has you hunt for specialty settings in various config files (and gconf)... which is something personally I don't really mind but clearly may be inconvenient for others. Also some things are editable in Gnome while hardcoded in KDE (which probably also exists the other way around).
That said, I'm not talking about that trainwreck called gnome-shell... I'm using gnome-panel + compiz on my work machine and MATE on most of my others.
captcha: blacker
Gnome is a completely new design of the desktop. KDE is the traditional desktop from Win 3.11. (KDE have an option to switch to a netbook style desktop). As for performance: I run KDE just fine on an Asus Atom with Intel integrated graphics; Btw, it still runs just fine, the family of my wife is using that Netbook now for Skype and YMail.
http://www.mueller-public.de - My site http://www.anr-institute.com/ - Advanced Natural Research Institute
The cluster is going to get you.
and now the French go Penguin.
Am I living a dream?
If I am I do not want to wake up.
Is that .... is that the YEAR of the LINUX desktop I see over the horizon?!!!! ;-)
-Hack
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
You seem to be posting in the wrong article - this one is about linux and not MS Windows 8 :)
France has two police forces. Police Nationale, and Gendarmerie Nationale. The former is civilian and mostly operate in cities, while the latter is military and mostly operate in rural area.
Both can do investigation for justice, which is where it is convenient. If for some reason an investigation is stuck, it is always possible to replace Police Nationale investigators by Gendarmerie Nationale, or the other way around.
*puts ontin foil hat*
Yeah, but this also has the advantage of not having potential backdoors that US NSA and co. might have introduced. This may be useful for any military documents that they actually want to keep secret.
"When was the last time they needed out-of-house Office editing"
It might happen, and Open/LibreOffice are no obstacle for plain documents (e.g. contracts).
I've shared/edited documents with my clients who use Windows, while I have a Debian desktop with OO; no problem in years. Actually even less than them on occasions, because that makes me less version dependent.
We still have Win XP at work.
I more than once had to use Open Office (or Libre Office more recently) for undo a mess created by Word 2007 trying to open Word 2007 documents...
Rethinking email
Yeah, Windows has extremely powerfull configuration management tools because managing Windows configuration is actualy a problem.
By the way, Puppy solves a different problem, one that most Windows admins can't even see because they are too short-sighted.
Rethinking email
Most software ... not inherent in the OS. Group policy. "nothing to compare to Active Directory" I'll grant you that. I think the mechanisms are there it's just a matter of building it out and polishing it, expeccially as more distros are moving to ACL's as the default security model.
Having the source is not perfect, but it is infinitely better than not having the source when it comes to security.
Sdelat' Ameriku velikoy Snova!
The NSA/CIA would still fully understand the databases, OS, OS file system, networks and hardware links within France via Tailored Access Programs, templates (ready-to-go backdoor), ~ Genie.
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/09/nsa-router-hacking/
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
SSHFs is really little more than a tansparent sftp, and I don't know if I'd use it on the enterprise. First losses in connection makes long lag and weird things happen to the desktop enviroment or at least thats been my experience. Second you need a account you can ssh into on the remote machine, It's better if you have a user consistencly as per NFS mediated by ladp. PXE boot is great, but only scales so far because of bandwidth limitations. Copying a simple simple application is messy as parts of a package are strewn in several differen (and sometime inconsistent) places. Config can be copy and pasted with relative ease, but it's easy to copy into an invalid configuration. Something like puppet should help with that though.
Working out the real practical differences instead of just looking at the "about" menu option is a different story. When it comes down to it one glass typewriter is just like any other when it's what you are typing in that really matters.
You are a really funny guy. Some of your statement smake me laugh so hard that people here in the office are starting to show real concern for my mental healt!
"The fact is, most business software is Windows only. That's the deal-breaker for Linux, right there."
I guess you are talking about MS-Office. Do some research, there is much more and much better than that.
"And Linux has nothing to compare to Active Directory."
And we are glad about it. We wouldn't like that crap anywehere near a descent system
"Yes, there is Puppet and stuff like that. But it's a colossal pain-in-the-ass compared to the very nice GUI tools"
That's what I love about GUIs: They make simple tasks easier, and complex tasks impossible. ~ John William Chambless
Finding a linux desktop that "just works" has been a easy as booting off a knoppix CD for the last decade. There's plenty of other examples.
Active Directory is a subset of LDAP which is most definitely on linux and a pile of other platforms. Please learn at least a little bit about Active Directory before making such pronouncements.
Google "cluster management" to see how the above comment has got it backwards.
Hide all mail in a database
Make it difficult for third party tools to backup and impossible with the provided ones
Mangle database
Lose email
Crash
There's your Exchange replacement
Meanwhile there are dozens of things that provide the same sorts of features people really want instead of what you get with MS Exchange - google provides a few of them but there are many others.
On the contrary, I recently did support at a company migrating from Office to LibreOffice to save on transition costs.
These are the reasons people switch to free software, nobody cares about software freedom they care about the no cost aspect.
Client side restrictions are ass-backwards. You want your access rules on the server. Then you only need to moderate the server, not 10000 clients.
With modern Linux distributions you don't have to ever touch a terminal anymore than you do on a Mac - which for me is a lot because I'm a nerd but you catch my drift. Systems "just work" and installing software is no more difficult than looking for what you need in an "app store" just like on a phone.
I use Ubuntu and OSX every day and take exception to this. For 5 months, Ubuntu 13.04 lost the ability to accept external USB keyboard input on the unlock screen after waking from sleep on a laptop... I had to keep opening the laptop to use the built-in keyboard, or change to the user-switching screen to get back to the desktop.
Sh!t like that never breaks on OSX and Windows. Those OS's respect that the user needs the basic IO of the user interface (graphics, keyboard, mouse, audio) to stay rock solid. On Linux, only the wired NIC stays rock solid... a stark reminder its still a server OS with server-room priorities.
Audio is still problematic for Linux users from time to time, and bluetooth audio is still a complete mess... barely usable and requiring periodic system restarts to keep it working.
A fresh non-OEM install of either Windows or Ubuntu on a random PC will usually result in slightly more features working in Ubuntu than Windows. But the remedy in Ubuntu for the non-working stuff involves CLI work, whereas in Windows you can go to the system mfg website and download and install needed drivers using the mouse. OSX and Windows both let you get add-on hardware working by downloading drivers from each peripheral mfg website and install using a mouse. Also, some of the stuff that "just works" will not work correctly because the driver's default values aren't correct for the particular implementation of the chip family in question... more CLI work.
What has changed for the better since Ubuntu's introduction is graphics stability... after many years they finally got graphics to stop mysteriously disappering. Audio is marginally better than it used to be. IMO, that's insufficient progress.
BTW, Gnome 3 (actually, the loss of Gnome 2) was THE reason I had to move a couple users back to Windows. You should have those pom-poms bronzed, cheerleader.
Scoobyyyy.... scooby-doo da doo-be-doo!
I and several others in my hackerspace have started to do exactly this. We actually started a few years ago, but due to obvious reasons we have accelerated our foray into SELinux. You should know that we AREN'T alone either; there are at least 20 other spaces doing the exact same thing, with even more planning on it due to obvious reasons.
Please consider yourself an asshole with nothing interesting to contribute. I'll just assume you are a shill, which would mostly explain your unreasonable behaviour.
Spoken like a true computer novice. I sincerely hope you don't admin any computers :-)
Most "marketed" business software is Windows only. 100% of businesses I deal with (in literally all industries that exist today) have found ways to work strictly in Open Source Software however. It isn't hard when there aren't amateurs telling them that something "just can't be done" unless they use Windows.
Linux doesn't NEED anything to compare to AD or GP if you know what the fuck you're doing! I can administer (so far, as in the upward limit has not yet been reached) an unlimited number of business systems, with no serious hiccups in over 10 years, networks ranging from a few hundred to over ten thousand distributed globally. I've never heard of a Windows administrator that can go even 10 days without some malfunction; and it's almost always caused by their incompetence. The other times, it's caused by Microsoft's incompetence, which is just another black eye to gloss over.
tl:dr; Learn how to use computers and you your IT job will be much easier, I promise.
OpenOffice is close enough to msoffice 2003 that users usually have very little problems...
The differences between different msoffice versions are often much larger, and yet users aren't given any training for that.
Also it says they were already running openoffice on windows, so that bit is already solved.
As for file formats, using standard file formats like odf is an extremely sensible course of action in any case...
And given that they are the government, and they are using an openly documented file format it wont be their problem, but the problem of anyone else who wants to sell into the organisation... Companies often bend over backwards to get a piece of government spending.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
I will take puppet to GUI tools any day. Having a DSL is far more satisfying than trying to navigate around GUIs.
You should look better at the less free options provided by the Linux distributions they offer all that manageability just fine.
New things are always on the horizon
That's one of the biggest problems... windows may be extremely buggy, but its ubiquity has resulted in people becoming used to its bugs and working around them... linux may be less buggy, but those bugs it does have are unexpected and take the users by surprise.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
due to the close relationship between English and German.
I suggest you, too, even more than the GP, learn English to a degree where you don't sound like a retard if you intend to criticise others' English.
Your first item of homework is to find out how the proverb "People in glass houses..." ends.
Best wishes,
A native English speaker
I'd really like to know some detail on how a migration like this works.
I work for a large healthcare organisation and - being a linux fan myself - often wondered about how it could work. Even if there were support from senior managers, there are some really practical issues to overcome...
I'd love to see some real gritty detail about exaclty how a project like this is done, and the challenges that were overcome. I know the article talks about a staged approach which makes sense, but I don't see any mention of what happened to their helpdesk teams. Grateful for any pointers.
Hej! Nasi tu byli!
Look at it this way, with all the money you are saving on Microsoft licenses you can hire yourself a real Linux guru, and this person you hire will accept natural spoken language as commands so you don't have to deal with criptic stuff or scripts and what not. Way better than what Active Directory does. That way you don't have to worry about administering the systems, will save a lot of money, look good with the boss, and by the time everybody realizes that you have been too lazy to catch up with technology you will be up for retirement, so they will probably keep you around for staying out of trouble. Win-win.
> OSS - with 100% less big brother then commercial
Except that Linux is contributed to almost completely by commercial corporations now. It is just zero cost commercial.
When a large organization gets involved into a software project it changes the project too.
French Republic can and probably will do a lot of good stuff for Linux community too. It will not just use it for free and enjoy it.
French civilization is universal. It brought metric system to the world, ideals of Great revolution, etc. When it starts moving, the word watches. I expect much more form this initiative.
With modern Linux distributions you don't have to ever touch a terminal anymore than you do on a Mac - which for me is a lot because I'm a nerd but you catch my drift. Systems "just work" and installing software is no more difficult than looking for what you need in an "app store" just like on a phone.
I use Ubuntu and OSX every day and take exception to this. For 5 months, Ubuntu 13.04 lost the ability to accept external USB keyboard input on the unlock screen after waking from sleep on a laptop... I had to keep opening the laptop to use the built-in keyboard, or change to the user-switching screen to get back to the desktop.
Sh!t like that never breaks on OSX and Windows. Those OS's respect that the user needs the basic IO of the user interface (graphics, keyboard, mouse, audio) to stay rock solid. On Linux, only the wired NIC stays rock solid... a stark reminder its still a server OS with server-room priorities.
Audio is still problematic for Linux users from time to time, and bluetooth audio is still a complete mess... barely usable and requiring periodic system restarts to keep it working.
A fresh non-OEM install of either Windows or Ubuntu on a random PC will usually result in slightly more features working in Ubuntu than Windows. But the remedy in Ubuntu for the non-working stuff involves CLI work, whereas in Windows you can go to the system mfg website and download and install needed drivers using the mouse. OSX and Windows both let you get add-on hardware working by downloading drivers from each peripheral mfg website and install using a mouse. Also, some of the stuff that "just works" will not work correctly because the driver's default values aren't correct for the particular implementation of the chip family in question... more CLI work.
What has changed for the better since Ubuntu's introduction is graphics stability... after many years they finally got graphics to stop mysteriously disappering. Audio is marginally better than it used to be. IMO, that's insufficient progress.
BTW, Gnome 3 (actually, the loss of Gnome 2) was THE reason I had to move a couple users back to Windows. You should have those pom-poms bronzed, cheerleader.
Such modding cowardice. I don't know why I expect better...
If they need to send stuff out of house, that's what PDF is for. When was the last time they needed out-of-house Office editing??
Unfortunately many people who use Microsoft Office have a tendency to send the editable document to the (hopefully) appropriate people which can make for massive inconsistencies between the original document and any edits. The problem lies not with Microsoft Office or any Office software for that matter but with the people who are using the products.
You are correct in saying that any document should be sent out as a PDF especially if it is to people outside the company and only those who have been designated as maintainers will have change rights which also brings up another problem so mangers like to have something like "Share-point" or it's "Wiki" equivalent. In principle this is great except that over time unless you have a designated competent maintainer, you will have a mess on your hands.
No matter what software you have people need to understand what they are supposed to do and why and how to go about doing it. It is not an issue of whether the software is Linux or MS Windows based although many people with vested interests will disagree.
There ain't no such thing as proprietary standards only proprietary formats. Standards are by definition open.
Mandrake was an excellent France-based distrubution many years ago. But the users ran to Ubuntu when the distro were sued over the "Mandrake" name and changed it to the unsexy "Mandriva". Ubuntu had naked people in their marketing at the time.
"When was the last time they needed out-of-house Office editing"
It might happen, and Open/LibreOffice are no obstacle for plain documents (e.g. contracts).
As I have said before in a previous reply basically the only people who should edit capability on any document are the designated maintainer(s) so any other readers should only get a non editable file. Yes it is still possible for a reader to point out issues with the original document and suggest changes via email however that person should not send the edited document back to the maintainer(s). Unfortunately this often does not happen in practice and the more complex a project that does not have some semblance of control the greater the chance of a FUBAR.
There ain't no such thing as proprietary standards only proprietary formats. Standards are by definition open.
Yep Microsoft Office does not create a "normalized" microsoft OXML file. It is really funny to find the smae bug when opening a docx file with OpenOffice/LibreOffice, Google Drive and ... Microsoft Office 365. So it seems that the defintion in the norm is different than the one use by the Microsoft Office team, another team (Microsoft Office 365) can not reproduce the same things and does have the same bug than other software.
Now if only there were prompts on the desktop to allow the user to decide which apps can talk to the internet (including *ALL* system apps, *NO* defaults) we'd have a useful desktop Linux.
Actually, Linux does have Active Directory servers and clients. Samba 4.0.5, and later releases, have been pretty good at replacing unmanageable arrays of AD servers and their turf sensitive admins in my most recent workplace, and support for Linux and UNIX as clients of Windows based authentication and file services has been available since..... oh, Lord, since I wrote the first port of Samba to SunOS 4.1.2 in....
OK, now I'm scared That was 21 years ago: that first software port is old enough to go drinking with me.
It took a long time after Active Directory came out for Samba to mature enough to be a full AD server, and Microsoft had to be compelled in court to publish the actual API's they were using for Active Directory. But it's working quite well now, much more robust than the Windows servers we were using, and it doesn't mangle the DNS the way AD tends to.
Nice GUI tools matter, and always have. See http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/cups-horror.html, from Eric Raymond, for some fascinating notes about why people won't use your software if your GUI is bad.
...though in France their national police have a wider mandate and are involved in activities similar to state troopers. They are NOT the same as US military police at all.
The RCMP in Canada is a much better comparison to what France has. They are involved in both FBI type activities as well as things like traffic enforcement outside urban centres in provinces that do not have their own police forces.
You can also have your document display changes/edits made by the third party and validate those changes, or not.
What are you talking about? Let's take it point by point to battle the FUD.
most business software is Windows only
Large businesses using linux: Walmart, IBM, Redhat, Amazon, Rackspace, it goes on and on...their ERP software is web based running on Linux.
Linux has nothing to compare to Active Directory
You realize Active Directory is a *broken* implementation of LDAP - something that has nothing to do with Windows? The enterprise world uses IPA, Radius, and OpenLDAP. It's light years ahead of Active Directory, and actually follows RFC's(Active Directory does not).
Linux has lots of advantages, but manageability isn't one of them
There is no point and click "management" of Linux. You actually have to know what you are doing. You don't get to buy a for dummies book or take a night class to be rewarded with an "admin" job. A good example in some large(1000+ employees) enterprises I've worked for is deploying [Linux] login scripts via directory services. It allows control and lockdown of user settings and permissions in ways Active Directory cannot hope to. You mentioned Puppet also - that's a server management thing though, not a user management thing. It's good you mentioned it though...where is the Windows equivalent of that? Powershell? VBScript? Doubtful.
The world is changing man, typical users are not baby boomers anymore that have a limited computing skill set. They are intelligent, capable of learning new technology. If they aren't - they get replaced by people that *can* do those things, because those things are in the interest of the business. Stop the FUD.
Trackball users will be first against the wall.
Because while well "written", all you did was tell us your experience - and no facts?
I'm sorry Ubuntu doesn't work for you - why don't you try a big boy distro? I spend a large majority of my day writing open source software and patches - and if a user doesn't care to read the manual to make it work - I don't care either. You fall into that category. Users are not our priority, we hope to automate you all out of a job in the future.
Yeah, internal users who only exchange documents with other internal users are a solved problem (either use Libre/Open Office for everything, or wikis, or some other document management system).
The thorny bit is when dealing with external customers... who use Microsoft Office XYZ. Any glitches in that exchange means lost business, and sending PDFs back and forth is not always acceptable either.
So, we're stuck using what our client use. With a few people trying out LibreOffice for internal only stuff.
Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?
Eh? KDE is nothing like Windows 3.11, not even remotely. I'm assuming by 'completely new design' you mean the Unity interface used by Ubuntu? Or Gnome 3 (which seems to be drawing much hate). Gnome 1 was pretty similar in layout to KDE 1/2 - even Gnome 2 was similar in that way if I recall correctly, never really used Gnome much.
You just described Religions.
Your biggest bang for the buck is replacing Exchange and it Jet engine constraint.
Your first item of homework is to find out how the proverb "People in glass houses..." ends.
With a period!
Thank God the French exist !!! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_Ending
Never underestimate the destructive and creative power of stupidity
I'm much more used to seeing this sort of reasoning in language flame wars. "My language does X easily, and I don't know how yours does it, so mine is superior!"
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
>The general problem has been that in many cases OpenOffice messes up the formatting of Microsoft Office documents.
Actually I think that's included under "MS Office Compatibility". I can't tell you the number of times I've created a document on Computer A with MS Office, then taken it to Computer B with the same version of MS Windows and Office to print and had numerous discrepancies appear. And that's using only standard fonts and formatting. And in dealing with older documents (from a version or three prior of MS Office) I've actually had much better fidelity with OpenOffice than MS Office.
In fairness though I haven't really used Office for anything much in over a decade, perhaps they've improved it since then.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
> As for the "nice GUI tools", they may make manageability easy, but they don't make it efficient.
Indeed. I managed a dual-boot Windows/Linux computer science lab for a few years - the sort of thing that often needed "random software X" installed on all the machines for some project or other. On the Linux side I had a script set up that let me just download the package to an internal server and add an entry to a text file listing things to install - the next time each computer was running Linux I'd then get a central log entry reporting newly installed packages (or very occasionally an error). Another script alerted me to any machines that hadn't reported success after a few days so I could make sure they got booted into Linux to update. Windows could do something similar from an easy-to-use GUI, but only with software installers that had been specifically packaged to be compatible with the relevant tool - which is to say a few of the big name corporate products, but essentially none of the small niche stuff which comprised the vast majority of the software I installed, meaning it had to be manually installed on every machine individually. A pain in the rear even when moderated by cycling through thirty virtual desktop windows instead of pacing the lab all day. And of course it was impossible to do even that while somebody was actually sitting at the machine using it - unlike Linux which has no problem providing a remote desktop to multiple users simultaneously.
Anyone know if that situation has improved yet? I've been away from IT for a while.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Why GNOME? Polish.
I completely agree that KDE is in many ways the superior, friendlier interface, *especially* if you're a power user. But pretty much all the major corporate distros are using GNOME as the default, meaning that GNOME itself is getting a lot more attention from organizations that can fund things like quality assurance and actual user interface testing (as opposed to only the design aesthetics of the people creating it and "bug" reports by that tiny fraction of people using it that are actually consciously aware of the myriad minor annoyances that interrupt their workflow),
Even more significantly the distros spend a lot more time polishing the "out of the box" experience of their own Gnome package, providing a much more pleasant experience than the comparatively neglected KDE alternative (seriously - set aside your preconceptions and do a side-by-side comparison of KDE versus GNOME as they are configured out of the box in any major GNOME-focussed distro. Pretend you have no idea how, or inclination to, configure anything and have to use it exactly as presented.)
Finally GNOME's weakness is also it's strength - your configuration options are extremely limited compared to KDE. That sucks if you know what you like and how to change it, but allows the available configuration options to be presented in a relatively simple interface which improves discoverability dramatically. KDE by comparison has a veritable jungle of options - I pretty much know what I'm doing and I can't tell you how many times I've stumbled across some interesting option I decided to try out, only to spend 5-10 minutes searching for the option again so I could turn it off after trying it out for a few days/weeks and deciding I didn't really like it.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
GNOME 3 is a "Triumph of Fashion over Functionality".
I I used to use GNOME 2, and noticed that useful features were often removed in "upgrades" - GNOME 3 was a disaster.
I fled to xfce, now I use mate.
they care about the no cost aspect
phew! lucky you opened my eyes... for a moment there i thought companies were forking out money to microsoft for charitable reasons
The thorny bit is when dealing with external customers... who use Microsoft Office XYZ
Exactly!
People can even open Word 2010 documents in Word 2000 without any troubles whatsoever! :-P
This whole "libreoffice" open document format thing is simply a non-starter
The world is changing man
microsoft fans are becoming increasingly desperate
gnome is ok as long as you're willing to surf the forums to get around its config limitations... only advantage over xfce is slightly easier on the eye and easier to find solutions on forums. i'm not lazy enough to need a gui for every little configuration option, but i'm too lazy to figure out how to shut down without opening a cli in xfce... go figure.
i still prefer fallback though
kde is just a bit too fat
We still have electricity at work.
I guess as long as it does the job.
I believe GNOME's advantage on that front is that most people can barely handle the anemic Windows GUI configuration options, in fact I know plenty of people who don't even change their wallpaper from the original "company advertisement" setting, even after years of use. For such people GNOME is a wonderful option if you're the local geek who has convinced them to let you permanently solve all their Windows-related issues. Ditto most office workers - they don't really care about their computer's configuration, they just want it to work simply, consistently, and reliably so they can get work done. GNOME does that. It's only the small minority of us that want to configure our tools for optimal productivity/bling/convenience that want that extra power. And let's be honest - we're just not the target audience for any major corporate distro. Or perhaps we are - but we're not recommending the purchase of something for us to use - rather something that the office workers can use without constantly bugging us with trivial problems.
And so the final result is the pretty, simplistic interface is the one that gets the rough edges polished off and becomes a streamlined pleasure to use, and we few who demand more from our GUI are left to take our pick of the powerful but kludge-ridden competition.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
agreed