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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.
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
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!
FBI in the USA = Police in France
Police in the USA = Gendarmerie in France (The one who pull you over for DUI, giving speeding and parking tickets, etc.)
Jean Reno
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.
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.
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!
The situation is a bit peculiar : - both the Police Nationale and the Gendarmerie report to the Ministère de l'Interieur. But Gendarmes retain a military status while Policiers are civilians: some differences in duties and in pay, but a strong difference on rights: les gendarmes are not allowed to go on strike or to publicly profess political preferences (as all soldiers here) while les policiers can do both. - both forces have elite counter-terrorism teams, altough the most renowed one belongs to the Gendarmerie (GIGN). And both forces are requested to work together if need be, and regularly train together. As for the police : Windows on the desktop, 80% Linux in the datacenters, with some AIX and windows.
I am not Remy Mouton, unfortunately: http://remy.mouton.free.fr/art/
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.
Actually the Gendarmerie Nationale is part of the Military. It is not a civilian institution.
So Police in the USA = Police in France.
Gendarmerie in France is something in between military police and the FBI in the USA.
Ahh, it's so nostalgic to have this discussion on slashdot again!
That's definitely unamerican behaviour!
They did multiple pilot test and all went all. I don't think they will migrate back anytime soon.
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
Unlikely. They have already demonstrated 40% cost cuts. It takes something big to undo a budget cut like that!
And to them, Microsoft is a foreign company - they have no reason to stick with ms at all. Whereas at least some of the linux developers are French.
Now, if the American government saved 40% on purchasing cisco equipment instead of huawei - would any Americans protest? Didn't think so . . .
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!
Not really.
Police is usually mostly for urban areas, and Gendarmerie mostly found in the country side.
Also Gendarmerie staff are military personnel, while Police are not.
Votez ecolo : Chiez dans l'urne !
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.
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.
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.
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
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
"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.
Asterix
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
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.
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!
Gendarmerie is the military policy.
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!
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!
Gendarmerie is the military policy.
My understanding is that in the US the military police only polices the military. So your translation, while literally correct, is wrong. As has been pointed out elsewhere the 'Gendarmerie' is a military force that reports to the interior minister and polices civilians, mostly in the countryside. They do have other missions but they are much less visible, mostly crowd control but also policing the military, though that's pretty much invisible to the general public.
I don't think one can equate it to the FBI either as the FBI certainly is not concerned with fining people for going over the speed limit or driving while drunk. There is none of the 'investigations across state borders' thing that makes the FBI so special, simply due to the lack of state borders in France.