A List of Linux Migration Stories?

borfast asks: "From time to time, I read about schools, cities, states or countries that decided to switch their operating systems to Linux for a number of reasons. The latest was the city of Munich. I'm currently preparing a presentation to do on local schools about Free Software and its advantages (and disadvantages) in government and education, and I'd like to show some examples of what I'll be saying to those folks. Not that I consider myself an authority on the subject but you know the saying, 'In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king'. Anyway, I have been collecting all the stories (both positive and negative) I find but I'd really appreciate it if the Slashdot crowd could give me a hand, here. Due credit will be given and the presentation will be posted online under a Free license. So, what Linux migration nightmares or cotton-candy dreams do you know about, and do you know any site that collects these stories?"

My University's Engineering and CS Colleges

[dch24]

My experience has been interesting. My university's college of engineering has a full-time staff of three, serving multiple labs in multiple buildings (so the infrastructure is non-trivial). They hire part-time and full-time students, train them, and rely on them for a lot of the work they need done. Because of the great leadership, the engineering network (entirely linux-powered on the backend, with all types of machines from supercomputers to workstations to desktops of every flavor) has an incredible track record, and they have been able to deal with almost every problem in a very professional way.

The CS department is exactly the opposite. There is one full-time staff administrator, who hires students to work for him. He is ornery and unhelpful. The network is down a lot. The machines are only updated infrequently, accounts get destroyed on a regular basis, the works. The same setup (linux backend, linux, windows, and mac clients) but administered entirely differently.

I guess my experience has been that if you are going to migrate, you need people who know how to do it. Linux might get a bad name, but it's really the people behind the migration.

That's just annoying

[Anonymous Coward]

It's like if my buddy comes to me and asks why his circuit is picking up noise and I hand him a stack of textbooks. "Your answer is in there."

Borfast is looking for some intelligence. If he just wanted a list, he could indeed just google. If we want to help him, a little editorial comment on our part is necessary. If someone is looking for strawberries we could honestly tell him that there are strawberries in all directions. It would be the truth. Of course if he walks north he won't find any strawberries for about 5000 miles. It is much more helpful to tell him that the nearest strawberries are 2 miles east of here just off county road 32.

Some of the stories on your list are quite interesting. Ernie Ball may be a classic. They were a Windows shop until the day Microsoft showed up for an audit. Microsoft was looking for someone to make an example of. They treated Ernie Ball as harshly as they could and made sure it was well publicized. Ernie Ball reacted by completely dumping Windows and making sure that was as well publicized as possible. :-)

Daimler and AutoZone are SCO victims. They switched from Unix though. Most school boards are on Windows so the cases may not be that relevant.

Re:Linux vs Windows

[Mr. Hankey]

FWIW, I've been using Linux for well over a decade and it's come quite a long way. I worked my way through the entire Slackware distribution from the ground up while I was a college student. When I started, it was a bit of a difficult task to get anything working. You needed to build your CD-ROM interface's driver (typically your sound card) into your kernel in order to use it. If you had a Sound Blaster 16 you might even get it the sound card itself to work. Recompiling/upgrading the system libraries and binaries from a.out to ELF format and migrating from the BSD to SysV init all by hand taught me a lot about the system, but it wasn't for the squeamish. Tweaking X11 was an interesting game of generating mode timings that hopefully wouldn't destroy your monitor based on minimal documentation. Browsers tended to be statically linked memory hogs due to Motif 1.2 not being open source, at a time when 8MB might have been your total RAM. Swap was often required just to get X to start. Setting up printing typically involved editing a lot of config files to set up print filters, queues, and getting your file rendered through Ghostscript. Boy has all that ever changed.

How easy it is now depends on which distro and software you use of course. Mandriva 2007 for example popped up a dialog box and configured my printer for me when I plugged it in for the first time. Ubuntu/kubuntu also tend to be good about adding and removing hardware. X11 isn't nearly the guessing game it used to be, and the hardware I own just works in a fresh OS install given one of the aforementioned distributions.

About your keyboard, have you tried Rosegarden? It's a bit of a large package, but it comes with a wonderful score editor and will happily play to and record from multiple MIDI devices. If you keep your keyboard near your computer, you might never need to use the keyboard's memory again.

As for the GIMP, it does have the ability to scan through SANE. File->Acquire->XSane:Device Dialog works in the version I'm using. You'll need SANE installed, but I've never had a problem with bringing images in through this menu item.

Xpdf is a bit of a simple application, and doesn't have much extra functionality. There are however other applications like kghostview which can do everything you're looking to do and more. Konqueror as a browser embeds it as a PDF viewer, amongst other datatypes. While the Adobe PDF plugin for Firefox doesn't seem to have been functioning properly for a while, there are alternatives.

I've listed mostly KDE apps as examples, as those are what I've tended to use, but there are typically GNOME equivalents with good functionality as well. If you want full functionality, it's best to use more modern applications. While I'll agree that Linux is not yet ready to replace Windows on everyone's systems, it's continuously improving in user friendliness and hardware support. Linux is certainly headed in the right direction. When will it be 'ready'? Who knows. What I do know is that the definition of ready varies per person. It was ready for me 12 years ago, and it's ready for a lot more people now.