A List of Linux Migration Stories? 68
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?"
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Migrations, eh? (Score:2)
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Well done, or something.
google (Score:3, Informative)
AutoZone
Burlington Coat Factory
Cisco/Linksys
City of Vienna information services
Daimer/Chrysler
Disney
Ernie Ball Guitars
Google
IBM
Los Alamos National Laboratory
Merrill Lynch
Mexico City municipal government
Pixar Animation
Papa John's Pizza
Raymour & Flanigan Furniture
Riverdale High School, Portland, Oregon
St. Mary's School, Rockledge, Florida
University of Oslo
US Air Force
You might not get all the details, but it might send you in the right direction.
That's just annoying (Score:2, Insightful)
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 strawber
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As someone who uses their products, I'm glad to hear they're using Free Software.
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it was quite a poster-story.
see http://news.com.com/2008-1082_3-5065859.html [com.com], for example
St Mary's Migration / Melbourne Linux Users Group (Score:1)
http://www.mlinux.org/ [mlinux.org]
Hung out with these guys for a while. They were big on Debian a while back.
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Disclaimer: It's mine. Here there are a lot of companies wishing to move from their current IT infrastructure to a more open one, but they're scared. A lot of them said if there are others who have done so, it'll make the case easier to be presented in the board of director meetings. So I created it. Hope it does help some people out there.
Richard Kiley (Score:4, Funny)
Linux Migration Story (Score:3, Funny)
I'm sure many other people have similar stories.
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I have migrated to linux at home... (Score:1)
My University's Engineering and CS Colleges (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
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How about this... (Score:3, Funny)
2. Enter search "Windows"
3. Look at a list with "Bye bye Weendoz!!!! roflmayonaise i migrated!!!"
4. Find some "LOL WTF LEENOOKS zuck!!! I'm back to my win!!! lol!!!" in bettween the entries on line 3
5. ???
6. Presentation!
50 stories (Score:3, Informative)
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"In the land of the blind, (Score:2)
Wow. (Score:1)
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And yet the French Military Victories book only includes one: The French Revolution
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(sorry, couldn't resist. All society's fault. not mine. really.)
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Just as an unrelated example: A long time ago, for a company I used to work for ( I don't anymore ), I had to select between Java and
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I welcome any stories that can show something of interest. If yours is one, go ahead and share it.
My experience... (Score:2)
I switched to FreeBSD, but it's issues (less commercial software, less supported hardware), are easier for me to handle than those of Linux (overall less comprehensive and user friendly documentation).
In the end, get your devs to try both, and compare them to your experience
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The options for Joe Computer-User are not vast:
He can try to wade his way through the contents of Microsoft's included manuals and help files. The problem here being that even if he knows what the problem is, and what questions he needs answers to; the solution
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If it works out of the box, it's easy enough... But as soon as something breaks, the error messages are useless, debugging information is useless, the registry is hardly what i'd call intuitive or easy to use, and the closed source nature of it makes it much harder for even the most skilled people to debug and fix your problems.
Not to mention the fact that commandline is much easier to debug remotely. cut+paste the error into google and when it gives you answ
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It's not as friendly for certain types of people, but the heirachical nature, plus regedit can actually be very useful. As well as keeping a lot of things in "one" place (even if that "one" place is scattered all over their computer)
Also, I've not had the troubles installing applications on Windows that I have had installing them on Linux. I want an application not-out-of-the-box on Windows, I open it's
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One killer feature that is missing from the Linux distributions I use regularly (RHEL 2/3, FC4/5) is a software deployment mechanism. Group policies plus Windows Installer (MSI) packages really make my life easier, even when I'm just supporting my family. I am aware of tools like cfengine, and I am certain I could script yum commands out via SSH, but I'm forced to admit that Microsoft's interfac
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Most programs install cleanly, but having to manually locate the installer, and usually click through multiple pages of license agreements, other bullshit and ads before you can download it is incredibly annoying.
For those few apps which dont install correctly, the error messages are useless for diagnosing why it didn't install and you often have to give up and accept not having the app.
Package managers on the other hand, debian's apt is usually problem free (although you
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Point Of Sale (Service) (Score:2)
* Wincor/Nixdorf
* IBM
* SAP/Triversity
* Micros
* BananaPOS
There are more..
Novell even has a Point of Service-specific Distribution, NLPOS..
You might have to get creative - not all individuals' success stories are public, but vendors are happy to tout their successes with a list of clients that successfully use their product. Add them to your list!
The past week (Score:1)
Nvidia + Wide Screen LCD flat panel can be cumbersome, tweaking modelines, xorg.conf files, ugh! It's enough to drive one sane! And the fact that currently 6.10 (at least for a number of people) loads to a black screen of death, and CTRL-ALT-F1 to F6 didn't bring up a viewable console making it that much more of a pain.
I finally got another distro installed, downloaded the latest nvidia dri
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X picked it up automatically by reading the supported resolutions from the display itself. It also worked out the physical dimensions of the screen and set the DPI appropriately, so the fonts are fully readable and the same physical size as on any other screen.
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In this case, there was no failure of the technology, only a weakness of documentation and lack of a trivial control panel for the hack.
In contrast, I've spent lots of time fiddling with nvidia drivers on windows trying to get a tv-out card to work perfectly with my ordinary CRT television before it worked well.
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I think Windows users experience this a fair bit as well. Especially related to hardware. I do a lot of "PC Repair" in my spare time for people via word-of-mouth. Until these people can understand, figure out, and problem-solve Windows issues, I think they will be lost in Linux. However, Linux has a lot
Linux vs Windows (Score:2)
I can relate my own anecdotal experiences.
First, the good points of Windows when compared to Linux. Setting up peripherals is still a PITA in Linux. Peripherals in Linux have gotten much easier in recent years thanks to SANE, HPLIP, Gutenprint, CUPS, gphoto2, ALSA, improvements in the 2.6 kernel and in udev. Having to mount CDs and USB memory sticks was also extremely annnoying in Linux. Linux distros vary considerably on how they handle removable media-- Ubuntu is pretty good at it, while Slackware a
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I've been using Linux since kernel version 1.3. The main trouble I have with GNOME and KDE is they are such resource hogs, and I like to get by with ancient hardware. If you have 64M or less RAM, Knoppix can't run KDE unless you let it create a swap file. I use Slackware with light weight window managers. Lately, I've been trying out jwm (used in Puppy Linux), and xfe for a file manager. I would like to trade out xfe for something lighter. I've had better luck with xpdf than with ggv. ggv chokes on a
Shameless plug (Score:1)
Skolelinux (Score:1)
After a quick glance... (Score:1)
I'm not getting a warm and fuzzy about possibly starting a business based on this (an idea I was toying with)...
Migration (Score:2, Interesting)
I gave a presentation on Free Software / Open Src. (Score:2, Informative)
Venezuela[1], Brazil[2], Extremadura and other regions of Spain[3], New Zealand[6], Bulgaria & Madeconia[4], and China[5], India. Development is often a worldwide effort, much like academic research.
For example, while I have only done a little FLOSS development, I've never met any of my collaborators in person.
Thailand Cities: Vienna, Munich, Geneva, Bergen[7]. Peru, Paris:almost.
[1] http://linuxtoday.com/news_story. [linuxtoday.com]