Help for note on GNU/Linux and Open Source

[bamboo_spider]

Hi

Just some background first,

I work for an environmental NGO in India which has teams in 10 odd locations with a head office. Most locations have upto 5 PC's / and or laptops (PIII's and above) there are some old PII's as well.

Most of the software we use is proprietory read MS related and stuff. There is also an Oracle system - oracle 7 I think.

Our organziations work is community based - very sim ilar in philosophy to the GNu/Linux OS community, only the issues are different.

Over the last few years we have been talking about migrating / shifting/ adopting GNU/Linux OS systems across the organization. This is an environment where most people have grown up with MS and the likes and are also very very untechnical as far as Computers go.

We have a very good GIS lab as well but there too we are stuck with high licensing oosts. We do have some requirements for Video and Audio editing to make simple movies now and in time more quality stuff. (So is it true that Pixar and stuff are on Linux based systems.

I have been promoting GNU/Linux in a big way and felt the way forward was to adopt it in my team first and have done that by convincing my boss to change to FC3 (though he was motivated by Red Hat Michels talk in a conference of the IUCN in Bangkok) but we have two FC3 machines, all the windows machines run Firefox, thunderbird and Open Office.

Now I am supposed to write a note on why the organization should enmass migrate to GNU/Linux.

Some of the important considerations are:

We have a old Oracle System that is proprietory and runs on only WHIMDOWS 98 (or windows 98 as some say). This is common across all locations and is centrally managed from our Heaf Office. SO the question is what are the GNU/Linux alternatives for this and can we migrate to some other Open Source PLatform.

We run pretty much the same harware across locations - so will that be a positive.

Our Head Office has about 50 machines and have a novell network and mail sever running and will continue to need a mail server. Currently they run Pegasus Malil, Mercury 1.4 and is based on a Suse 6.1 server.

There are the usual considerations : Licencesing costs, felxibilty in making them specific , less resource intensive (is this really true ??) and so on.

So can you give me your suggestions as I want to make the note a good one

We have a cell in the organiztion whose main job is to manage the software and hardware - they have a few programmers on board so one of the important points the note would stress on is that we should have a few people who will develop some aspects of GNU/Linux be it Open Office , or a specific localzied distro to meet requirements for our organizations and others like ours. This would be a small contribution to the larger effort and place our computer work in a larger context as well as match our regular work philosophy. Community Based.

Most locations have very poor bandwidth -so that will be a consideration as well. We have a very slow website which we would like to upgrade - and make more interactive and efficent , with it being served from our head office location.

An idea was that we could spread our work across specific distributions - paid and free - Suse is good for the variety of software it has, RH for the stability and FC for the guys wanting to push the limits and check out whats on. Actually once the folks get a hang of the GNU/Linux I guess they will fnd their own way around and some may end up with that terribly happy condition called distro fever. After that the skys the limit. Further there could be organization specific customization , which is currently being done on Oracle - but with out the worry of not being able to cope with the future licencesing costs.

Finally I would like to say that the reason I am doing this note is not for personal glory or effect - I am not a programmer, and am not likely to be the person doing the hard work. I am an end user and have great faith in Open Source. And the people at fedoraforum is a symbol of this belief.

So guys / and the few gals that are there give in your suggestions or if you have any questions - I'll try and do a good job of helping convert 100 odd machines and 200 odd folks to GNU/Linux.

regards
PS I just read the posts on what will kill Micrisoft - some interesting stuff there

[imdeemvp]

You have think about the 5 basic things a regular user does in a computer.

1. Internet and for that we have firefox and mozilla browser but in fedora some plugins are not easy to install and we are seeing this with java lately.

2. Word processing is always a must. Open office is similiar application to MS word professional and its included in most linux distros.

3. Email services for entire organization and can be accomplished with thunderbird and evolution being also similiar to outlook in MS.

4. Security, well we dont really worry about this one with linux. Only when you share files with others systems running windows.

5. I will say budget for #5. Using linux will save you money. But in this case I dont recommend fedora because it is testing ground for redhat. Suse and mandrake will serve you better and are well known on the other side of this continent too. And if you want to expend some money well than use RHEL. www.redhat.com

[terr9898]

In addition, I would say that you try to push the users to install one distro. It will help when it comes to supporting their problems.

Also, an low cost alternative to RHEL is Whitebox Linux or CentOS. Both utilize the source code from RHEL 3, which gives you the bells and whistles of RHEL without the high(er) cost.

[imdeemvp]

Also, an low cost alternative to RHEL is Whitebox Linux or CentOS

Which is very cheap compare to RHEL.

[kosmosik]

Originally Posted by bamboo_spider

I work for an environmental NGO in India which has teams in 10 odd locations with a head office. Most locations have upto 5 PC's / and or laptops (PIII's and above) there are some old PII's as well.

It would be hard to just replace theese with Linux... surely a bumpy way and lots of training/service work with it...

Originally Posted by bamboo_spider

Most of the software we use is proprietory read MS related and stuff. There is also an Oracle system - oracle 7 I think.

if your system is not too complicated it will be easy to port that applications (running Oracle and Windows clients) to equivalents based on web interface and some opensouce database (like MySQL or PostgreSQL) - initially it will require an investment to rewrite the applications, but after some peroid it will pay back as reduced licensing costs... here (multiuser db applications) it is a sure path to go opensource. switch everything you have to web based interfaces in intranet and run database on free solutions (they are good enough to manage it). also in India (but I can be wrong) man labour is not really that expensive comparing to license costs?

Originally Posted by bamboo_spider

Our organziations work is community based - very sim ilar in philosophy to the GNu/Linux OS community, only the issues are different.

this is good argument... when you look at Linux it comes to that best Linux tools are made for typical Linux users. I mean for years best Linux tools were stuf like editors, programers tools, servers, compilers etc. - I mean we scratch our own itch. right now this toolset (what Linux has best) exceeds to colaborative developement (things like blogs, wikis) and web in general (servers, engines, databases etc.) so if your model is similar you will get good tools

Originally Posted by bamboo_spider

Over the last few years we have been talking about migrating / shifting/ adopting GNU/Linux OS systems across the organization. This is an environment where most people have grown up with MS and the likes and are also very very untechnical as far as Computers go.

this is not the issue, you can implement this partially so users won't even notice that something has changed. it has layers:
1. you can run you low end stuff on Linux, like file/print servers/mail/web/dns etc. - here user does not notice no change.
2. you can run Linux on very high end stuff like datacenters and HPC - here user also won't see any change
3. you can switch your aplications to Linux (this will be like changing their apps to server/web based stuff) - here user will notice something but it should be not significant problem when you arrange proper implementation and brifings on new system along with good documentation...
4. the last bastion is users desktop and you should be very careful here... if Windows does its job right now you don't need to switch... eventually you can run pilot programs and let the users decide what they wish to use... take look at commercial offerings like Red Hat Desktop or Sun Java Desktop System or Novell Desktop... they come with nice toolset for administration, support and so on.

Originally Posted by bamboo_spider

We have a very good GIS lab as well but there too we are stuck with high licensing oosts. We do have some requirements for Video and Audio editing to make simple movies now and in time more quality stuff. (So is it true that Pixar and stuff are on Linux based systems.

you can get some of these... also in commercial form - look at Main Actor... it is not so expensive.

(...)

We run pretty much the same harware across locations - so will that be a positive.

be sure to test it first before you roll out something that will not work...

Our Head Office has about 50 machines and have a novell network and mail sever running and will continue to need a mail server. Currently they run Pegasus Malil, Mercury 1.4 and is based on a Suse 6.1 server.

Linux shines as a mail server...

[bamboo_spider]

Thanks folks

I will work on it and when the note is ready I will post it on the forum. Give me some time

Thanks once again

[imdeemvp]

Just make sure the hardware will be able to handle fedora's ram compsution.

[bamboo_spider]

Originally Posted by imdeemvp

Just make sure the hardware will be able to handle fedora's ram compsution.

I guess most machines will have 128 mb ram, that was standard when we bought the computers, now maybe we can upgrade just the ram a bit.

[crackers]

Run a different distribution of Linux if memory (and money) is tight. Vector Linux seems to do quite well on a limited-memory footprint and older hardware...

[bamboo_spider]

thanks will remember that,

how geekly is vector linux - as i said earlier the bunch of people we are talking about are really very scared of command line stuff.

regards

[crackers]

I think the "geekiest" are Gentoo (build from scratch) and Debian. The rest of them are destktop oriented or have a choice between desktop and server. I played with VectorLinux a bit, but I'm afraid I don't remember too much. It's not quite as "polished" as FC. This is one of those things where you're just going to have to play with quite a few before finding one(s) that is(are) "most ideal" for the situation.

[imdeemvp]

And the easiest installation will be from mandrake 10.1. So far is a walk in the park for me. Slackware is pretty stable by techie but you have one advantage with mandrake and that is rpm based.