French Parliament Chooses Ubuntu 174
atamyrat reminds us that last November it was announced that the French Parliament had decided to switch to Linux. At that time the distro had not been determined. It will be Ubuntu: "[T]wo companies, Linagora and Unilog, have been selected to provide the members of the Parliament as well as their assistants new computers containing free software. This will amount to 1,154 new computers running Ubuntu prior to the start of the next session which occurs in June 2007."
Re:I don't get why they would use Ubuntu... (Score:3, Informative)
There's no law saying you have to be bleeding-edge; they can perfectly well stick with Dapper, which is the current 'long term support' release. The rest of us can install pre-release versions of Feisty if we want, but it's certainly not compulsory.
Re:I don't get why they would use Ubuntu... (Score:2, Informative)
Good stuff (Score:3, Informative)
Obviously that the only good decision that the french gouvernement took for a long while
Re:I don't get why they would use Ubuntu... (Score:3, Informative)
There also seems to lack mature features for installing 3rd party content. This might not be much of a problem for really basic desktop user, but for a standard Linux users not being able to install and run tar-balls is a real problem (ubuntu doesn't even include
Re:I don't get why they would use Ubuntu... (Score:2, Informative)
In Ubuntu or Kubuntu you need to replace both GNOME and KDE to get something stable. They apply a bunch of experimental patches to "improve" the experience, but the patches often creates more bugs.
For serious? I haven't heard about any of this, nor experienced any of its effects (to my knowledge).
There also seems to lack mature features for installing 3rd party content. This might not be much of a problem for really basic desktop user, but for a standard Linux users not being able to install and run tar-balls is a real problem (ubuntu doesn't even include /usr/local to PATH!), and they have obscured everything but /home and /mnt in the file-browsers, making it hard to access your webpage in /var/www, your source code in /src and your optional packages in /opt !!
Last I checked, hidden system folders is a Kubuntu-specific feature.
Not Part of The UK (Score:3, Informative)
Socialist Theory? (Score:3, Informative)
P.S. You are more likely to find sodomy in the halls of the U.S. Congress - where pages really know what pain in the ass means!
Re:Glad I don't do my IT work in France (Score:3, Informative)
Once you've had a chance to actually deal with real-world users in the government enterprise environment, you know exactly what I mean. Linux is a great solution if every user has a basic grip on how to use a computer and are willing to explore and figure out how to do things. But in the real world, most aren't.
Actually, I think Linux is a lot better for this than Windows is. I've seen incompetent management types who can only access files from the "most recent" list in Word and have no idea where their files are stored or even what the whole file/folder metaphor is about. The difference is, with Linux it is fairly easy to customize the interface such that the tasks a user needs to accomplish are mapped directly to big buttons that are omnipresent and it is possible to make the one hundred random controls that those user don't ever want to touch, invisible by default. Remember we're talking about deploying in a centrally managed environment. Rolling out software and patches and even doing remote support tasks is a lot easier using Linux than Windows.
I guarantee that the oldest/most senior users in the french government are going to call IT every time they want to do something they weren't shown how to do, or simply forgot or became too tech-timid, when they were set up with Ubuntu.
Sure they will, and they'd do the same thing if they were upgraded to a newer version of Windows. The difference is the ease of accommodating them.
Despite the fact that "OMG Windoze wantz to rulez world so it suckz" seems to be the normal opinion here...
This is a strawman argument. No one but you said Windows sucks.
Windows XP is a solid OS with a familiar feel...
A "familiar feel" is an argument against all change. Change can be difficult and has real costs, but sometimes those costs are outweighed by other factors.
...most importantly, real support from a massive dev team.
Umm, Ubuntu probably has more professional, paid developers working on it than Windows does. Trying to get a flaw in Windows fixed is an exercise in frustration. Unless you are huge, good luck. You can wait till service pack 3 or the next release of Windows in another 5 years. Trying to get the same flaw fixed in Ubuntu is a matter of calling one of the two support companies that are part of this contract, or Canonical, or another Linux distro, or getting an internal employee to fix it, or hiring an independent contractor because all of those are options and have access to the source. Better yet, you can take competitive bids from all of them to see who will work most cheaply, and the same applies for new features of customizations.
Getting real support for Windows is a matter of hiring a company who will solve what they can without the source and pester MS on your behalf and hope for the best. That is the inferior support option.
As oppossed to a group of nerds who just don't want to pay for software so they build a modified version of Unix for themselves.
Are you smoking crack? Do you even know any Linux developers? Most of them work for IBM or Redhat or Motorola or Home Depot, or one of thousands of other companies that use Linux as a component of their business model. Heck we submit fixes and improvements to Linux all the time and not because Linux is license free, but because it was the best fit for our project and because customers demanded it. In fact some of our projects ran on BSD variants until customers demanded Linux for greater customizability with tools they were familiar with. Since the cheapest box we sell is about $40K, adding another couple hundred for an OS license is not really a significant expense if it had any benefits. It doesn't and has significant negatives.
The French parliament has two professional services companies for support and they are professional coders. They can buy support from Cano
Re:Quick French Lesson For Posters (Score:3, Informative)
In 1998 when he tried to hold Saddam to account for non-cooperation with the UNSCOM regime by bombing a wide variety of targets (mostly related to WMD production) he was widely criticized for it BY REPUBLICANS. They said he was trying to "wag the dog" and that there wasn't a real threat from Saddam, it was all just hype. Go look at the actual record of events during the Clinton administration. Look at how many tons of bombs were dropped on Iraq every year of his presidency, look at how many missions were flown over the no-fly zone in Iraq, look at his public comments during re: Iraq. It's complete and total bullshit that the very same people who mocked Clinton for attacking Saddam in 1998 now try to spin it in the opposite direction.