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Linux Business Operating Systems Linux

German Company To Install Linux On 10,000 PCs 328

jfruhlinger writes "Linux proponents used to proclaim that the era of Linux on the desktop was just around the corner. That may never come to pass, but there are still occasional wins. For instance, a German insurance giant will be moving 10,000 employees to Linux-based desktop and laptop machines."
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German Company To Install Linux On 10,000 PCs

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  • by rolfwind ( 528248 ) on Sunday April 24, 2011 @01:49AM (#35919408)

    The Foreign Ministry left Linux back to windows just a little while back:
    http://cuduwudu.com/2011/02/germany-bids-farewell-to-linux/ [cuduwudu.com]

    I think the Munich government is still on it but may be wrong.

  • by Reed Solomon ( 897367 ) on Sunday April 24, 2011 @02:27AM (#35919504) Homepage

    AT THE SAME TIME!!!

    • German Company To Install Linux On 10,000 PCs

      This is really not such a big deal. I know a dormitory where one copy of StarCraft was installed on over 6000 computers over an eight year period.

      I'm pretty sure they were all using the same copy of Photoshop too.

      The amazing thing about this story is that the 10,000 Linux machines were all installed legally.

  • There are free and paid support enterprise distros over a popular but unstable (and as far as I know still a home user focused) distro?

    The only thing i can think of is that Canonical is a stable company (unlike Novel) and can undercut RH or do they want to move into the cloud.

    I would think that suse/RH would have better security, package management, hardware compatibility with opensuse(my impression have no proof on this) and everything else that you want for a large company.

    • Ubuntu is desktop-focused and does a server version; RHEL is server-focused and will also work on a desktop.

      Ubuntu does things like One Hundred Paper Cuts [launchpad.net] to reduce the annoying little shit.

      And Canonical has been around for a few years and is backed by a rogue billionaire who doesn't have to do anything he doesn't want. "I did lose a million dollars last year. I expect to lose a million dollars this year. I expect to lose a million dollars next year! You know, Mr. Thatcher, at the rate of a million dollars

    • Canonical wants to do anything that gains then revenue - they can;t exist without that after all.

      So, cloud computing - nice to do, everyone else is doing it after all, even Microsoft sees a nice revenue-generating bandwagon to jump on.

      So I welcome that, if people want to use their cloud facilities, good for them. It makes the company more stable and that's ultimately what's needed for Linux adoption. Busineses aren't run by geeks, they're run by people who need to know their money isn't going to be wasted b

  • The company will rush into this without any care to what is actually involved, will get frustrated when switching to a different OS will actually take some investment, and will eventually switch back when the short-term cost of training outweighs the recurrent cost of Windows licenses.

  • Now, *that's* what I call a Beowulf cluster.
    • Now, just try to imagine what you could do with it!

      (Except it isn't what you have, but what you do with what you have, that really matters.)

  • by Haedrian ( 1676506 ) on Sunday April 24, 2011 @03:25AM (#35919662)

    I mean, they probably just use Office Suites (which linux has), and i they use some sort of proprietary software they'll have to modify it a bit if it wasn't written in java or something.

    I honestly don't see why many companies don't just switch really. If you don't need a windows box to run windows software, you can get better results with a Linux machine.

  • I hope they secure their sensitive data on those laptops
  • by __aaqvdr516 ( 975138 ) on Sunday April 24, 2011 @08:38AM (#35920666)

    She's been on XP on an older machine and had been playing a few games that kept her there. She just recently started complaining about WinXP acting "weird" and having firefox hanging up. I slapped Suse 11.4 KDE on her machine and told her to let me know if something didn't work.

    First day in and her words were: "I don't see what's different" and "It looks the same".

    I was away at work. She installed Quicken via Wine and didn't even realize that it was any different than being in WinXP. But then came some coupon printer she's been using. That doesn't work. I'm looking at running a virtual machine just for that purpose.

    As I'm typing this, she just plugged in our camera for the first time.
    "This won't work in here huh?"
    "Plug it in, you'll see"
    Up pops the camera application and away she goes without further prompting.

    She's not very tech savvy. But she's not on the job either and can wait for me to show her how to get stuff done.

    Posted from my Win7 machine in Pale Moon
    *ducks*.

Algebraic symbols are used when you do not know what you are talking about. -- Philippe Schnoebelen

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