cubic blog

This evening our mail server mail.best-off.org and the people.best-off.org site will be down for maintenance. We have scheduled this for 19.00 to 21.00 Central European Time.

The file system needs some love and new applications need to be installed.

It has been a long time since I last have been working on Midgard on the Windows platform and today has been the first time for months that I logged into my Windows development partition again. I upgraded to Visual Studio.NET recently and now it’s time to start working on the Windows side of Midgard again.

Midgard Core and Apache 2 module already made it through the compiler with small patches, PHP4 and PHP5 will be a task for the next days, since I plan to switch to using official source and binary packages from both Apache and PHP to build Midgard.

This will require a lot of changes to the Windows build system as for now the build is better suited for my open sa source tree - which also has not been touched for months sigh - and it should be possible to build against any source tree.

For now the rough plan is to use environment variables to link against the desired source tree and for Midgard core and Apache this worked out well.

Good news is that since the Gnome support for Windows has improved over the last months, at least this part of the build process is a lot easier. I do not know in which shape the PHP build system is - especially the module build system - but this seems to have improved, too.

I decided to use the Windows Installer Toolkit released to the Open Source community by Microsoft. It is .NET based and allows for the transformation of an XML definition nto a real Windows installer application, patch packages are possible, too.

Initial thoughts for the Windows port have been defined in mRFC0011 by Henri Bergius and after checking what Windows Installer can accomplish these days, I will add my two cents to it. Expect more over the next few days.

I hope to finish my Windows port before the baby arrives, so any input, idea, or whish is welcome.

From time to time, life changes in every aspect. This time it got me. My wife is pregnant, she’s in the 7th month now. And as we had hoped it will be a girl. In the last few weeks more and more time in my private life got dedicated to the preparations for the birth of our daughter. I never would have thought how many things one has to do before a child is there. We will have to search for a new flat, need lots of furniture, clothes, accessories plus the bureaucracy factor. Forms need to be completed, and there are lots of them which law demands to be completed.

So for today I’d like to introduce everyone to our daughter Leoni (losely based on Leo for Lion).

More news coming soon and hopefully new photos, too. Expected date of birth is March 24th, 2005. Plus or minus two weeks, depending on the growth in the next weeks.

Just read the notes from Henri Kaukola on running Midgard with RHEL3.

There is a little addendum for those running Fedora Core 3 or RHEL4 beta (or e.g. CentOS 4 beta):
you are safe as these distributions already have a working zlib and pcre version available right from the start.

Migration of business offices seems to be what researchers, news pages, big players, etc. talk about these days and this story by The Age describes what a German research firm claims in their study on migrating desktops to Linux using OpenOffice.org.

Let me summarize this a bit:
Soeren Research claims that the migration to Linux as desktop platform is not cost-effective for small companies. This is a common claim. I can not remember how many of these statements I have seen in the past months and this one is really one too much.

We have switched several offices to Linux as desktop and server platform within the last year, moving from Windows 2000 to Linux with Gnome as desktop. The reasoning for these switches all have been the same. Windows 2000 is to expensive for small companies, as you can not leverage the volume licensing options, you need an even more expensive Windows administrator, plus there is the constant presence of system failures. For example, you do a fresh Windows 2000 server installation on a new system. First it works, but when you start using Active Directory it suddenly breaks on each boot complaining about a broken printer, and there was not a single printer installed or even attached to the system. Two years later the issue still remains although the client reported it to MS.

So over the last few years, I got the strong feeling that Windows is not the right thing in a small office. There are several reasons:

• small companies usually do not have much more than a amateur administrator
• small companies do not have servers running all day and all night.
  Each day a secretary or someone else switches it on and waits until it is booted.
• there is no need for fancy features.
  Things needed include file sharing on the network and sometimes a little email.
• no one has the time to run updates.
  There usually is enough other work left.
• you have mostly untrained users, even unaware of how Windows works.

This results in lots of issues which consume time and money, I will describe a few below.

• desktops and server(s) in a small business will be installed one time.
  Afterwards every user has the believe that things are done and never need to be touched. If anything does not work without reading the manual, the company will loose up to a whole day of work when all users wonder what happened.
• updates will be done in the users spare time when no work is left.
  This might happen once or twice a year. If the company has an office-wide web connection this may add another five to ten spam servers in this world.
• small companies do not think about Access Control Lists, LDAP or RSBAC.
  They trust in their systems to do the right thing. Windows does not do the right thing. It will not report a bug and then tell the user to look for fixes, it will simply report a bug and stop.
• in a small office your word processor needs to be reliable and it needs to work the same way on each desktop.
  Have you ever tried this with Windows without any management software? No chance, it even breaks if two system share identical hard- and software installations.
• installation of a Windows desktop or server and keeping it up to date is time consuming.
  As a small company does not have ZENWorks or any other working management solution, each installation or update might cost from half a day of work up to one week, depending on what you need to do.
• license fees are to high.
  Assume you have ten users and one server. Now go and buy the cheap volume licensing from MS. You will get Open Licensing, meaning you buy X numbers of licenses and have to pay for each support call.

Now if you know some economics or even have learned it, you can do a quick calculation. And yes, these are thousands of Euros of additional costs for each year. For a small company we’re talking about a sales volume near a million Euros. Now deduct the costs and see what’s left. Yes, then a few thousand Euros do count much more.

Try This With Linux

Now let us try the same with Linux. The picture is pretty different.

• desktops and servers will be installed once.
  Afterwards you can run automated updates using Cron on the whole network.
• users do not have to care about updates.
  They simply use their desktops. Some may start to wonder why they do not have to stop working for a new update to work.
• users do not care if it is MS Office or OpenOffice.org.
  If they can type text, apply formats, add tables, work with spreadsheets, use their templates, it is fine for them. Plus: even untrained users can use OpenOffice.org without training.
• a Linux server can switch on the desktop systems each morning.
  It will supply all users with the same desktop on whatever machine they login. Same look, their files, only different seat. Once installed, this works perfect.
• even if there should be any license fee coming up, the price can not be higher than for a Windows system.
  Support is available from the web, via browser or email plus your users will start to learn how a computer works when they enjoy Linux day to day.
• if you report bugs, you will get a response and some time later you get things fixed.

So where is the difference? It is in the marketing and in the look and feel. Yes, Linux does not look like people are used to, but it has the ability to let your users do their work. From a business point of view, what counts more? A beautiful Windows XP desktop with flowers or dogs and lots of blue and green or a user who can work without interruption for the whole year?

Summary

Run as many case studies as you like, we are enjoying Linux in the mean time.