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posted by LaminatorX on Thursday October 09 2014, @07:40AM   Printer-friendly
from the still-8-percent-locked-in-to-proprietary dept.

The European Union's interoperability site reports:

The German town of Gummersbach, a city of about 50,000 in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, announced that this Summer it has completed its switch to Linux PCs, retiring a decade-old proprietary operating system no longer supported by the IT vendor. The migration has saved the town a five-figure sum, and Gummersbach expects a further reduction of IT costs: a combination of savings on proprietary [licenses] and lower hardware costs.

Using Linux has reduced the need for PC maintenance, freeing 1 full-time equivalent employee (FTE). The IT department now employs three persons.

In August, the city sent a statement to Pro Linux, a German Linux news site, announcing the completion of the migration project and detailing its current desktop PC policy. [October 7], the city made the same statement available to the Open Source Observatory and Repository (OSOR).

The administration now uses 300 thin client PCs, with desktop and applications [retrieved from] a SuSE Linux Terminal Server cluster of six servers. The desktop environment is MATE. The city staffers use the LibreOffice suite of office productivity tools and the Open-Xchange suite of email, instant messaging, calendaring, and online collaboration tools.

Some departments use Wollmux, an open source tool for managing forms and document templates developed by the German city of Munich.

The Linux desktops can access a number of business application that depend on a proprietary operating system, by using a combination of proprietary desktop virtualisation solutions. Gummersbach retains 25 PCs running a proprietary operating system, a requirement for applications used by the Civil Service desk, and for computer aided design software in use by the town.

[Update: Corrected spelling of Gummersbach and updated link thereto.]

Related Stories

India's Defense Services Are Switching to GNU/Linux 12 comments

The site It's FOSS is reporting that India's Defense Services are switching to GNU/Linux, ditching an insecure legacy operating system, with an August 15 deadline. Little is known about their home spun distro except that it seems to be based on Ubuntu.

What's Happening: According to a recent report, the Defence Ministry of India has decided to replace Windows with an in-house developed Linux distro called 'Maya' on all computers that are connected to the Internet.

Also reported at The Hindu, Defence Ministry to switch to locally built OS Maya amid threats, which explains that this move is a reaction to increasingly successful attacks against a certain, pervasive, desktop legacy operating system. x

Currently, Maya is being installed only in Defence Ministry systems and not on computers connected to the networks of the three Services. On this, the official said the three Services had also vetted it and would adopt it on service networks as well soon. The Navy had already cleared it and the Army and the Air Force were currently evaluating it, the official added.

Maya was developed by government development agencies within six months, the official said. Maya would prevent malware attacks and other cyberattacks which had seen a steep increase, the official noted.

However, the attacks in and of themselves are less of a problem than the fact that a large, and increasing, number of them are successful against that aging legacy desktop operating system.

For India to pull this off successfully, they must study how their opponent has maneuvered over the years against GNU/Linux deployments and in particular look at case studies like Kerala, Munich, Lower Saxony, Vaasa, and Turku. India's opponent in this move has had many programmes, years ago one was EDGI, and a long standing mandate that "under NO circumstances lose against Linux".

Previously:
(2018) German Documentary on Relations Between Microsoft and Public Administration Now Available in English
(2018) German State of Lower Saxony Plans to Switch From Linux to Windows
(2017) Munich Switching From Linux to Windows 10
(2017) Linux Champion Munich Takes Decisive Step Towards Returning to Windows
(2016) Draft Report Doesn't Say -Which- Software is Causing Problems in Munich
(2016) Munich: The High Cost of Having Committed to Closed-Source Software
(2014) Another German Town Says It Has Completed Its Switch To FOSS


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  • (Score: 2, Informative) by Caballo Negro on Thursday October 09 2014, @08:07AM

    by Caballo Negro (1794) on Thursday October 09 2014, @08:07AM (#103942)
    Small correction: that's Gummersbach, not Gummersach — see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gummersbach [wikipedia.org].
  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Marand on Thursday October 09 2014, @08:24AM

    by Marand (1081) on Thursday October 09 2014, @08:24AM (#103943) Journal

    It's a shame the article doesn't have more detail, I would have liked to know more about the hardware and other implementation details.

    A machine translation of the pro-linux.de article gives a bit more info. It seems they're using using Fujitsu FUTRO machines for the thin clients, and using XDMCP for the connections to the servers.

    I have to say, though: looking at Fujitsu's site [fujitsu.com] for the "thin clients" is kind of amusing. The only thing "thin" about the ones in the 'flexible' category is the lack of disk space. Some of them had specs like 1-4GB of RAM, Radeon GPU, >1ghz CPU, etc. The lowest spec I saw at a glance was a 1ghz ARM CPU...

    I still have an old laptop with lower specs than that that can run a full distro, and those are considered thin clients.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 09 2014, @09:41AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 09 2014, @09:41AM (#103965)

      Also, what was the proprietary operating system they previously used? Why not name that?

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 09 2014, @09:51AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 09 2014, @09:51AM (#103967)

        Why bother? It's pretty obvious what it almost certainly was.

      • (Score: 2) by Marand on Thursday October 09 2014, @10:53AM

        by Marand (1081) on Thursday October 09 2014, @10:53AM (#103972) Journal

        Also, what was the proprietary operating system they previously used? Why not name that?

        The German article seems to claim that they were using Windows XP with Office XP prior to the migration. So, they chose to migrate to Linux instead of moving to Windows 7 for most systems, though it also says something about 25 installations of Windows 7 remaining in use. There's also something else about certain Windows applications being made available to the Linux thin client users via VMware, but the machine translation is less coherent there, so I'm not sure if I read that correctly.

        • (Score: 2, Informative) by yours truly on Thursday October 09 2014, @04:26PM

          by yours truly (3040) on Thursday October 09 2014, @04:26PM (#104103)

          According to the article they had about 325 PCs under XP with Office XP but would have had tremendous expenses to replace all hardware and pay for new licenses. That "remaining" bothers me as well but from the German I assume it means that the software they were using is only available under some variety of the OS and remains there although the OS itself was updated for those 25 (new) PCs. These are CAD and special purpose applications requiring Windows drivers. Some required special purpose applications are provided on 2 Citrix servers running under VMware. They are also using some of the (WollMux) software developed by the city of Munich during their migration.
          I live about half an hour away from Gummersbach and had no idea this was going on. Very interesting.

    • (Score: 1) by Gravis on Thursday October 09 2014, @12:10PM

      by Gravis (4596) on Thursday October 09 2014, @12:10PM (#103993)

      I still have an old laptop with lower specs than that that can run a full distro, and those are considered thin clients.

      thin clients are less about hardware specs and more about the fact that they dont store user data locally. that said, there are plenty of thin clients that can be used for full machines, assuming you dont open lots of chrome tabs and eat all the ram. :)

      • (Score: 2) by Marand on Thursday October 09 2014, @12:38PM

        by Marand (1081) on Thursday October 09 2014, @12:38PM (#104005) Journal

        I know, it's just funny seeing the specs of thin clients that are many times more powerful than systems that used to be high spec. Thin clients with gpu memory that is 4x an old, once-fast desktop's entire RAM, etc. I remember when X11 actually used a significant chunk of ram, so the specs amused me.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 09 2014, @09:13AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 09 2014, @09:13AM (#103956)
    If so, looks like they are fucked.
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 09 2014, @09:35AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 09 2014, @09:35AM (#103963)

      Hopefully they don't.

      They seem like a sensible bunch of intelligent people, not the thuggish, "use this or you'll be wearing cement galoshes" types we usually associate with systemd.

    • (Score: 2) by kaszz on Thursday October 09 2014, @03:39PM

      by kaszz (4211) on Thursday October 09 2014, @03:39PM (#104072) Journal

      Their next custom OS will be FreeBSD - problem solved.

      (no systemd devils were used to type this message)

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 09 2014, @11:34AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 09 2014, @11:34AM (#103978)

    Such a 90's term.

    From TFC and experience at work (win7 i7 even a locked out dvd, full hdd etc, but no own executables or local storage), plus win8, android and ios devices at home - tells me the meaning of 'thin client' describes the available user s/w more than the h/w these days.

    Must look into this free'nix thing one day.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 09 2014, @07:19PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 09 2014, @07:19PM (#104178)

      May I encourage you to make that "one day" today ... and never look back.