I'd love to see some detailed architecture docs for this or similar high-level Linux based rollout.
Ubuntu and open source help the City of Munich save millions
41–50 of 109 posts
Re: Ubuntu and open source help the City of Munich save millions
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
Honestly, it is going to take a while. The display drivers needs a lot of work (intel seems solid). Also, desktop itself needs to be super stable. Also, the software (from companies) is treated like a second-class citizen. Chrome is horrible on linux, --disable-gpu --audio-buffer-size what user is going to bother with that? I have to do all these tweaks and workarounds to get things to work. Regular users will not ha…
YMMV, of course. I have found the exact opposite experience. https://plus.google.com/u/0/+AlexChiang/posts/JKdr1LTLQD2
#2 resonates with me. I always feel I might break something on a Mac.
I only mentioned Mac because many HN users cite their experience on linux as not being a good one.
Re: Ubuntu and open source help the City of Munich save millions
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
I really wonder if LibreOffice is not totally adequate for the users in the city of Munich. I know that it has its problems if you want to use it with Word generated documents, and it obviously has problems with add-ons developed for Word. But I could really think that it works quite nice, if all your documents are generated for LibreOffice. I am using Open / LibreOffice since nearly 10 years exclusively at home and…
I think this is really sad. As someone who went through university when the last wave of centralized unix died off, then the move to decentralized windows, and to decentralized linux (because they couldn't really figure it out mostly). I found that move to decentralization and the availability of compilers and tools and dev. environments and easy ways to get admin privileges, well I credit that with my learning how t…
Creating a simple game on a Linux machine:
nano awesomewebglgame.htmlRe: Ubuntu and open source help the City of Munich save millions
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
I believe it's been well documented by many writers that Linux on desktop (LOD) won't be a thing in the foreseeable future. If you think about it, Android's problems with open source allowing manufacturers to have their own flavours of Android, is one of the reasons why the average user might think TouchWiz (or other skins) is Android and that's why it sucks. Note that this is just _one_ reason I believe LOD won't be…
"If you think about it, Android's problems with open source allowing manufacturers to have their own flavours of Android..." One is not really dependent on the other. You could use open source and not allow modifications or you could use closed source software and allow endless customization. I also don't consider it an "android problem" that manufacturers do this. Most of the good stuff ends up in standard android a…
> One is not really dependent on the other. You could use open source and not allow modifications or you could use closed source software and allow endless customization.
Good point.
> Most of the good stuff ends up in standard android after a while, which wouldn't have happened if no one was allowed to make the changes in the first place.
This was mainly due to Google pushing more stuff through Play Services. It would be nice if there was some more control/constraints on Linux flavours.
Re: Ubuntu and open source help the City of Munich save millions
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
SharePoint is a Jack of all trades, master of none so based on you requirements you have to choose the right tool most of which are OSS or at the very least non depended on Windows
Could you name few? Anything would be helpful.
If you respond with specific requirements I'll be glad to give you a rundown of options for each requirement, as well as good "package deals" of software that works well in concert.
Re: Ubuntu and open source help the City of Munich save millions
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not to mention the big kahunas, Exchange, Sharepoint, AD, SQL Server licenses.
Is there an opensource alternative for Sharepoint?
I've only used Sharepoint very cursorily and that years ago, so my experience isn't the best or understanding complete.
As a first approximation: a Wiki.
Tools such as Atlassian's Trac and Jira (not themselves open sourced) offer a fair bit of the equivalent features.
For setting up Internet portals, a CMS such as Drupal or Wordpress could fit the bill.
One of the features of Sharepoint sites that I've seen is that they're used effectively to "hang" MS Office documents off of them -- as Office docs. This grates strongly with my preference for either HTML or PDF formats for documents, plus some markup style. I'm growing increasingly strongly partial to using either Markdown (for simple documents/pages) or LaTeX (for more complex ones) for document preparation. Yes, there's a touch of up-front training involved, but once you've crossed that bridge, the world opens up, and the basics can be gotten in an hour or so.
The document management pieces are actually something I'd like a solution for more generally, and it's a space that's hugely frustrating. There's zotero, a desktop application, there's git, there are a number of other tools, each of which effectively only address part of the larger picture.
There are a number of free document management tools, but I'm not in a position to recommend any: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=web+based+document+management
Best thing to do is to make a functional list of what it is you're using Sharepoint for, and to find equivalent replacements for those features.
Re: Ubuntu and open source help the City of Munich save millions
#47What about long-term compatibility of Microsoft (or Apple) products? How can proprietary, maybe even binary file-formats be accessed in 100 years from now? Cities usually keep their books forever. I have so many files from the nineties that are already very difficult to restore. I could imagine that open source formats have a huge advantage here?! #LongtermCosts
Re: Ubuntu and open source help the City of Munich save millions
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
They are not, unless there are Ubuntu computers available in stores. I actually know there are some German laws requiring computers be made available with varying or no OS, so it is much more likely than it is stateside to find an Ubuntu machine in store.
Unfortunately this is not the case. I only new 2 Online-Stores in Germany that sell Ubuntu maschines - one is my own: http://rockiger.com/ On the other hand, System76 computers are not available in Germany. Best bet is probably is Sputnik from Dell, although their Ubuntu configuration is not that good.
The initial Dell sputnik was lacking (notably small screen resolution, price, etc.). The second rev is decent:
4th Generation Intel® Core™ i5-4210U processor (3M Cache, up to 2.7 GHz)
UBUNTU Linux 12.04 LTS (64-bit)
13.3 inch LED Backlit Touch Display with Truelife and FHD resolution (1920 x 1080)
8GB1 DDR3L at 1600MHz
128GB Solid State Drive
Intel® HD Graphics 4400
3.02 lbs
Dell Price $1199.99
Re: Ubuntu and open source help the City of Munich save millions
#49It reminds me http://xkcd.com/934/ for most simple users. What a government officer do at his/her workstation? They probably have every service through web pages, almost nobody builds native programs anymore. And for the most cases LibreOffice is not perfect, but adequate to do simple jobs. So it is very logical to use something free for these tasks, to replace Windows+Office and save money.
The problem is usually interacting with other agencies; those don't have well-defined data formats for data interchange, instead they often work with forms in Word documents, and require the document to be edited with a very specific version of MS Word. Of course that makes interaction harder. The technical lead of the LiMux project told a story once about a German federal agency that required documents to be submitt…
As you note, these requirements tend to be with specific versions of Word, and so libreoffice and co present no more of an impediment that using other/current versions of Word.
Re: Ubuntu and open source help the City of Munich save millions
#50I want to know a bit more about how they solved the MS-specific problems like VB macros that are often quite vital to a company's infrastructure.