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SuSE Conquers Munich

[This article was contributed by Ladislav Bodnar]

According to this story in Heise Online (in German), the city of Munich is likely to vote this week in favor of migrating its 14,000 PC systems and notebooks and over 16,000 personnel from Windows NT to Linux. Assuming that the transition goes ahead and completes successfully, we will be seeing one of the most significant moments in the history of the Linux operating system. [Ed. update: the vote is in and Linux is in. See this note from SuSE for additional details.]

It is not hard to elaborate on reasons for Munich's intention to move to Linux. The cost of Microsoft licenses, compared to Linux is often cited as a decisive factor, especially from the long term point of view, but the Munich city officials are adamant that cost is only one of the many factors. Flexibility of the open source software as well as the availability of local expertise are equally important.

The article does not specifically mention any Linux distribution by name, but informed sources and common sense all point to the local Linux experts known as SuSE Linux, AG. SuSE's headquarters are in Nürnberg, only about one hour's drive north of Munich. The company offers a range of products from workstations to advanced servers, as well as specialist applications, such as mail servers. They also have a major sponsor and partner in IBM, which will no doubt throw its weight behind the deal.

SuSE's Linux products have frequently received favorable coverage in the computing media, but the recently released version 8.2 has probably seen the largest number of compliments ever given to a Linux product. In its review entitled SuSE 8.2 approaches computing Nirvana, The Register writes: "It appears the company is serious about tempting a mixed-species shop of Linux servers and Windows desktops to harmonize in favor of Linux and thus save considerably on administration costs. Microsoft should worry about the strides SuSE is making in this area."

This NewsForge review agrees: "I have been using SuSE Linux 8.2 Professional for two weeks now, and it is as close to Linux desktop perfection as I have found so far." Many users on various public forums have echoed the sentiment.

One other product, which might come handy during the transition is SuSE Linux Office Desktop. Released in January this year and based on SuSE Linux 8.1, the Office Desktop was specifically designed to ease migration of Windows-based offices to Linux with a selection of useful applications. These include Acronis OS Selector for NTFS partition resizing, StarOffice 6.0, and most importantly, CrossOver Office and its ability to run Microsoft Office 97/2000 applications. This will be especially important to those environments that make extensive use of VBA macros in their office documents. SuSE's Office Desktop has been reviewed by Extreme Tech and MadPenguin.

On the server side of things, the Oracle9i compatible SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 8 (available for i386, AMD64 and Itanium2 processors) and SuSE Linux Openexchange Server 4 are two main enterprise class products from the company. They complement the usual array of support, consultation and certification services, as well as routine security advisory and product update services.

Will the transition be successful? The road will be full of bumps and pot holes, and some users will no doubt resist the change. But SuSE and IBM will make sure that the process is as painless as possible. This will be a valuable experience that will pave a much smoother way for further transitions in other German government and academic institutions. Before we know it, a tidal wave of defections to Linux will be on the way in many parts of the world.

Our warm congratulations to Germany's third largest city for being brave enough to resist Microsoft's earlier cajoling and go where no one has ventured before. Munich is once again making history...

Comments (2 posted)

Distribution News

Debian GNU/Linux

The Debian Weekly News for May 27, 2003 is available, with a look at GNOME 2.3.2 which is now available for testing; a donations wishlist; a proposal to remove Mosix; more MIME improvements to the BTS; and much more.

Anand Kumria reports on some new mailing lists and new documentaion.

Bill Allombert reports on changes to the Debian menu system. Many bugs have been fixed, i18n support is underway, new features have been added, and much more.

Comments (none posted)

Gentoo Weekly Newsletter -- Volume 2, Issue 21

The Gentoo Weekly Newsletter for the week of May 26th, 2003 is out. This week the newsletter looks at hardware failures on the Oregon State mirror, Gentoo Linux is seeking developers for the GNOME team, and Gentoo Linux in the news.

Full Story (comments: none)

Mandrake Linux

Mandrake Linux 9.1 shipped with Mozilla 1.3. Now Mozilla 1.3.1 is available, fixing a number of bugs and added some missing locals.

The lsb packages provided with Mandrake Linux 9.1 were missing the /lib/lsb/init-functions script required by LSB-aware applications. This update provides the missing file.

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Slackware Linux

Slackware Linux has several security fixes noted in the stable changelog, and even more changes in the current changelog. Slackware current has a new GCC 3.2.3, KDE 3.1.2, GNU Emacs 21.3, and other fixes and upgrades.

Comments (1 posted)

Setting up SuSE for wireless networking (NewsForge)

Here's a NewsForge article on setting up SuSE Linux 8.2 for wireless networking. "I was excited to set up my brand-spanking-new copy of SuSE Linux Professional 8.2 on a machine I'm planning to use for testing and review. Everything went smoothly except for installation of the Orinoco Silver PC Card network adapter. Several hours and unsuccessful tacks later, I can claim victory, and maybe save you time if you tackle the same task."

Comments (1 posted)

New Distributions

Compledge Sentinel

Compledge Sentinel is a Linux distribution designed for monitoring, auditing and intrusion detection. - a complete solution to solve as many monitoring needs and aspects as possible. A wide variety of open source software is included, such as: Nagios, Nagat, Nessus, Snort, ACID, openMosix, Apache /w OpenSSL, PHP and MySQL. The whole package is distributed on one CD, ready to install on any x86-based computer. Version RC2.1 was released May 22, 2003.

Comments (none posted)

Pingwinek GNU/Linux

Pingwinek GNU/Linux is a Linux distribution made in Poland. The main desktop is GNOME 2.2. It supports only Polish and English languages. Version 0.23 was released May 22, 2003.

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Minor distribution updates

AbulEdu

AbulEdu has released stable v1.0.7-II with major feature enhancements. "Changes: This release includes OpenOffice 1.0.3 fr, Mozilla 1.2 fr, Ted 2.13, and Gimp 1.2.3. Booting for X-terminals is now very fast. Lots of abuledu-soft updates were made. Applications from LeTerrier were added. Samba 2.2.8a is used in order to support WinXP-Pro. Lots of new applications were added."

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Caixa Mágica

Caixa Mágica has released v8.01 with several bug fixes and improvements.

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DietLinux

DietLinux has released v0.1.1 with minor feature enhancements. "Changes: This release features an integrated process for burning a bootable Dietlinux CDROM."

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Mindi Linux

Mindi Linux has released v0.85 with code cleanup. "Changes: The failsafe kernel and its modules have been moved to mindi-kernel, an auxiliary package. Mandrake 9.1 is now supported. Support for Debian has been improved."

Comments (none posted)

Phayoune Secure Linux

Phayoune Secure Linux has released v0.3.6 with minor feature enhancements. "Changes: This version updates iptables-1.2.8 and squid-2.5-stable2. The user can choose to use proxy transaparent features with the hard disk (storing cache to save bandwidth) or without the hard disk (filtering URLs for virii without storing cache). It now includes easy installation scripts which allow the user to run the firewall after answering a few questions. It also stores its configuration on a floppy disk."

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RedHawk Linux Real-Time Operating System

Concurrent Computer Corporation has announced the release RedHawk Linux real-time operating system, version 1.3.

Comments (3 posted)

Rock Linux

Rock Linux has announced v2.0.0-beta3 of dRock (desktop Rock Linux), with minor feature enhancements. "Changes: This release fixes the next bunch of broken packages, fixes a kernel .config generation bug, includes many package updates (including KDE-3.1.2), and adds some new packages. Each included window manager now registers itself for proper gdm/kdm support. Some of the init scripts were improved, and some initial support for gcc-3.3 was implemented." The main Rock Linux branch has also released v2.0.0-beta3.

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ThinStation

ThinStation has released v0.92.cr1 with major feature enhancements. "Changes: This release adds samba-server and samba-client packages, a patch to allow the X server to be started with an XDMCP indirect query, the ability to get thinstation-HOSTNAME.conf as a config file, used in conjunction with thinstation.hosts to simplify custom hosts configuration, the ability to select which nsp-package to build directly inside build.conf, and an lpr package which can be used with samba for printing locally. UPX is now used to compact all executables, to reduce the overall footprint."

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uClinux

uClinux has released 20030522 with minor feature enhancements. "Changes: This release adds quite a few new board targets, the Motorola M5282EVB, Hitachi/EDOSK2674, Triscend A7DB and DevA7, and more."

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