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SUNDANCE IS A NON PROFIT TAKING, WORKER OWNED CO-OPERATIVE FOR RENEWABLE ENERGY AND SUSTAINABILITY
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OUR POLICY - OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE FOR THE OFFICE

Sundance Renewables has a strong ethic to try and establish alternatives to the standard corporate profit oriented business model. We use ethical banking with the Co-op and Triodos, for example and we are keen to develop the alternatives to the monopolistic world of Microsoft that so many IT users take for granted.

Originally, in 2002, we used a Cardiff based RISC operating system run on low energy Acorn computers, then in 2004 we changed over to Mandrake Linux with new AMD IBM PC hardware for desktop use. Other  reasons behind the adoption involved cost of acquisition as compared to the major costs of committing to a full Microsoft shop. It was decided the Linux was able to support the IT needs of the co-op in particular with respect to the Kmail email client (later upgraded to Thunderbird) and the Open Office suite of programs available with Mandrake 9.1.

John - Our Linux Support Worker

There was an element of reluctance from staff familiar with Microsoft from their home environments to adapt to the range of possibilities available to the Linux user but this difficulty did not prove insurmountable and a level of acceptance developed. While WINE or Win4Lin could have been explored to support financial applications such as government PAYE software, the SAGE accountancy package and particularly the Internet banking access it was considered expedient to base that aspect of the software needs of the co-op on a Microsoft box for simplicity and accept a heterogeneous network. The attitude of such financial corporations to persist with a blinkered Microsoft monopoly acceptance possibility remains a frustration, highlighted when interacting with bureaucratic mindsets untrained to consider any other computing paradigm.

Joe put a lot of effort into getting the SAGE stuff to work in CrossOver Office (now Cross over Linux from CodeWeavers - a flavour of WINE) from the Mandriva 2006 Xmas edition onwards (2005).

Further to desktop applications in the winter of 2004 database development was undertaken over the Internet using the Linux environment of Apache, PHP and MySQL developed in Quanta.

Over the time of operations the system has regularly been updated such that by mid 2005 the OS deployed on the desktop and database support hardware had progressed to Mandrake 10.2, renamed Mandriva 2005LE.  All machines were upgraded to Mandriva 2007.0 in October 2006 mostly requiring fresh installs for the root directory, protecting /home information on a separate partition. This release is not without its issues but 2007.1 packages are now online to fill in most gaps. The spring edition should be better.

Mandriva (http://www.mandriva.com/) is just one of many 'flavours' of Linux. The best known are probably Red Hat/Fedora, SUSI and Debian. They spring from the Richard Stallman (http://www.stallman.org/) C compiler (GNU is not Unix) and the Linus Thorvalds (http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/u/torvalds/) OS work. Much of the financial model could be described as CopyLeft where the concept of information wanting to be free does not necessarily carry the implication that there should be no remuneration for those that create it. Freely given support is encouraged and some may actually charge as well especially for stable commercial strength packages.

There is a wide community involved in the Linux and UNIX world who meet frequently in many guises around the world. Always worth catching a conference if its in your area.

Much of the hosting I run at home is virtualised for ease of maintenance, backup and so forth and there are benefits from isolating systems from each other and getting the maximum use out of any particular box. I must admit that amongst my Linux VMs is a Windows 2003 server to keep my old website in its old environment but I have to put links to Linux routes off that to experiment further economically at the moment. There is also regrettably better support for intense multimedia applications from Windows at the moment but I feel no urge to upgrade to Vista. More likely the urge is to virtualise the XP install in a VMWare Virtual Machine (An installation of an operating system within an environment which runs on a host and gives the impression to that guest installation that it is running natively on a dedicated box in a thin layer of virtualisation) on a Mandriva 2007.1 host and maybe then keep a copy of VISTA in a little prison of its own where it can't cause any problems for the stuff it makes obsolete.

Anyone can find me on (http://www.lorienrandir.me.uk/) which points to the graves4all.com website where I post exercises and poems and stuff to get them off the liveware so they don't bother me too much.
 

 

 

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