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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.
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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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