Webs’ Random Ideas

My wildest dreams have come true… bye bye windows! According to this article the Windsor Unified School District in Northern California has completely absolved themselves of Windows! They are now using Novell SUSE… which is a project co-authored by M$. So I guess they haven’t completely said goodbye. But switching to SUSE means the school district could eventually move to an all free solution in the near future.

Anyways to me this was just going to happen. Hardly anyone I told this to, including tech friends and co-workers believed me, but sure enough people are getting tired of paying for crappy, buggy, M$ software and switched to Linux. And it happened where I predicted it would happen as well, in the education sector.

This article doesn’t surprise me much because the education sector has seen quite a few slashes in their budget in the last few years, and paying for M$ is an expensive chunk of any education budget. That when cut that saves a lot of money.

By this summer, all 5,000 students and 250 teachers will be working off of a Linux-based thin client running OpenOffice.org, and the majority of the district’s servers will be running Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.

Heather Carver, brought on as the director of technology and information services at Windsor in August 2006, said her hiring was a result of the district’s desire to vet alternatives to a Windows upgrade for its network of seven schools.

When Carver arrived, Windsor had an aging Microsoft Windows environment running on 70 Hewlett-Packard and Dell servers spread across seven schools. Upgrades would have meant purchasing more powerful hardware and additional licensing costs totaling $100,000 – far too expensive for their limited IT budget, she said.

That said, Carver still investigated ways to remain on Windows, but an upgrade proved impossible. “We looked at keeping the physical environment, and how we could accomplish that. But in that scenario, if we could afford the software upgrades, then we could not afford the new hardware required to run it and vice versa,” she said.

$100,000 to stay with Windows… Even I was amazed with that figure, but then I remembered it was Micro$oft… Of course, no migration is complete without hiccups:

Identity hiccup

Windsor did go over a few speed bumps in the migration to Linux involving managing user identities and authentication. For Carver, the ID issues were not debilitating enough to deter her from making the switch from Windows to SUSE, but the issue was still noticeable.

Specifically, custom scripts had to be developed to perform tasks such as granting faculty access privileges to student grade information, for example. These tasks had to be completed locally on a server-by-server basis. “We had to add all the system’s users one-by-one,” Carver said. “That’s a pain when you have 500 users.”

But here is the great thing about these kinds of hiccups. Novell can now see what it takes to migrate from Windows to SUSE, and so can the rest of the Linux world. Then the Linux developers sit down and find ways to make it more painless. And as time goes on more and more people will make the switch.

This is the same reason why I knew organizations would start transitioning. Because as time goes on it will only get easier and easier. Linux is no longer about being an underground geek only thing, but about being a world-wide thorn in Microsoft’s side. And the Linux Gods know the only way to get people to switch is to make Linux easier and easier.