Re: question

["Andrew M.A. Cater" <amacater@galactic.demon.co.uk>]

On Wed, Aug 27, 2003 at 04:16:13PM -0400, Thompson-Laurin, Harriet wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I am a systems analyst taking a course at the University of Phoenix on Unix.  My teacher has assigned a project in which I need to obtain specific information about Debian.  Although I searched your website, I wasn't able to find out if Debian runs on Pentium 4's.
> 
> Specifically, I am to find information regarding Debian regarding:
> 	Cost 
Free to download.  Free updates over the network.  Available on pressed
CD's at minimal cost. [7 CD's needed for "stable" 10 for "testing" 
probably 11 for "unstable"] CD1 is all you need to install a minimal 
system so, say, $2 US from Cheapbytes.  A UK distributor used to give 
out CD1 free to people who requested it.
> 	Market share
Overall Linux market share is ~5%  However, it's freely copyable so,
I have 7 machines here on three different hardware architectures and
three at work - none "licensed" with any vendor - all run Debian.
A very recent Netcraft survey suggests that Debian is second in terms of 
Linux webservers on the net.
> 	Hardware requirements
386 with 12M of memory upwards.  A minimal install is around 100MB, full 
install for a desktop might need 2-3GB (but that would include 
image viewers, file converters, several flavours of editor and so on).  
A machine running major services and acting as a primary server for a 
large corporation ?????
[Plus any of 10 other architectures, from Motorola M68000 through MIPS,
to DEC Alpha or ARM - PDA to supercomputer]

> 	File Processing
Databases? [Postgresql/MySQL] File editing?? MS Word/Excel/Powerpoint 
compatibility [Openoffice.org/GNUmeric]
> 	Programming capabilities
Name a programming language, it's probably here somewhere.
> 	Availability of application software
Via the 'Net.  Not as widely supported for e.g. Rational Rose/Oracle as 
the RedHat Enterprise edition - the biggest commercial vendors want 
minimal numbers of distributions to support - but virtually anything can 
be made to run.  HP use Debian GNU/Linux extensively in house - if 
nothing else, because nothing else runs on HP PA-Risc.
 
> 	User interface
Command line / KDE / GNOME / any one of about twenty other window 
managers :)
> 
> Then I am to apply this information to a scenario in which a company 
>is "facing the dilemma of upgrading the desktop PC's to run either 
> Windows XP Professional or Linux platform (Debian)".  In the teacher's 
> scenario, the following was provided about the mythical company's 
> current hardware:
Note: desktops.  [The question is slightly ambiguous - I'm assuming
you don't need each machine to dual boot WinXP Pro _and_ Debian. If
you do need dual boot then, as stated by someone else, you may as well
junk 750 PC's as being unable to run XP.  So you have say a $450 
computer x 750 + OS and application costs - $750,000 plus the costs of
upgrading the machines running Win2k to XP]
> 
> 400 pc's running Windows 95/98 with a Pentium CPU, 64mb RAM and 2Gb hard drive and below or equal to 300 Mhz.
Will run Debian.  May not run everything ultra fast.  Could be used as X 
terminals and "dumb clients" being fed from a server.  See, for example 
how the Florida city of Largo has done this using LTSP [Linux Terminal 
Server Project].
> 350 pc's running Windows NT with a Pentium 2 CPU, 128 RAM and 4 GB hard drive
Will run Debian and a full environment. [Would barely run XP at all]
> 150 pc's running Windows 2000 with a Pentium 3 CPU, 256 RAM and 20 GB hard drive
> 100 pc's running Windows XP with a Pentium 4 CPU, 256 RAM and 40 GB hard drive.
>
Both the above hardware specs. would be fine with whatever you threw at 
them.

Assuming the "infrastructure servers" for such a large organisation are 
still Windows based, you'd need to look into Samba.  KDE and Gnome now
have Windows Remote Desktop client capability to connect to Windows 
terminal servers.  If they're Linux based servers or you get to set them 
up afresh - no problem at all. Linux machines may be able to replace
Windows machines as domain controllers by using Samba. [No licensing 
costs :) ]

Bonus points - the German Interior Ministry has just
published a major document outlining the suggested changeover from 
Windows -> Linux.  It's 400 pages odd of technical German, but it 
outlines the whole process, including changing over applications.
Trawl Google for it, it was also mentioned on Linux Weekly News as
having been announced at LinuxWorld Expo.

If you have an organisation like that in the Real World, you also have 
hidden costs.  

Currently, you have five generations of Windows software - three
now unsupported by Microsoft wef July 2003. You have Windows 
hardware folk/technical support who are probably tearing their hair out 
trying to keep 1000 desktops running on a daily basis.  You have three 
or four different UI's and probably three or four generations of app software 
like MS Word in all likelihood.  [The oldest workstations won't run later 
than Office 95/97 and the newer ones will have come with Office 2000] 

You also have security update hell and (unless the organisation 
purchasing policy is very tightly controlled and you can buy large 
batches of machines at once) workstation configuration hell. 
[Workstation models change every six months or so. With 1000 machines, 
you could have easily have 25 different hardware models or more 
even from the same vendor which means 25 different sets of 
Windows drivers for graphics cards etc. ...]

Debian will allow for an easy update to a running system: reboots are
only for kernel upgrades and all else can be done on the fly. 
Centralised download and push of updated .deb packages could be done 
relatively straightforwardly.

Conversely, you have a wide variety of Windows experience. 

Moving to Debian or any other Linux - you could unify the whole lot to
one UI and one set of apps.  You would need to retrain your admins but
you might be able to downsize your staff - TCO costs are what you make 
them, but at least one survey suggested that a Windows admin ran 10 
servers on average to a Linux admins 40 :)

Installation will take a considerable time.

You would need to retrain the staff running the 1000 desktops - 
retraining costs need not be quite as high as you think because OO.org
and GNUmeric are almost drop in replacements.

The virus problems for mail attachments effectively go away as do the
requirements for expensive licence management schemes and threats from
the Business Software Alliance/Federation against Software Theft.
(These organisations reckon that there is no large scale organisation
which has all its Windows software correctly licensed and infringement
costs are high).

You would need to think very hard about how to support legacy apps which
only run under Windows and legacy document formats and "stuff" 
especially multimedia files

HTH,

Andy

[PS. I don't normally answer "do my homework for me" questions but this
one raises a whole raft of interesting issues.