A company that migrated from Microsoft Windows to Linux on the desktop has praised the open source operating system's stability.
Günter Stoverock, the data processing manager at German import company Heinz Tröber, said on Thursday his firm had decided against running its ERP software on Windows as it considered it less stable than the open source alternative.
"We didn't want to rely on Windows-based systems as they were quite instable and insecure," said Stoverock. "With Linux there is no blue screen and no freezing — that was the advantage for us."
Stoverock took part in a panel of company executives and vendors at the CeBIT trade show which debated whether companies would choose Windows or Linux to run business applications in the future.
Heinz Tröber is running its ERP application on an IBM iSeries server, which is accessed by Linux front-end clients.
Peter Schmitzek, the founder of ERP vendor CSB-System, which offers its products on both Windows and Linux, said that customers who have chosen Linux as a front end tend to be happy with the outcome.
"Customers that are running Linux on the desktop are amazed that it doesn't constantly crash," said Schmitzek.
Stoverock later told ZDNet UK that its employees are much more productive on Linux, as in the past they wasted a lot of time when their systems crashed.
"Out of 65 desktops, around 10 desktops crashed daily," said Stoverock. "Employees wasted around 30 minutes, that's five times 30 minutes per week. That's not acceptable — we had to do something [to solve this]."
Heinz Tröber switched from Windows NT to Linux on the desktop in 2001 and has not had any downtime since, Stoverock claimed. "There are no problems — in the morning you turn the computer on, in the afternoon you turn it off — that's it."
He claimed the main reason for this stability is because the Linux kernel and its windowing system X Windows run independently of the software applications being run by the end user, so if an application crashes, this does not impact the kernel or the windowing application.
The CeBIT panel also included Union Technik, a Microsoft customer, and AP, a company that sells ERP applications for the Microsoft platform. Neither commented on the stability of Windows compared with Linux, but said there were various advantages to Windows.
Jörg Heilingbrunner, the manager director of oil services company Union Technik, said it chose to run Navision, ERP software that was acquired by Microsoft in 2002, as it fulfilled their business requirements. "Eight years ago Navision fit in best with what we wanted and there was no alternative operating system to put it on," said Heilingbrunner. "We would make the same decision today — because we like the application."
For a look at the fun side of CeBIT, check out our CeBIT Digital Living special. Or visit ZDNet UK's CeBIT Toolkit for more enterprise technology stories and pictures from the show floor.
Talkback
Right. Because Windows applications run in Kernel memory space. What's he running, Windows ME? Of couse, that would require investigation, not Ingrid's forte.
And all of your business apps are going to run on Linux? Good for call centres, bad for businesses with legacy apps running on windows.
Also, many vendors are pushing Linux thin clients with expensive (and not open) hardware such as Sun Ray.
Having the source code doesn't mean a thing when you have a five year lock-in under the Linux flag...
The apps don't run in Kernel space, but the GUI *does* run in Kernel space, which the apps do use.
Yup. They also use IO, scheduling etc. And those live in the kernel too. On Windows and Linux. But since we're talking GUI, XWindows (unlike Windows) allows apps to access hardware directly. How's that for stability?
"Having the source code doesn't mean a thing when you have a five year lock-in under the Linux flag..."
Out of Microsoft and the various Linux vendors, we can safely say it's pretty obvious which of these companies relies on customer lock-in the most.
(In case you live on Mars: Microsoft)
Not surprising that he got good stability from Linux and I'm not surprised that is was better than windows. But really! How did he manage to get windows to crash that much. In my experience winXP crashes at most once every six month or so.
"But since we're talking GUI, XWindows (unlike Windows) allows apps to access hardware directly"
Absolute rubbish. Where did you get that information from? X Windows does not allow ANY direct access to video hardware.
Both Windows and Linux have a mechanism for permitting direct access to video frame buffers (DirectX under Windows and svgalib for Linux). But this is a far cry from providing "direct access" to hardware.
The weak point of any operating system are the drivers, because most of them have to run in kernel space. But even there Linux has an advantage over Windows, because Linux drivers are single-file modules, while Windows drivers tend to be spread over multiple VXD and DLL files, all piled into the system directory where they can overwrite each other if the names aren't unique.
"Having the source code doesn't mean a thing when you have a five year lock-in under the Linux flag..."
Rather that than a nine year lock-in to Microsoft.
By the way, did you factor in the fact that after your nine-year pact has ended, the files you've created won't work with anything else, because Microsoft have nailed your b*****ks to the wall with DRM? You're still locked in!
On a plus point if you're hacked off with Windows (my Windows XP crashes twice daily and our Exchange server needs rebooting weekly), this is the time to get out! Check out OpenOffice.org 2 beta. Its Word document conversion is practically perfect in every way.
I'm using a stripped-down, fully patched win2k and a customized Mandrake 10.1 Linux on the same machine (yay dual boots); windows GUI freezes as soon as I run too many apps and click all over the screen - which is usually solved by forcing windows shutdown to send a 'killall' signal to all processes if an application fucks up the GUI some. If that happens in Linux, I can either just kill the app, if others happen to be compromised (rare!) I can just kill X... and if even the session has crashed I can log in as another user and shut down the system correctly.
Personally, I still use w2k for some games and a few applications I still haven't completely replaced in Linux; but even then, most utilities I run are under the GPL, LGPL, AGL or Mozilla licence...
If I want to work under Linux, there are no problems to do so. Ifi I want to watch movies, no problems either. Many games are available, so it's not a big deal. And finally, if something doesn't work I can try my hand at correcting it - something one can hardly do in Windows, even with source code provided (one example: installing XviD in Linux basically requires a precompiled package that isn't always out or specifically optimized; in Linux, get source, run ./configure && make && make install, and you're all set, with an optimized build fitting your computer to a tee).
Desktop Linux will never succeed until someone upgrades the Amateur Hour solitaire games, I'm sorry. Multiple play styles, scorekeeping, AND THE ABILITY TO RESTART THE GAME IF YOU DON'T WIN, WITHOUT CLOSING AND RE-OPENING FROM SCRATCH!
I can't believe anyone ever approved or for that matter wrote such a POS program. Considering the high % of time spent on desktop systems running this app, I'd suggest it's a show-stopper. ;p