Desktop platforms Toolkit

Story: Criticism mounts over Birmingham's Linux project

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Fact: Successful pilot, disasterous rollout

TU> Facts: Successful Pilot
DS> The library pilot was successful because it wasn't run by the council's IT department. Members of the Open Source Consortium were responsible for deploying the pilot Linux machines. Birmingham's IT department then erased the winning desktop (Gnome on Ubuntu) in favour of an outdated version of Suse. The subsequent rollout was an unqualified disaster.

TU> Coming to what we know of the project, the implementation of the Linux pilot I believe was a success, and various members of the linux community, opensource advantage, south birmingham linux group and the open source academy were initially involved in the project.
DS> Neither have any large scale deployment experience.

TU> When I have visited Birmingham Central Library, the linux machines were always in use with a waiting queue and appeared to be more available then the other machines in the library at the time.
DS> That's because they are free to use. The Solaris thin-clients were also heavily used, but not liked by the public.

Read the independent market research ... oh that's right, it was never published.

TU> The version of linux distribution was chosen as it had all the functionality they required as well as being available and backed by a company like Novell. At the time, 9.3 was the current and supported version and not out of date as suggested...
DS> The Suse version used was out of date at the time - BCC were advised of this. The Birmingham IT team's only experience of running Linux desktops was installing Suse on their home PCs - hence the decision to go with Suse. There are many other distributions of Linux backed by credible vendors and independent consultancies - most of whom aren't imploding and doing deals with Microsoft to stay in the game.

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