[QUOTE=tonedef]
Still seems weird to see people using a linux here especially in an office environment.
[/QUOTE]
I’d switch this office to Linux tomorrow if it were not for the fact that we rely on running software that we wrote specifically for Windows (- which although hideously complex, would probably be easier to rewrite from scratch than to port to Linux). In terms of security and immunity from the sorts of stupidity that people subject their Windows machines to, Linux has Windows (at least XP) beaten hands down, and there isn’t really any regular office task that can be done on Windows but not on a Linux desktop box.
[QUOTE=Koxinga]
Or is it that David Hasselhof loves strange operating systems, and the Germans do too?
I wonder what OS Kitt used.
[/QUOTE]
He runs windows.
He used to run so smooth and do everything he needed then one say he jsut screwed up. He contact support and they just told him “a patch will be coming soon to fix your problem. thank you”
[QUOTE=Balthisar]
They went for what (at the time) was the low-cost wow factor. Consider that most Macs were still black and white, except for the super-expensive Mac II line (although I bought my Colour-with-a-u-Classic there), and that PC-clones still sucked as far as graphics and sound. The Amiga (and to a lesser extent) and ST were (a) cheap and (b) impressive as hell.
[/QUOTE]
Hell, for a number of years I had my amiga set up next to my PC, and could run the same game on each at the same time [I had Eye of the Beholder for both paltforms.]
People could not believe how amazing the graphic and how smoothly the game ran on the amiga compared to the winbox…
I loved my amiga. People were amazed when the first 1 gb HDDs came out and I mentioned wishing that I had the 1K$US for one … now my freaking cell phone has 4 gb on it [moto 9M … you can have it when you pry it from my cold dead hands, though I wish they would make it accept the 32 gb micro sd chips instead of the 4 gb micro sd chips=(]
Up until very recently, the BeOS lived on as ZETA, distributed and maintained by Magnussoft, a German company.
Amiga clones are being made by Individual Computers, a German company. Hyperion Entertainment, a German software firm, continues to develop the OS.
The majority of developers for AROS, an open source Amiga-like alternative operating system that runs on Intel hardware, are German.
Atari ST clones are made by Milan Computer, a German hardware firm.
[/QUOTE]
[QUOTE=t-bonham@scc.net]
I think all of those are either versions or offshoots of Unix/Linux.
[/QUOTE]
Neither BeOS nor AROS are based on Unix/Linux. There might be some cross-pollination from Linux or the BSDs, for drivers and such, but the cores of these systems are not Unix-based.
ZETA’s source code was based initially on public BeOS source, but has not been published itself.
[QUOTE=Mangetout]
I’d switch this office to Linux tomorrow if it were not for the fact that we rely on running software that we wrote specifically for Windows[.]
[/QUOTE]
Have you tried running it with WINE on a Linux box? Maybe you’ll be making that switch… or maybe not, since WINE’s not perfect.
[QUOTE=Balthisar]
Have you tried running it with WINE on a Linux box? Maybe you’ll be making that switch… or maybe not, since WINE’s not perfect.
[/QUOTE]
It works well for compact applications - the one we need to run is a huge sprawling mess that struggles to run properly in Windows. I wouldn’t dare.
What I actually need to do is freeze development and rewrite it from scratch, properly, but I don’t think that’s likely to happen - firstly, a good deal of my time is taken up supporting it, nextly, there are all sorts of new feature demands being made from all the way up the company, and lastly, I don’t actually have the relevant cross-platform skills anyway - if I rewrote it starting today, it would still be a Windows app, sadly.
[QUOTE=Koxinga]
Warum haben die deutschen Dopers nicht geantwortet?
[/QUOTE]
Cause I’m posting from a Windows XP laptop that cost me about 500 bucks? About the Linux thing: The Munich administration says they switched because it makes them more independent of software manufacturers, it encourages competition, and it helps them achieve their “strategic goals” (whatever those may be) Link (in German).
But I have no explanation for SAP. I don’t think there’s anybody who does.
[QUOTE=Mangetout]
It works well for compact applications - the one we need to run is a huge sprawling mess that struggles to run properly in Windows. I wouldn’t dare.
What I actually need to do is freeze development and rewrite it from scratch, properly, but I don’t think that’s likely to happen - firstly, a good deal of my time is taken up supporting it, nextly, there are all sorts of new feature demands being made from all the way up the company, and lastly, I don’t actually have the relevant cross-platform skills anyway - if I rewrote it starting today, it would still be a Windows app, sadly.
[/QUOTE]
well… you should at least TRY running it in wine. Learning everything over from scratch to program in linux is crazy… your best bet, even if you rewrite, is to run on WINE and just make sure that you only use the parts of win32 that wine supports well. It will work just fine, as if you were using any other 3rd party library. Another solution is to rewrite in .NET 2.0 which also runs on linux (but much more slowly than will WINE).
Also… don’t rewrite. Refactor. Even if you want to make really big changes, even if you want to restructure everything, it will be infinitely easier to make them incrementally and at each step make sure everything is working. Compromise isn’t dirty, it’s smart. Also sometimes people start to think of the work it’ll take to refactor and get the idea that rewriting is easier. That is an illusion. It’s just clearer to realistically see how much work you will need when you’re refactoring (and that’s a good thing).
I don’t think the support of niche operating systems is that remarkable. Germany is a country of 82M people - that’s the economic basis for a lot of niches.
Some points that may contribute a bit to that effect:
[ul]
[li]ease of use works well as a selling point to the German consumer, but may well backfire when selling to German professionals and businesses (because people take pride in being qualified to do things the hard way). “Buy this, it is easy to use” = “You are not a true professional”.[/li][li]There is still a smallish number of ex-East German engineers who cut their IT teeth on Commodore Amigas and other things that could be got for the small amount of convertible currency available to their company.[/li][li]A lot of electronics hobbyists started on 6502 and (later) 68k systems.[/li][li]As has been said above, MSDOSIntel and later Wintel systems were prohibitively expensive as laste as the late 80s/early 90s. Expecially for graphics applications other platforms were much better value for money. E.g. in the 1980s for DTP applications Atari ST was the platform of choice for a lot of companies (MSDOS/Intel sucked at Graphics; Unix and the early Macs were too expensive)[/li][li]In the 1980s I recollect that extended charsets (including commonplace German chars like ÄÖÜäöüß) were either unavailable or a PITA to use on DOS/Intel based systems while other platforms supported them as a matter of course. The technical Russian institute where I worked as a student had to use Atari ST and later Mac because there was no Wintel solution that supported mixing Latin and Cyrillic charsets in the same document. [/li][li]Legacy applications may be a bit more prevalent than in the US in the technical and graphical fields (not in commercial fields - the introduction of the Euro in 2002 did for a lot of legacy apps)[/li]