Linux and free/open source software are the best computing environments for children because they can get under the hood and learn to control and shape the technology, rather than be trained like lab rats to click buttons and be good little unquestioning consumers. Here is a batch of excellent educational and creative software for children, and for beginners of any age.

Tux Paint

Here at Worldlabel we have a special fondness for Tux Paint, the cross-platform drawing and painting program. (We even hosted a Tux Paint drawing contest with awesome prizes last summer!) Tux Paint teaches the fundamental functions used by most computer painting programs such as drawing tools, shape tools, special effects, and labels and captions. It has a giant assortment of stamps and sound effects. And it has a helpful assistant that is actually helpful, and teaches file management and how to use the program. (Linux, Mac, Windows.)

Figure 1: A colorful Tux Paint doodle.

Tux, of Math Command!

The fine folks who give us Tux Paint, New Breed Software also created Tux, of Math Command!. This is an excellent math tutor with plenty of educational action. Like Tux Paint it is designed for children, but it’s great for anyone who needs to brush up on their basic math skills. It has exercises with great graphics and fun sound effects, and also a selection of fast-paced games for honing math, mouse, and keyboard skills. It supports network play, and has special options for teachers or parents to organize competitions. You can even create custom games. Figure 2 shows Commander Tux using her quick typing and math skills to defend against the attacking equations. (Linux, Mac, Windows.)

Figure 2: Commander Tux defending against marauding equations.

There is one more from the fine New Breed folks, and that is the Tux Typing tutor. Computer users need good typing skills, and Tux Typing is a fun and effective tool for learning to type, or improving your existing skills. (Linux, Mac, Windows.)

KDEdu

The hardworking people at KDE have assembled a nice batch of excellent teaching apps aimed at older kids in the KDEdu package. This contains 20 high-quality apps including math, algebra, trigonometry, and geometry; a periodic table of the elements; desktop globe; vocabulary trainer; memory trainer; the excellent KStars astronomy and planetarium program, and the Kturtle programming teacher. (Linux.)

Figure 3: The Marble virtual globe, part of KDEdu.

Etoys

Etoys is an ambitious application that teaches concentration, critical thinking, and problem-solving. Kids learn math, science, and programming concepts by creating sketches of various projects, such as building a car, building a moon rocket, making a movie, or going wherever their imagination leads them. (Linux, Mac, Windows.)

Figure 4: Etoys teaches kids how to think, imagine, and create.

Fly Through Space With Celestia

The Celestia Space Simulator takes you on journeys through space. It needs some horsepower, so you should have a PC with at least a dual-core CPU and a good OpenGL 3D video card. It opens in Earth orbit, and you can visit any of 120,000 celestial objects in the included Hipparcos catalog. Tour our own Solar System, visit newly-discovered extrasolar planet rho-1 Cancri e, and many of our galactic neighbors. The better your video card the nicer it looks, because it supports several different texturing modes. So you can use lower resolutions with less detail for lower-end video cards, or crank it all the way up for better video cards. (Linux, Mac, Windows.)

Figure 5: Approaching Venus in Celestia.

GCompris, a Feast of Activities

GCompris is an award-winning suite of over 100 activities for children aged 2 to 10, though as with all the others in this article it’s a high-quality feast for beginners of all ages. The name is a French pun. GCompris is pronounced like “I have understood”, J’ai compris.

GCompris teaches basic computer skills such using the mouse and keyboard, reading, memory training, all kinds of science, geography, math, reading, how to tell time, how to draw cartoons, puzzles, understanding money, games, and even Braille training. (Linux, Mac, Windows.)

Figure 6: Learning about water systems in GCompris.

Operating Systems for Kids

There are only two operating systems that are customized for children: Sugar, which was originally created for the OLPC (One laptop per child) program and is now installable on a number of Linux distributions, and several Linux distributions.

Sugar is a radical departure from the computer operating systems we’re used to. It is designed to encourage exploration, learning, and sharing, to learn problem-solving and creative thinking.

There are a number of Linux distributions aimed at children: they bundle kid-oriented software and artwork, and have simplified interfaces that are friendly to little hands learning to use mice and keyboards. Some of these are:

• Qimo 4 Kids
• Foresight Linux
• Doudou Linux
• LinuxKidX
• Edubuntu

My favorite is Qimo (pronounced Kim-oh) because I think it does a great job at bundling first-rate software and inviting kids in, and it’s the only one that is available pre-installed on a cool-looking PC, thanks to excellent independent Linux vendor ZaReason. All of them are excellent in their own way, and it costs nothing but a bit of time to try them out.

by Carla Schroder

Can you save money by moving your business to GNU/Linux? The short answer is that you can. However, the long answer is that how much you save — or if you save at all — depends upon your resources and choices. If you are lucky, you might find a study comparable to your situation to help you plan, but most of these studies are biased one way or the other, so you should still need to do your own assessment as you plan the move.

Whether a switch is worth your effort is usually calculated in terms of Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). As the term emphasizes, TCO includes not only the cost of buying and installing the software, but also the cost of hardware to run it, administering it, training employees to use it, and maintaining and supporting it. Sometimes, TCO is divided into first year costs and yearly costs, to reflect the extra expenses of setup and configuration, and the presumably lower costs of running an ongoing system. But, however TCO is calculated, what matters is that making the switch is not just as simple as assuming that, because GNU/Linux has no licensing fees, you will automatically save money.

The truth is, the TCO of a switch can vary wildly, depending on your expectations and planning. To give just a few examples:

• Do you have the in-house expertise for the migration, or will you rely on consultants?
• Are you switching just your servers, or employees’ desktops as well?
• Will you get technical support from on-line forums, or will you be more comfortable with a traditional support contract from a company like Red Hat or Novell?
• Will you take advantage of GNU/Linux’s lower memory requirements to coax another year or two of life out of your old equipment, or buy completely new hardware?
• Do your employees need only minimal adjustments to switch from Microsoft Office to OpenOffice.org, or will you want them to take a complete training course?
• Will you need new employees to maintain your new infrastructure, or can existing ones cope, possibly with retraining? And these are just some of the considerations. To complicate matters even more, your assumptions will also affect your projected TCO. To give just one example, how should you estimate the cost of hiring a GNU/Linux administrator?According to Datamation, in 2009, a system administrator’s salary ranged from $52,750 – $82,500 in the United States, to which an extra 10% could be added for GNU/Linux expertise — which implies that the expertise is still relatively rare. At first, you might conclude that the migration will involve increased administration costs if you have to make new hires. However, many analysts argue that, given the general reliability of GNU/Linux, your new administrator will have more free time, and be more productive than a Windows administrator, and therefore save you money.
• Similarly, as you compare the costs of Windows and GNU/Linux, should you assume that both operating systems have the same costs for administration and maintenance? At first, you might think that a reasonable assumption.However, experienced administrators almost unanimously report that GNU/Linux is more secure, more stable, less affected by viruses and malware, and easier to patch and upgrade, as detailed in “Open Source Software vs. Commercial Software: Migration from Windows to Linux.” If you accept this testimony (and it is comprehensive enough to seem convincing), then assuming roughly equal maintenance costs will falsify your estimate, skewing it in favor of Windows.Multiply these examples by twenty or thirty, and you will begin to understand the difficulties of estimating TCO. Even a simple task such as estimating the cost of obtaining licenses for Windows or Microsoft Office can be difficult because of ever-changing policies. Con Zymaris of Cybersource, an Australian company that has tracked migration costs for almost a decade, notes that “it has become increasingly difficult to obtain clear figures for Microsoft licence and software assurance costs. One has to be an expert or be within the Microsoft licencing fraternity to make heads or tails of it.” The more you look into each factor, the more complex it can be.

BORROWING ESTIMATES

Faced with the difficulties of estimating TCO by yourself, you might be tempted to search online for an estimate that you can apply to your own circumstances. However, be warned that, as with many contentious issues, TCO analysts show a strong tendency to conclude what they already assume.

This tendency is especially strong among those whose conclusions favor Windows. In one notorious study for the Yankee Group, Laura DiDio concluded that, while GNU/Linux might save money for small companies, generally the total cost of switching was three to four times more expensive and took three times as long as upgrading from one version of Windows to another.

However DiDio’s conclusions not only run counter to most other studies, but contain numerous assumptions that betray an unfamiliarity with GNU/Linux (such as a failure to factor into its relative immunity from viruses when estimating maintenance costs). DiDio was also criticized for lumping enterprise and small and medium businesses together and ignoring their differences, and for other aspects of her methodology. The report was quickly debunked, although some Microsoft sites continue to cite it as evidence.

Other unbalanced pro-Windows assessments are included in Microsoft’s Get the Facts campaign, which ran from 2004-2007, and continues to run on Microsoft sites outside the United States, such as Microsoft Canada. The Get the Facts site itself offers numerous marketing case studies full of sweeping generalities and unsupported claims.

For instance, the case studies for C.R.I.S. Camera Services states that”By switching from Linux to Microsoft software, C.R.I.S. is improving its business efficiency while at the same time reducing the effort required to manage the technology that supports the business. Microsoft Dynamics™ NAV gives the company a powerful business management solution that has improved technician productivity by 20 percent and will help the company to realize an expected 40-percent increase in annual revenues.” These kinds of statements lack the detail to any use whatsoever, except as clumsy propaganda.

Needless to say, pro-GNU/Linux studies should be approached with equal caution. However, what distinguishes the most convincing pro-GNU/Linux studies is their careful explanation of how they arrive at their figures, which allows you to study and question the conclusions.

One example of these studies is Cybersource’s 2004 study of GNU/Linux TCO. The study carefully explains its methodology, in particular pointing out that it has made several choices in Windows’ favor, including ignoring the cost of fighting malware and viruses and of unexpected downtime and tripling the estimates of costs for external GNU/Linux consultants. In addition, the study summarizes and critiques other TCO studies. Even more importantly, the study gives each cost as a line item, so that you are left in doubt about how the conclusions were reached (and can copy the line items for yourself).

Cybersource’s conclusion? In 2004, a company of 250 would save 36% by using a non-commercial version GNU/Linux with existing hardware, or 26% if new hardware was purchased. If a commercial version of GNU/Linux such as Red Hat or Novell were used with existing hardware, the savings would be 26%, while, with new hardware, the savings would be 19%.

Cybersource’s figures are six years old, and more recent TCO studies are hard to come by, especially ones that lists every line item. Possibly savings would be a few percentage points lower today, because Microsoft and its partners have lowered their prices in recent years in an effort to become more competitive.

Still, here and there, some indicators emerge. For example, the French Gendarmerie Nationale reports that, by switching to Ubuntu, it has reduced its IT budget by 70% without reducing its capabilities, and saved fifty million Euros in licensing fees in five years. Similarly, the same is true of the German Foreign Ministries’ claim that, by using GNU/Linux, it has reduced its annual costs per desktop from three thousand Euros to one thousand — by far the lowest of any German ministry’s.

Admittedly, these indicators are not detailed. But unlike the claims on Microsoft’s Get the Fact site, they are at least first-hand reports from those involved in the migration. Even allowing for a wide margin of error, they suggest that, with the right choices, switching to GNU/Linux remains an effective cost-savings measure.

By contrast, you have to search long and hard to find pro-Windows studies that are either detailed about their assumptions and methodologies or else first-hand reports. In fact, I have been unable to find any, although conceivably they exist.

THE ADVANTAGE OF DO-IT-YOURSELF

David H. Wheeler has argued in detail why you should at least consider GNU/Linux. However, as explained to Robin Miller in an interview for Linux.com in 2004, “in the end, the only way to be really sure that you have unbiased results is to do the comparison yourself — which you have to do anyway, because some measures like total cost of ownership (TCO) and performance are incredibly sensitive to specific environments.”

Wheeler recommends looking at other reports as you develop your own TCO estimates. However, he also suggests that you look at how the report was funded, so that you can assess its contents in more depth.

“Even potentially biased reports can give you some useful data, as long as you’re careful with them,” Wheeler says. “A report paid to review a vendor’s own product will often raise issues that vendor thinks are to the vendor’s advantage — but those issues might be very important to you, and thus worth thinking about (and examining the competitor for that attribute). Also, these vendor-sponsored papers often identify who that vendor thinks is valid competition — so make sure you include that other vendor in your evaluation! For example, Microsoft has information comparing OpenOffice.org to Microsoft Office (previously noted in Slashdot). So as an acquirer, that’s a tip-off that if I’m thinking of buying/upgrading Microsoft Office, I’d better also consider OpenOffice.org.”

Such research takes time, to say nothing of an alert and analytical mind. In many cases, I suspect that an open-minded TCO assessment will lead you to considering GNU/Linux, but there may be some factors, such as a lack of trained staff or key employees unwilling to learn new software that make you cautious.

However, the point is to make the decision for yourself. Switching infrastructure can be a huge disruption to your business, so you owe it to yourself and your business to evaluate the choices openly before you begin.

BY BRUCE BYFIELD

Ever tire of laying out a sheet of address labels in OpenOffice.org or Word templates when you’re in a hurry? Karl Fogel’s LabelNation may be able to help. It is a small free software tool that whips out printer-ready label layouts from the command line. All you do is put the addresses in a plain text file and run LabelNation; the output is a standard PostScript file. And it’s not just fast; as a command-line tool it is easily integrated into scripts or other automated workflows.

Of course, If you interested in a dedicated label software program for linux, we highly recommend gLabels and read our howto…

LabelNation is written in Python. You can download the latest package from the project’s Web site. The package includes the labelnation executable (which will run on any platform with Python installed), plus instructions and a folder full of examples. LabelNation comes pre-configured to handle more than 50 different standard label sheets from Avery and other manufacturers, but you can also specify your own layouts if needed.

Basics

Basic usage requires calling the labelnation script with five arguments: labelnation -t labeltype -l -d "delimiter" -i inputfile -o outputfile. For example, labelnation -t avery5661 -l -i addresses.txt -o mylabels.ps.

The -l switch tells LabelNation that the input file contains lines of text (it can also take PostScript input for more complex variations by substituting the -c flag, but this is for advanced users). The label types available for -t include standard 4- to 80-label-per page layouts on both letter sized and A4 paper. LabelNation will print out a complete list of available options if you run labelnation --list-types.

The delimiter specified by the -d switch tells LabelNation what separates the addresses between the labels in your input file. So if you use —- as a delimiter, your input file might contain:

Jerry Seinfeld
123 Fake Street, Apt 5E
New York, NY 10201
USA
—-
George Costanza
456 Faker Avenue
New York, NY 10211
USA
—-
Cosmo Kramer
123 Fake Street, Apt 5D
New York, NY 10201
USA

… and so on; you would then call LabelNation with -d "----" as an argument. As you can see, the address text is indented; this is to allow you the flexibility to place addresses as close to the edge horizontally as you see fit — you can add as much or as little as you like, which can be handy if you will be printing labels with a pre-printed border or logo. Other than spacing ans the address delimiter, no special formatting is required of the input. LabelNation supports the Latin-1 or ISO 8859-1 character set, including all of the accented characters. It also automatically adjusts the font size to fit the label type specified by -t.

Tips

If you are new to LabelNation, the program allows you to get used to spacing and other formatting issues with the optional --show-bounding-box switch. This will produce output with a black line outlining each label; that way you can print a sample sheet and adjust your spacing before printing your final labels.

If you find that your labels are consistently misaligned with LabelNation’s output, perhaps due to printer feed differences, you can easily adjust the margins LabelNation uses with the --bottom-margin and --left-margin arguments. First, run labelnation --show-parameters for the label type in question. For example, labelnation --show-parameters -t avery5661 returns:

LeftMargin: 11
BottomMargin: 16
LabelWidth: 270
LabelHeight: 72
HorizSpace: 20
VertSpace: 0
HorizNumLabels: 2
VertNumLabels: 10
FontName: Times-Roman
FontSize: 12

If the left margins are too small, simply try adding a few points by adding --left-margin 32 to your command.

You don’t have to print a full sheet of labels at a time, either. If you only have a few to print, you can reuse a partial sheet of labels and tell LabelNation where on the sheet to start printing with --first-label n. The count starts in the bottom left-hand corner and goes up column by column, like so:

4 8 12
3 7 11
2 6 10
1 5 9

… reflecting the number of labels in the specified type.

Advanced usage

Despite all of the flexibility described above, LabelNation is capable of doing much more if you are willing to learn. First of all, you can create your own label types if the labels you need to work with are not in the predefined list. All you have to do is create a text file containing the parameters of your label sheet, in the plain-text format reported by LabelNation when you call the --show-parameters switch. The margins, label width and height, and spacing are all measured in points. With your file saved, just tell LabelNation to use it with the -p flag, such as labelnation -l -i myinputfile.txt -o myoutput.ps -p mynewparameters.txt

The more adventuresome should explore the -c flag, which tells LabelNation that the input file contains PostScript, not plain text. PostScript is a complex and powerful language, but the LabelNation Web site reports that users have had success through trial and error with creating graphics and other features using -c.

Finally, like most good command-line utilities, LabelNation can be used in scripts to automate label generation. For example, you could export names and addresses from your address book to plain text files, then write a bash script to quickly produce printer-ready mailing labels from them with LabelNation. Even better, you could specify a dash as the output file argument (i.e., -o -) — that tells LabelNation to send its output to stdout. You could pipe that output directly to the printer with labelnation -t avery5661 -l -i myinput.txt -o - | lpr … and print your labels directly, without the intermediate PostScript stage.

By Nathan Willis

Other resources:

http://oplnk.net/~ajackson/software/maillabels/

Glabels

Openoffice.org Labels Templates

Printing Avery Labels in Linux

Visit Worldlabel.com for all popular size labels

If your laptop is getting long in the tooth, there is no reason to rush out to buy a new one. Instead, you can relegate the most demanding computer tasks to your desktop machine and use your laptop to run applications remotely. This solution (often called the server/thin client model) has several advantages. The obvious one is, of course, that you can give your old laptop a new lease of life without spending money on memory or hard disk upgrades. Moreover, since all your documents and files are stored on your desktop computer, you don’t have to worry about keeping your data on different machines in sync.

To accomplish the magical transformation of your laptop into a powerful workhorse, you need to do two things: you have to install and configure a VNC server on your desktop computer, and set up a VNC client on your laptop. VNC is a system that allows you to control a remote computer as if you were sitting in front of it. And if you run the VNC client in full screen on your laptop, it’s almost impossible to tell that you are controlling a remote machine. VNC is not the fastest system of its kind, but it is very easy to configure and straightforward in use. And if you run it on your home network, it is fast enough for most tasks.

Installing and configuring the VNC server

Figure 1. Enabling the Remote Desktop feature on Ubuntu.

If you are running Ubuntu or Kubuntu on your desktop machine, turning it into a VNC server is as easy as it gets, and you have several options to choose from. On Ubuntu, the quickest solution is to use the built-in remote desktop feature. Simply choose System > Preferences > Remote Desktop, tick the “Allow other users to view your desktop” and “Allow other users to control your desktop” check boxes. In the Security section, tick the “Require the user to enter this password” check box and enter the desired password into the Password field. Before you close the window, note the command you can use to access the desktop (it looks something like this: vncviewer localhost:0). That’s it: close the window and your server is ready to go. This solution, however, has some drawbacks. Notably, it doesn’t have any configuration options, meaning you can’t customize it in any way.

Figure 2. Installing the TightVNC server.

A better solution is to use a dedicated VNC server software like TightVNC (http://www.tightvnc.com/), one of the most popular and feature-rich VNC implementations out there. TightVNC is available in Ubuntu repositories, so you can easily install it using the Synaptic package manager. Choose Applications > Add/Remove and press the Advanced button to switch to Synaptic. To locate TightVNC, click on the Search icon, enter “vnc” in the search field and press OK. In the list of found packages, select tightvncserver, right-click on it, and select Mark for Installation. Click on the Apply button to install the package. Alternatively, you can install the TightVNC software from the command line using the following command:

sudo apt-get install tightvncserver

Figure 3. Installing the TightVNC server from the command line.

Once TightVNC is installed, launch The Terminal program (Applications > Accessories > Terminal) and run the “vncserver” command. You will then be prompted to enter access and view-only passwords. Once you’ve done that, you should see a line that looks something like this:

New ‘X’ desktop is localhost:1

This indicates that the TightVNC server is up and running with display number 1. Unlike GNOME’s built-in Remote Desktop feature, TightVNC allows you to specify several important options such as display dimensions and color depth. Why is this important? Let’s say the display on your desktop machine has a 1024×768 resolution while your laptop can only manage 800×600. If you run the TightVNC server using the default settings, you end up with a display image that doesn’t fit the screen of your laptop. To prevent this from happening, you can set the TightVNC server to run in 800×600 mode using the -geometry option:

vncsever -geometry 800×600

The same goes for color depth. If your laptop can only handle 16-bit color depth or you want to speed things up a bit, you can set the TightVNC server to run in 16-bit color mode using the -depth option:

vncserver -depth 16

Of course, you can combine both options:

vncserver -geometry 800×600 -depth 16

Using the VNC client

Now that the VNC server is up and running on your desktop machine, you have to take care of your laptop. No matter what Linux distribution you are using on your laptop, chances are it has VNC client software already installed. For example, if you are running Xubuntu, which perfectly suits older hardware, you can launch the VNC viewer using the “vncviewer” command. If the vnc client is not installed, you can easily do that by executing the following command:

sudo apt-get install xtightvncviewer

Alternatively, you might want to consider installing a lean and fast Linux distribution like Damn Small Linux DSL for short–which will turn your old laptop into a speed demon. In fact, you don’t even have to install DSL at all: since it’s a live CD Linux distibution, it can happily run off the CD. This also means that you can use your laptop even if its hard disk is dead. Boot your laptop off the DSL CD, click on the VCNViewer icon to launch the VNC client, enter the IP address of your desktop machine followed by a colon and the display number, and you are good to go.

Figure 4. Laptop with Damn Small Linux running OpenOffice.org off the server.

by Dmitri Popov

When the third largest city in Germany rebuffed Microsoft, even people in the US were talking about it. The Munich city council’s decision some years ago to gradually banish Microsoft software from City Hall computers made news in American newspapers. In the meantime, while the software revolution has quieted down, the change goes ahead with zeal. And other governmental authorities have now dialed back use of Microsoft software. But Microsoft is not conceding the field without a fight. “We are learning,” says Microsoft manager Andreas Hartl.

“We would do it again,” said the vice director of the Munich project, Florian Schießl. Pictures of penguins, the Linux mascot, adorn the walls of the Munich city IT department. By mid-2012, at the latest, 80 percent of the 14,000 computers in the city administration will be moved to be Linux. Even much earlier, by the end of this year, all City Hall employees will be leaving Microsoft Word, Excel and Microsoft Internet Explorer and moving to free software, such as OpenOffice and the open-source Firefox Web browser.

In the short-term, no money was saved with the change-over. To the contrary, the city had to absorb one-time upfront costs of 13 million Euros for the Linux Munich “LiMux” project, which the city’s IT department describes as an IT evolution, not a revolution, as some observers thought. According to vice director Schießl, an upgrade of the then-existing Windows NT4 operating system to Windows XP would have been as much as two million euros cheaper. The change-over will make financial sense only after several years, by avoiding the payment of on-going licensing fees.

In the meantime, others have followed the Munich example. The Foreign Office and the Federal Office for Information Security (BSI), as well as several other cities, have placed their trust in alternatives to Windows, Word and Excel. Microsoft is unexpectedly finding itself out in the cold. “Microsoft certainly must have thought that the city of Munich’s only consideration was how to go about purchasing licenses for new Microsoft software,” says Schießl.

But the city administration had a different question in mind: “How much are we going to allow ourselves to become dependent on one manufacturer?” Echoing the primary concern of the open source community, Schießl explains that free software certainly “Does not mean free as in free beer.” Instead, open source offers programmers the advantage of improving the software and expanding additional applications without having to get permission from a specific company. This advantage also carries weight with other municipal governments. That is why the cities of Mannheim, Schwäbisch Hall and Treuchtlingen in Bavaria are moving at least partially to free software.

“The Munich decision has not led to masses of other city governments following Munich’s example,” says Microsoft manager Hartl, although he concedes that Microsoft has meanwhile been making efforts to open its Windows platforms for free software. Even Richard Seibt, of “Open Source Business Foundation (OSBF) finds that Microsoft is now heavily engaged in open source arenas. “They are serious,” he says.

[Note: this article is a translation of an article written in German by reporter Michael Kieffer and published in Heise On-Line on 2009-06-24. You can read the original article in German here: http://bit.ly/u4tRk]

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This article will help you think about the pros and cons of baby-stepping your move to FOSS, versus starting out from scratch with a brand new Linux computing environment. This article is aimed at new users, not experienced computer professionals. I will be illustrating the principles involved by giving examples two migration projects in which I have personally been involved: my own law practice; and a public middle school in San Francisco which is the subject of the Digital Tipping Point video project that I am producing.

You’re not alone in considering a move to GNU-Linux

If you are thinking of ways to save money by moving to GNU-Linux and FOSS, you are not alone. On March 16, 2009, a prominent IT research company by the name of IDC released a study showing that 2009 will likely see a 10 percent jump in the use of GNU-Linux in both servers (the machines that run business infrastructure) as well as desktop computers, which are typically used by office workers. The study found that the use of GNU-Linux was also going to grow in mobile devices and ultra-light weight notebook computers called “netbooks.” In fact, number 2 computer maker Dell has said that one-third of all its netbooks are already sold with the Ubuntu GNU-Linux operating system pre-installed.

And with good reason. When you buy a computer with GNU-Linux pre-installed, you get a lot of really good software that is comparable to applications that would cost you hundreds and even thousands of dollars in the world of Microsoft Windows or Apple. Do you need Adobe Photoshop? You could lay out a couple hundred dollars for that program, or you could use the GIMP, a Photoshop-like program that comes free with almost every pre-installed version of GNU-Linux (and is available as a free download for Microsoft Windows).

Microsoft Office will set you back another couple hundred dollars, or you could just start Open Office from your GNU-Linux desktop or download it for Microsoft Windows. And the list of Free Open Source Software substitutes for paid Microsoft Windows programs is quite large, indeed. Rolf Schuster, the former head of IT at the German Foreign Ministry, estimated that the German Foreign ministry reduced its IT expenses by two-thirds by switching to GNU-Linux, and on March 10, 2009, the French Gendarmerie announced that it saved $50 million Euros by using only FOSS.

So why isn’t everyone using it?

If Free Open Source Software is so good, why isn’t everyone using it? Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has made the point that licensing fees are a small percentage of the total cost of ownership. In reply, GNOME Foundation Executive Director Stormy Peters says:

“Over the lifetime of a machine, the licensing fee is just a portion of the cost of a machine. That said, it’s not an insignificant portion! Just by moving to OpenOffice individuals and small businesses can save significant money.”

In fact, Cathy Malmrose, the CEO of Zareason.com, a small computer builder who sells only Linux computers, points out that for individual systems, the cost savings of Free Open Source Software can be outcome-determinative:

“For small businesses and individuals, the cost is significant. For us, adding Windows to our systems would add $100 to each system. It would kill our company in short order. The cost is three-fold: initial license cost, increased tech support cost, and upgrade cost as new versions of the software are released.”

So how do you figure out whether the cost of the licensing fees and other costs of proprietary software is too much, versus the convenience of staying with the software you know?

Quantify it!

It is possible to add up all of the costs of your system and divide by the years of life you expect to get from that system, and there is a book by Maria Winslow that will help you do just that. Her book, called The Practical Manager’s Guide to Open Source, helps you break down your computer system into its various components, and compare the costs of buying and maintaining that system over its life. Her book comes with prepared spreadsheets, so that you can easily run scenarios of a proprietary system against the costs of a Free Open Source Software system.

Before you run off and start crunching numbers, though, it is helpful to take an overview of your system, and think about which systems are mission critical to run your business, and which systems are peripheral and non-core. Maria’s book will help you identify areas that you might be able to swap out, such as low-level knowledge workers, who might just need access to the Internet and can be easily trained to switch to Open Office from Microsoft Office, as opposed to your CEO, who has no time in her schedule to learn new software.

What emerges is that you are not looking at a binary choice of the devil or the deep blue sea in most cases. You are going to have the option of choosing the “best of breed” for each function that your computers serve. While it might not be pragmatic to move the CEO from Microsoft Office to Open Office, you might find that you can protect yourself against viruses by substituting Firefox in place of Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE).

While quantifying the Total Cost of Ownership of your system, be sure to dig through all of your support costs, costs for anti-virus software, and be sure to calculate the downtime lost due to crashes with your system. Also be sure to factor in training costs for moving to new software in the future. For example, ask friends and colleagues how many of them paid for seminars either for themselves of their staff for moving from Microsoft Office 2003 to Office 2007, a move that saw the introduction of an entirely new user interface, called the “Ribbon” (or the Fluent User Interface), as well as confusing features such as Contextual Tabs and The Floating Toolbar, all features that would require Office 2003 users to take expensive training or lose productivity while becoming familiar with the new software package.

Many people make the mistake of assuming that time will stand still for their proprietary software packages, and they won’t require re-training as they upgrade from one version of a Microsoft product to the next. They assume that moving to Free Open Source Software tools will require extensive training, because, after all, it is a different system. But many users of the most recent version of Open Office who are transitioning from Microsoft Office 2003 will say that Open Office is more familiar to them than Microsoft Office 2007. Cathy Malmose, the Zareason CEO, says that they don’t really have problems with customers complaining that their Linux systems are “unfamiliar”:

“A few weeks ago, we had our first return with the ‘It was too unfamiliar’ comment. We are in our third year of business and this is the first time we have had this reason for return even though we make it clear that you can return your system for any reason, even the simplest reason of, ‘I didn’t like it.’ We want to make sure that people feel free to try something new and Linux might feel new to them. We happily granted the refund and perhaps when the Linux field is more mature, this person will try again.”

So the need for training from a proprietary package to a FOSS package might actually be less burdensome than a move from one version of a proprietary package to the next version! Be sure to factor in these hidden costs when quantifying your computer systems, and don’t assume that these costs will apply only to the FOSS computers!

Migrating my law office to GNU-Linux

My move from the Microsoft world to the GNU-Linux world was motivated by a fear of viruses. In the year 2000, I was hearing a lot of talk among my friends and colleagues about the slew of viruses that they were encountering. I was hearing horror stories about long waits for technicians to arrive; long waits on hold with Microsoft support; lost documents; and lots of downtime. I bumped into a computer systems administrator from another law firm on my floor who recommended that I might want to consider using Linux as an alternative to Microsoft Windows.

This systems administrator and I became friends and discussed Free Open Source Software over innumerable lunches and elevator rides. I began warming to the idea of not having to pay for anti-virus software or forced upgrade marches for software and hardware to accommodate what I saw as an arms race in computer hardware and software. I had come to distrust computer software salespersons, because I found that they often left out and misrepresented hidden costs of the software.

My new computer sys admin friend offered to assemble a new Linux computer for me out of parts that I purchased over the Internet. Back then, there weren’t so many vendors who would sell computers with GNU-Linux pre-installed. I took my friend up on his offer, and within a week, I had a new SuSE Linux computer. With the help of another Linux whom I met through the first guy, I was able to network the two computers so that I could pass documents from my Microsoft Windows computer to my GNU-Linux computer.

Lawyers use the same kinds of word processing documents over and over again. I found that I was able to save a document from Microsoft Word and open it with Open Office Writer with little trouble. I found that it was a joy to be able to cruise the Internet without having to worry about getting viruses. I was able to open other lawyers’ Microsoft Word documents without having to worry about whether those lawyers had kept their anti-virus software up to date.

I did have trouble with the loss of California Judicial Council forms. These forms are mandatory court forms that must be used in certain aspects of a California lawyer’s state law practice. I did experience a loss of productivity there, but I was spending a whole lot less time on the phone with salespersons when I had to purchase and upgrade software packages. The Judicial Council forms I was able to use by downloading them on-line and filling them out with PDF software programs that came free with my SuSE GNU-Linux distribution. I lost some of the automated features that the paid programs offered, but that time loss was probably off-set by gains made from not experiences crashes and losses of data associated with Microsoft Windows.

Within 6 months, I had moved my entire practice from Microsoft Windows to GNU-Linux. That was a relatively fast-paced migration, and it would not have been possible but for the fact that I did not have a lot of difficulty in convincing my “staff” to make the migration, since I am a sole practitioner. When planning your migrations, keep in mind the human element. Alexandro Colorado, the founder of the Open For Business service of the Spanish-language OpenOffice.es project, recommends spending time with the end users to make sure that they buy in to the migration:

“Migrating office suite software is a human migration more than a software migration; you need to change the minds of the staff before changing the bits on their computers. The ‘Humanware’ needs to feel informed, and know help is available and also their opinions about the move can be heard at anytime.”

How do you go about winning people over to a change of software? By appealing to key players and finding allies within the organization, as we will learn from my experiences in moving a small public middle school from proprietary software to Free Open Source Software.

Migrating a school: win over the principal and key teachers

In the spring of 2004, I noticed that a new public charter school had opened in my neighborhood of San Francisco. The school had placed an A-frame sandwich board on the sidewalk announcing that they were accepting new students. Public schools in California are notoriously under-funded, and so I saw an opportunity to present Free Open Source Software to the principal as a way of bringing low cost computers to the school.

I phoned the principal and scheduled an appointment to meet with her to discuss her options. She had no idea that Free Open Source Software was an option. She trusted Microsoft, and in fact asked if I had a grudge against Microsoft, since I was obviously offering an alternative that would cause Microsoft some serious competition. I told her that I was not so much against Microsoft as I was in favor of providing simple end users a free market choice of computing solutions.

The principal was not willing to consider moving her teachers’ computers from Microsoft Windows to GNU-Linux, but she did decide to spend $6,200.00 for a thin client lab with 24 thin client terminals and a server to allow the 10 through 13 year-old students to do Internet research and compose their essays. The principal saw her teachers’ work of grade keeping and reporting to be mission-critical to the success of the school, and she was not willing to risk a change in that area.

One would think that the task of educating the children was actually the “mission-critical” activity of the school, but the current focus in the United States under the Bush administration has been on rewarding schools that do well on standardized testing, and penalizing schools that perform poorly in that area. It was therefore more important to this principal that the students acquire basic reading, writing, and math skills; and that they be able to exhibit those skills on tests. So the low-cost GNU-Linux computers were nice, but they were seen as almost an extra-curricular activity, not a main pedagogic method or goal. We have been able to place a few stand-alone Linux computers in a few of the classrooms, but those machines are used mostly just for occasional Internet research and essay writing here and there.

One of the primary successes in this migration project has been convincing the principal and the teachers to use web-based calendaring, word processing and grade-reporting. Before the transition, the teachers and non-teaching staff used exclusively Microsoft Word, Microsoft Outlook, and Microsoft Excel for those purposes, along with Squirrel Mail for email. Now, the teachers and non-teaching staff use Google Docs for many of these purposes. The transition to cloud-computing for these purposes means that teachers using Macs or Linux computers have equal access to those functions. Google Docs is obviously a non-Free solution, but at least it means that Mac users and Linux users have equal access, which is a step in the right direction that has allowed the 7th and 8th grade science teacher to dual boot his notebook computer with Ubuntu GNU-Linux.

The migration of this single teacher’s notebook computer is probably the second greatest accomplishment of this migration, after the GNU-Linux lab itself. It means that this new principal has shown sufficient trust in GNU-Linux to allow a teacher to run at least some of his “mission-critical” functions on a Free Open Source Software platform. This teacher migrated to Free Open Source Software after a virus rendered his Microsoft Windows partition unusable. We wiped his hard drive to kill the virus, and then partitioned his hard drive so that he has access to Microsoft Windows and Ubuntu. He now uses the Ubuntu partition on a daily basis, and uses the Microsoft Windows partition only once a year in the spring in connection with a book publishing project for which the Free Open Source Software solutions are not as good as the proprietary solutions under Microsoft Windows.

This teacher liked the philosophy of Free Open Source Software before the viruses crashed his original Microsoft Windows XP partition, but not enough to commit a mission-critical resource, his notebook, to “the cause.” He was idealistic and pragmatic. It was not until a pragmatic need arose that he was willing to experiment with a new system. And that’s probably the wisest way to move to Free Open Source Software: do it when the need arises, and only after testing the water one step at a time, after lots of research and experience, and only when your end users are fully committed to the process.

by Christian Einfeldt, Producer: The Digital Tipping Point

Certainly, many companies have been looking for FOSS solutions in the last six months. Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, predicted last December that GNU/Linux and other FOSS technologies would become more attractive in hard economic times. “Lower cost, faster time to market, higher profit margins, better branding — these are all things that are in favor of Linux and not in favor of Windows,” he writes, and his comments seem accurate. According to Business Week, FOSS-based companies like SugarCRM, Digium and Zenoss, all reported record quarters last fall, while Red Hat had over $500 million in revenue over the last twelve months.

Rolf Schuster, a diplomat at the German Embassy in Madrid and the former head of IT at the Foreign Ministry, estimated that the German Foreign ministry reduced its costs by two-thirds by switching to GNU/Linux.

However, whether your business will save as much is difficult to estimate in advance. Given the business model of proprietary companies and the idealism of FOSS companies, any estimates tend to be colored by the interests of those who make them. Moreover, although using FOSS means that you no longer have to pay for software or upgrades, you have to realize that you may have costs associated with installation, technical support, and retraining.

The safest way to explore FOSS is one step at a time. Instead of plunging into FOSS all at once, I suggest that you begin with some of your basic desktop productivity software on Windows before making any large scale transition to a FOSS operating system like GNU/Linux. Many FOSS applications have versions for both Windows and GNU/Linux — and, often, Mac OS X as well — so you can easily experiment. Then, if you decide to go ahead, you and your staff will already have some training when you switch operating systems.

To help you decide, here are some basic productivity applications for you to try, and some considerations you need to take into account when moving to FOSS.

OFFICE SUITES

Among FOSS office suites, by far the most popular is OpenOffice.org. Feature for feature, it compares closely with MS Office. Its Writer word processor is stabler than MS Word, and has strong desktop publishing tools that make it a good substitute for FrameMaker, the software of choice for technical documentation. Similarly, Calc is nearly equal to Excel, Impress to PowerPoint, and Base to Access. OpenOffice.org also has a Draw application that is not only useful for general graphics but also serves as a simple alternate desktop publisher. One especially strong reason for using OpenOffice.org is that it includes built-in PDF creation and (if you add the Sun PDF Import Extension) PDF editing.

However, you might want to look at other alternatives. Neither the Abiword word processor nor the Gnumeric spreadsheet is as fully featured as MS Word or Excel, but both are complete enough for many users’ needs.

The same is true of KOffice, the office suite development suite for the KDE desktop. KOffice 2.0, which will likely be released in the next few months, will include not only the basic office applications, but also vector and bitmap graphic programs, a project management tool, and several other useful additions.

HTML EDITORS

You can create HTML files directly from OpenOffice.org, Abiword, or KOffice. However, especially with OpenOffice.org, the resulting code is not very clean unless you make some effort to learn how to improve it. Alternatively, you can run it through HTMLTidy to clean up the file before using it.

Other FOSS HTML editors available for multiple operating systems include Amaya and KompoZer, which traces its pedigree through NVu to the Composer found in Netscape. Both offer an easy to learn graphical interface, but neither is quite a match for Dreamweaver — at least, not yet.

GRAPHICS AND DIAGRAM PROGRAMS

The best-known graphics program in FOSS is GIMP. GIMP is the equivalent of PhotoShop — that is, it is designed for editing raster graphics. The main differences are that The GIMP suffers from a somewhat klunky interface and has only dozens of extensions where PhotoShop has hundreds. However, you can sometimes use the GIMP User Plugin to convert PhotoShop plugins.

Just as PhotoShop has in Illustrator a twin for vector graphics, so many people pair GIMP and Inkscape. Although Inkscape has yet to reach a 1.0 release, many people already use it for professional production, just as they do The GIMP.

Another matching pair of applications is KOffice’s raster editor Krita and vector editor Karbon14. In fact, many users consider these applications the outstanding features of KOffice.

If you are looking for a diagram or charting program, a good place to start is with the Drawing Toolbar that is available in OpenOffice.org Draw. The toolbar includes a large set of flow chart shapes (although you have to know what they are in order to use them), as well as connecting points and arrows. Turn on the grid background, and you have a relatively close match for Visio.

An even better choice is KOffice’s Kivio, a dedicated charting program. Some people have complained that early versions have been buggy, but the upcoming 2.0 release already shows signs of providing greater stability. Meanwhile, you might consider the standalone program Dia.

INTERNET TOOLS

The Firefox web browser is a FOSS success story, having come out of nowhere to seize a 20% market share despite the dominance of Internet Explorer. It is enhanced by thousands of extensions, with more being produced almost daily. The Konqueror web browser for the KDE desktop is less well-known, but also has a loyal following. Keep an eye out, too, for Google’s Chrome browser, which is currently available only on Windows, but is supposed to have a GNU/Linux version at some point.

Among email readers, Mozilla’s Thunderbird is almost as well-known as Firefox is among browsers. However, if you are looking for a tool more like Outlook, then KMail, with its connections to other personal information management tools, or Evolution, which was designed as an Outlook equivalent, might be a better choice.

For IRC, which is used by many development teams, you have a choice of at least half a dozen FOSS tools. Ones you can use on Windows include Pidgin and Xchat.

DATABASES

OpenOffice.org includes a database called Base, which has the advantage of being able to use both spreadsheets and all the types of database servers that you are likely to encounter.

However, like Access, Base does not scale especially well. For serious database use, both MySQL and PostgreSQL are robust and fully-featured alternatives.

NEXT STEPS

These are only suggestions for beginning your exploration of FOSS in your business. As you grow more comfortable with FOSS, you might want to try other applications — for instance, Alfresco if you are a Sharepoint user, SugarCRM for customer relations management, or Deki for a collaboration platform, and GNUCash for accounting. You can find lists of usable software at the OssWin Project, which tracks FOSS for Windows, or at osalt.com (Open Source as an Alternative).

Eventually, you might want to switch operating systems altogether. While FOSS includes a wide variety of operating systems, including FreeBSD and OpenSolaris, the most widely-supported choice tends to be GNU/Linux. With GNU/Linux, you have number of variations, or distributions that provide desktops for the average user, notably Fedora, Mandriva, openSUSE, and Ubuntu, which is rapidly becoming the best known distribution of them all. Perhaps as an intermediate step, you might want to look at Wubi, KDE on Windows, or the Ulteo Virtual Desktop, all of which allow you to run GNU/Linux desktops and applications from within existing Windows installations (Note that you will need KDE on Windows to run KOffice and other KDE programs on Windows).

Similarly, when you do convert to GNU/Linux, you might look at VirtualBox, CrossOver Office, and WINE, FOSS projects that will help you run Windows programs under GNU/Linux, just in case you have the need for some specialized program that doesn’t have a fully functional FOSS equivalent.

As you go deeper into FOSS, you will also need to consider changes to your support infrastructure. In most major urban centers in North America or Europe, you should be able to find system administrators able to help you maintain your FOSS software. Possibly, though, you will prefer to deal with a company that offers traditional software support, such as Red Hat or Novell.

Another important consideration is FOSS governance. Because FOSS is often free for the download and costs nothing, it can easy bypass your procedures for software procurement. If you are not careful, your company can find itself obliged to follow license agreements that you never planned on, or being in violation of them. To minimize such problems, you might want to talk to companies like Palamida or Black Duck Software, which offer tools for administering such projects, or become involved in FOSSology, a project to provide FOSS tools for governance.

You can save money moving to FOSS, but to do so you need to plan slowly. Take the transition in stages so that your staff isn’t overwhelmed, and be aware of the infrastructure you’ll need in your move, and the process should be less painful — and, ultimately, more inexpensive and successful.

By Bruce Byfield – February 2009

There are times when all you want or need is something to just work and get the job done quickly and efficiently without frills or fuss. You probably don’t want to fire up Inkscape or Adobe Illustrator to create just a few labels. You want legibility, and maybe some zip, but edgy for your file labels is probably not what you had in mind when you contemplated cleaning up your file folders.

Enter gLabels, a hassle free label creator and business card program for the Gnome environment which does its job perfectly and will have you producing fabulous labels and business cards in a snap. With gLabels, less is more in that the drawing tools at your disposal are limited, but that’s probably the key to its and your task’s success.

The program is designed to work with various laser and inkjet labels and comes preloaded with virtually every Avery label size in existence. When you click on New, you are prompted to choose the Avery label you need, and then a screen with your selected blank label appears in the workspace. Now, with just the right number of tools, you can design something nice and quick.

For the purpose of this tutorial, we created shipping labels for the holidays. To get started, we selected the Avery 5164 shipping labels from the pull down menu.

We then selected the line tool to draw a line separating the return address from the ship to address. The line tool is in between the square and circle tools. Its icon is a diagonal line. You can increase/decrease the size of the line to suit.

We then inserted a holiday photo from our computer by selecting the “create image object.” It is the tool with a house and sun in the background. We clicked on the file folder which and then navigated to the location on our hard drive where the photo was stored.

Next, we selected the text tool (it has the capital T) to insert our “from” address. We deleted the word “text” and inserted our address.

If you would like to change the size and font of the text, click on the “style” tab. The text tool is straightforward enough with the exception of font size being located in the Style tab.

We then inserted another text box in the “ship to” area. You can enlarge the text box by putting your cursor over one of the green corners. A plus sign will appear and then you can click and drag the corner out to enlarge. We typed in our ship to address under the text tab, then increased the font size under the style tab. While we were there, and since we felt so festive, we changed the font color to green.

And there is our shipping label. If you do a print preview, you see you have 6 shipping labels going to the same address, which probably is not what you wanted.

You could delete the “ship to address” and print the labels blank and then hand write the ship to address. Or if you really want to be fancy, you can do a mail merge.

Mail Merge

With your document open, go to the Objects command in the file bar and select merge properties in the pull down menu. A merge properties dialog box will open. Select your data source format, in our case a csv file, and the filename location.

You can click on the triangles in the dialog to check your information and when satisfied, click the ok button.

Now you add your merge fields to your document. The first line in our example contains a single merge field (“${1}”) corresponding to the first field of a record (first column of a line) which contains the family’s name we are shipping to.

We have a total of 5 fields to insert which correspond to the name, address, city, state and zip code. We added them all in one text box as shown below.

Now go to File and select print from the pull down menu, then click on print preview.

If you are doing a mass mailing and have the need to insert barcodes, gLabels has this feature too. The barcode tool is located next to the “create image object” tool. Click on the barcode tool and a dialog box appears where you can select your barcode language and other style features.

All in all gLabels is a simple program which can handle your label printing needs with style and speed. It’s just the right tool for the right job.