NL: Amsterdam may soon start migration to open source & open standards

There are "now" technical difficulties???????

Yup. Typo. It's fixed.

After running the original page through babelfish, it looks as if there are 2 problems. Which arent really problems, just windows user having issues with how linux works.

Financial Software, and it appears, normal every day users not being able to install proggies. Both issues are easily dealt with. There was also mention of something about servers, but babelfish does a word for word translation so sentence formating gets mangled and I couldn't figure that one out.

Being Dutch I had no trouble understanding :-)

It's in fact just one problem: Some programs don't yet have a full-blown open source alternative. In Munich they solved this by having the software made. Amsterdam doesn't have the money to have new open source software built for them, so instead they'll put those troublesome applications on a central server and have users access them remotely from their Linux desktop, then wait for the open source alternatives to mature.

For the rest, it's all good news. Linux and OpenOffice are not causing any trouble. Nobody needed any extra training and everybody could find all the functions they needed. Especially in OpenOffice because it works so much like MS Office. Extra accolades for OpenOffice because it offers a couple of features that MS Office does not which are highly appreciated (sadly it doesn't say which features those are).

> ...so instead they'll put those troublesome applications on a central server and have users access them remotely from their Linux desktop.

Which is the obvious solution, and should be done by more folks. There's simply no real excuse for running Windows desktops anymore, not when there's a fully functional Citrix client available for Linux to handle the needed Windows applications. And Citrix is only one of the possible solutions, it's just the one Windows folks are going to be most familiar with and most comfortable using.

Quoting:And Citrix is only one of the possible solutions

Well, it's exactly what the Dutch government uses _everywhere_, "as long as it runs on Citrix, it is approved" I heard. When becoming more independent of (single) software vendors, that should also change I think.

That's true for central government but not for local government IRC (gemeenten).

What I don't undestand is why Citrix never made a *nix server. That would be ideal for a lot of users. Move from MS-Office on Citrix Windows to OOo on Citrix Linux without messing with the end-user's desktops. A perfect way to migrate slowly instead of with a big bang.

> What I don't undestand is why Citrix never made a *nix server.

The same reason Dell didn't offer Linux on the desktop until recently, and is still very discreet about doing so: Microsoft.

Okay... Then why didn't some open source guys figure out the protocol of Citrix server and built a Citrix-compatible FOSS *nix server? It could be a big push for *nix if they do.

> Okay... Then why didn't some open source guys figure out the protocol of Citrix server > and built a Citrix-compatible FOSS *nix server? It could be a big push for *nix if they do.

The protocol for MS Terminal Services is known (at least enough that rdesktop seems to work seamlessly), so a *nix server that serves up Linux desktops to Windows clients theoretically shouldn't be that tough... There is already the ability to do similar things with X servers for Windows clients or through VNC.

I am not sure how much more work it would be to reverse engineer Citrix's protocols. I am assuming that Citrix's are more efficient/faster to make it worthwhile to do.

From personal experience, Citrix is a lot faster than VNC or rdesktop, and more secure (unless you tunnel then through SSH). It's not as fast as NX though, but perfectly doable over slow broadband barely faster than a 56k modem (e.g. 128/64 ADSL).

The big bonus of course is integration. Citrix folk often don't use a desktop, but thin clients. In order to integrate you'd need to make *nix apps appear on the remote Citrix desktop, not on the local client.

Thanks Sander... that basically confirms what my understanding was. A little googling shows that there are commercial products based on Linux that claim to do Citrix, but I didn't dig up much in the way of FOSS projects. Seems like there might be an opportunity there.

Citrix really isn't any faster than Windows Terminal Services, in my experience. In fact, Citrix Server requires Windows Terminal Services to run.

The added value of Citrix is in the special things they do at the server, rather than the protocol. For instance, you can create a load balanced farm of Citrix Servers. You cannot do the same with Terminal Server (without some creativity.)