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A growing band of users in Ireland is taking to Linux with enthusiasm. Lower cost, users say, is only one of the benefits.

Linux solutions are gaining steam, with advocates touting the platform's openness and customisation features. According to IDC Research, Linux is the world's fastest-growing server operating environment. In 1998, some 690,000 Linux operating environments were shipped, reflecting a 190 per cent growth rate and 17 per cent of all new server operating environments.

Specific figures for Ireland are more difficult to find. The experience of Oracle, however, may not be untypical. In the first half of this year, 25 Irish-based organisations purchased Oracle products for deployment on Linux platforms. Most of these were software development firms, but there were also a couple of large commercial organisations that are currently investigating the OS with a view to doing large-scale rollouts at a future date.

The Irish Linux Users Group (ILUG) asserts that Linux use is even more widespread. (The existence of a thriving user group, with offshoots in Galway and Cork, is further evidence of the spread of Linux.) ILUG claims Linux fulfils many roles in the Irish commercial sector. For example, ILUG says, it is being used to supervise Windows NT boxes and reboot them when things go awry. It is also used as an image server for bulk installation of software on PCs.

Other typical uses include Internet gateways, firewalls, email servers, ftp servers, file servers, print servers, virtual Web servers and so on. It is also widely used for network monitoring. More unusually, it is used as a serial port server by Galway-based Blue Tree Systems, a company developing software for communicating with data logging devices, as an alternative to carrying loggers, power supplies, sensors and cabling around to individual desks.

Difficulties
However, users still consistently complain that Linux is too difficult to install, and Linux enthusiasts concede that it is not for the faint-hearted. ILUG member Owen Kelly, author of The Beginner's Linux Guide, admits that there are problems in this area. Speaking on TechTV recently he said, "It's not for people who are technically challenged. You want to have a good idea of how your computer works. With Linux you are digging down deep into the core of the system. You could change things with Linux that could actually destroy your machine if you don't know what you are doing.

"Eventually it is planned that Linux will become as easy to install and use as Windows. I can see that happening in the next five to 10 years and when that happens, we could see a big market turnaround."

Seeking to address these concerns, the IT industry's major organisations have rowed in with a plethora of support announcements over recent months. Computer Associates said it plans to support OpenLinux in its TNG systems management framework. IBM plans to support OpenLinux in its global training centre network and will make its DB2 database available on Linux platforms through partners. Hewlett-Packard has launched a 24-hour technical support service to provide customers with around-the-clock worldwide support of Linux and HP Linux applications. HP's new support services include a maximum two-hour response time commitment, and immediate response for critical calls, on multi-vendor Intel-based platforms.

At the end of June, Dell decided to take the installation bull by the horns. On Dell's Web site, customers can order Red Hat Linux 6.0 factory-installed on select, certified configurations of Dell Precision workstations. Dell said the move is a response to growing customer demand worldwide for systems configured with Linux and boasted that it is the first major European systems vendor to offer Web ordering of systems with Red Hat Linux already installed.

Good Runner
Apart from the obvious cost benefits, what are the other attractions of Linux? According to the ILUG's Colm Buckley, reliability is a major factor: "In the Department of Computer Science at Trinity College, Linux servers are slowly edging out NT servers for file/print server. They're easier to maintain and they `go wrong' considerably less often." Linux advocates argue that Linux is much more stable than Windows NT. It requires less hardware resources and is more versatile and robust.

Kenn Humborg, chief technical officer of Blue Tree Systems told the ILUG's Ken Guest what had impressed him about Linux. Blue Tree Systems was founded four years ago by two electronic engineering postgraduate students from NUI, Galway. The company currently employs eight software developers, mainly producing software for the transportation industry. Its largest customer is Thermo King Corporation.

Blue Tree's first Linux machine was used for the company's firewall. There were a few factors affecting that decision.

"First off, I was not convinced about the out-of-the-box security of NT in such a hostile environment," said Humborg. "I didn’t know enough about NT to be confident that I'd be able to make it secure enough.

"Secondly, I wanted to run quite a few services on this box, including mail, news, WWW cache, Web server, ftp server and DNS server. I felt that doing all this with NT would cost quite a bit in both hardware and software, whereas with Linux I could use Open Source software all the way and make use of an older machine which was no longer any use for development."

As a third factor, Humborg complained of troubleshooting difficulties with NT. "Fourthly, I can admin my Linux firewall from home, which I can't do with NT (or at least wouldn't be anywhere near as comfortable doing it)."

Blue Tree's second Linux installation is a test machine that allows programmers to select between numerous OS and application configurations in very little time. "We needed the ability to test our software under everything from Windows 3.1 to Windows 98/NT4 with and without MSOffice and in various languages," said Humborg. "It's also important to be able to go back to a well-known configuration when troubleshooting and doing QA. So, I split a large hard drive into a small (500Mb) partition for the OS under test and installed Linux on the remainder. Two trivially simple scripts allow us to save and restore compressed images of the small partition. Developing this solution without Linux would have taken longer and given me much less flexibility." Although Humborg says Blue Tree is unlikely to open-source its own major products, he acknowledges the contribution that the Open Source model has made to the company's infrastructure. "Infrastructure is vital. You can’t build solid systems on a fragile foundation. In addition, interoperability is vital. This means infrastructure is almost a `natural monopoly'. Desktop OSes (and essential Internet services) fall into the category of infrastructure. And nobody really wants to develop for multiple platforms, so the commercial world seems to tend towards a single-OS situation. (I'm talking about the desktop market here. Other markets, such as servers and embedded computing, have very different priorities.) If we are going to have one dominant OS, it should be Open Source. Otherwise, the industry becomes subservient to the will of one dominant company. And we all know that's not a good thing.

"So, my main reasons [for choosing Open Source] are not financial. I will quite happily pay for a good product. It just happens that I've had fewer problems dealing with Open Source software than with proprietary software. I think that the best Open Source products are those that allow anyone to `scratch their own itch' and contribute features and fixes to the product, but still have somebody overseeing the whole thing (such as Linus, or the Apache Group) so that the architectural integrity of the product is maintained."

Although well versed in the benefits of Linux and Open Source products, Humborg does not go completely against the prevailing Windows grain. For example, Blue Tree uses Word 95 to produce its documentation. According to Humborg, there are three reasons for this: "Inertia, interoperability and functionality. Word is not a particularly bad word processor (although it falls well short of the mark when dealing with really large documents). For everyday correspondence and writing user manuals, it does the job. In-house developer documentation is generally either Word, HTML or plain text, whichever suits best."

Nor is he likely to begin using any of the growing number of Linux productivity applications. "All our development is on Windows, so there is no point in having to use Linux for other productivity tools."