Re: gEDA-user: Building geda under Windows

[Sascha Silbe <sascha-ml-geda-user@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Sat, Mar 05, 2005 at 09:57:02PM -0500, John Dozsa wrote:

> Their managers will obviously support them once they see the tools can 
> do the job.
@work:
No, they won't, at least in a major company here in Germany I know well 
enough. The IT department (even located in a different city) won't allow 
anything besides Windows. Period. There's no use in trying to convince 
my "boss" (or rather "contact" since I run my own - very small - 
business) that Linux is suited better for this particular job. He's not 
the one who decides that (he's a management guy in charge of approx. 100 
people, to give you some starting point about the management structure). 
Neither does his boss (team leader). And neither does his boss' boss 
(department leader) - though that one might have just enough influence 
to at least suggest such a thing.
One of the first things I did was installing Cygwin so I had at least 
some of my familiar tools (heck, there doesn't even seem to be anything 
like "tail -f" on Windows!). I'm very glad that's possible.
My own application is written in pure Python, the platform-specific code 
is minimal (only the serial port routines and some curses keycode 
differences). I can develop and test the code - at least the 
hardware-independant part - at home (=> Unix) and put it into production 
(after further testing) at work (=> Windows). I could even grab my 
Laptop and drop it right in for one of the PCs at work if one of them 
fails.
Ideally, I'd like to see all applications to be that portable, so I can 
use them on whatever platform I have to use. Convincing the IT 
department to install a special application is one thing, but persuading 
them to maintain a whole new platform because the new application 
doesn't run on the existing one is an entirely different thing.

@home:
One of the problems of "Migration to Linux" is that you're not only 
changing the OS, but also a major subset of the applications. 
OpenOffice, Mozilla, etc. - as much as I hate them because of technical 
and resource-wasting reasons - are very helpful in that respect. You can 
switch the applications one after another and once the users are 
accustomed to all of them, you "just" have to change the OS.
I've effectively given up on converting former pure-Windows users to 
Linux. You'll have to accustom them to a major part of the applications 
they'll run on Linux first. Otherwise it's just too much difference for 
them and they'll install Windows again. Had that several times. All in 
all, it was just a waste of time to both of us.

Psychology:
People don't like changes. If you want them to change, you have to do it 
slowly and carefully. Move one piece at a time. Show them it's very much 
like what they're used to and help them get accustomed to and even take 
advantage of the differences. If possibly, let them switch back and 
forth between the old and the new app, so they can use the old one if 
they're in hurry and the new one otherwise. Apart from being a real 
"life-saver" in some situations it gives them a sense of security: If 
the new one doesn't work, they still got the old one to get the job 
done.

Technical rant:
What I hate most are applications that won't even run on most Unix 
systems, only on Linux/x86 (yikes, some of them not even on Linux/PPC!). 
It's almost as ugly as Windows-only applications, the only difference - 
if any - being that most of them are Open Source so I can fix them 
myself.

CU Sascha

--
http://sascha.silbe.org/

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