Gary Barnett's Blog

One of the key aspects of my Move The Business To Open Source project is that any solution has to support both Linux and Windows clients – Because I just can’t, even with my small desktop estate, do the “big bang thing”.

This has resulted in an interesting “moment” on the term “Open”. One of the facets of Open must, at least in some context, be “open platform” – the ability to run on different platforms….

On visiting the OpenGroupware.org site, I learn that they don’t actually have binaries for Windows…. instead here’s what they say..

The project currently does not provide prebuild binaries for Windows. There are basically three ways to attempt to run OGo on Windows: port to Cygwin, run with GNUstep for Windows and run in VMware. Only the last option is well tested and works fluently.

So only the VMware option is tested. Let’s look specifically at that…

This option runs rock solid, fast and is well tested for years. Just install one of the Linux distributions (eg Debian) inside VMware running on Windows. The VMware approach is very similiar to the approach used by Java based solutions (run a virtual machine, in this case Intel ix86). The advantage is that VMware is much faster than a Java virtual machine given that the instruction set matches (both client and server use the ix86 instruction set).
And: VMware is now available for free!

Yes… OK, that is undoubtedly a way around the fact that the software doesn’t run on Windows… but it’s not a work-around I’m willing to engage with right now.

This stuff is NEVER going to take off unless it can be perceived as better than anything that you can get on windows today…. which means running on Windows.

Argh.

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