Agriculture & Middle class Ministry 
R&D Administration (DG6) 		 NATIONAL BOTANIC GARDEN of BELGIUM    
National Botanic Garden 

Survey of the situation in December 1998
Intro  Tutorials  Informatics 

History

  • CPU cumulative power
  • FILE server
  • APPLICATION servers
  • Personal hard disk

Good news

  • Server availability
  • Global availability (servers and network)
  • Cost effective solution

Bad news

  • Exploding complexity of the personal Operating System
  • Staff size
  • We are facing now (1999) a real crisis.

The solutions

  • Hardware standardization
  • Remote installation and rescuing
  • DUAL-BOOT PCs for easy Operating System selection
  • on UNIX, many applications can be loaded in parallel, without the 'FATAL ERROR blue Screen' fear.

Advices for the forseable future

  • Keep your attention on the principles, not on the window manager idiosyncrasies. or on the exact position of 'this' or 'that' button in the current version...
  • Take into account our spartan support context

A very short presentation of LINUX

  • Current state in 1999
  • EMULATORS
  • DEDICATED environment for well-known applications at the Botanical Garden

The proliferation of LINUX at the user's desktop :
not a Y2k bug but now a feature of our institution

The projection for the year 2000 :