windows TO *NIX MIGRATION

[Bill Campbell]

On Wed, Mar 04, 2009, RKreiss1 wrote:
>One of my client's called today and they are about to replace the current
>hardware which is running fp under windows server.
>
>Their question is how much of a performance gain would there be, assuming
>their current hardware, by migrating to *nix.

I can't speak to the differences in processing speed, but the time
recovered not having to deal with anti-virus, and the other ``features'' of
Windows and the continuing expenses related to them could be huge.  Most of
our Filepro customers are running them on either CentOS or SuSE Linux, with
typical uptimes measured in years, and no dedicated IT staff to babysit
them.

>It's been a long time since I have looked at Unix in any flavor.
>
>After running fptransfer to move the programs.  What else will I have to do
>to my programs to insure they are working?

FP guys will have to answer those questions, my expertise is more in *nix
administration, security, et al.

>I am currently running some programs that are calling batch files to create
>pdf using Printwizard.  I'll assume that they would get Anzio and I would
>change some of these operations to use pfpostprint to handle this operation.

You could run Windows in a VMware virtual machine on a Linux box to handle
things like this if necessary.

Our accounting software does pretty output by created groff input files,
then using groff to create PDF files directly.  Our invoices are created by
overlaying a graphic form from an EPS (Encapsulated Postscript) file with
the text of the invoice.  Groff allows me to load the EPS file, the
position the output on top of that with absolute line position within the
line with tab stops.

The SQL-Ledger program does something similar, but uses LaTeX templates to
generate pretty reports.

Bill
-- 
INTERNET:   bill at celestial.com  Bill Campbell; Celestial Software LLC
URL: http://www.celestial.com/  PO Box 820; 6641 E. Mercer Way
Voice:          (206) 236-1676  Mercer Island, WA 98040-0820
Fax:            (206) 232-9186

When we must wait for Washington to tell us when to sow and when to reap,
we shall soon want bread -- Thomas Jefferson