Kennards shifts 400 desktops to Linux

03.11.2005
National equipment hire company Kennards Hire will migrate more than 400 desktops to Linux in a national deployment of the open source operating system.

Scheduled for completion next January, the migration, which started about 18 months ago, began with a trial of one branch, according to StraTech Consulting Linux systems engineer Lindsay Holmwood.

In a recent blog post, Holmwood described how he has been working at StraTech Consulting to design and implement a "Linux desktop SOE (standard operating environment) and backend" for Kennards Hire since April 2004.

The SOE includes "distributed LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) authentication" with "locked down Xfce and Gnome desktop environments".

Holmwood wrote that the full rollout will take place in January and will involve more than 400 machines running Fedora Linux on the desktop across about 80 branches nationally.

The Fedora Project is a community-driven Linux distribution started by Red Hat. Although not supported by Red Hat, company engineers work on Fedora, which is "one of the sources for new technologies and enhancements that may be incorporated into Red Hat Enterprise Linux in the future", according to the project's Web site.