myguideTravel Blog

50 ways to save some money Part 1

November 21st, 2007

For some reason, I had Paul Simon’s song playing in my head while I was composing this post. You know the one “50 Ways to Leave your Lover”

You just slip out the back, Jack
Make a new plan, Stan
You don’t need to be coy, Roy
Just get yourself free
Hop on the bus, Gus
You don’t need to discuss much
Just drop off the key, Lee
And get yourself free

While I remain fully committed to my beautiful wife, I have been finding 50 ways to leave another relationship. Here at myguideTravel being destination specialists, we are discovering 50 ways to leave the proprietary software vendors behind. In some cases, we have come back to a proprietary solution and in others we are using a hybrid solution. However, in most cases we have moved to an open source or free model.

When many people think of open source and Linux, they imagine command prompts, black screens and anoraks. While I am no Luddite, I would run a mile from anything that is not user friendly. I have no programming skills and no desire to learn any. I am very much a businessman with a passion for travel.

When I started this company, I honestly had no idea what open source was. Our first website was hosted on a Linux platform but it could have been hosted on Mars, for all I knew about software at the time. However, around 2001 my tech guru and good friend Ger O’Shea, bought a new book called Linux for Windows NT/2000 Administrators The Secret Decoder Ring written by Mark Minasi. Included in the book was a Linux distrubtion called Mandrake 7.1. I still remember the Saturday afternoon that we installed Linux on my laptop. It was amazing, a full operating system, a ton of programs and it was all free. As someone who was bootstrapping a start-up - light bulbs went off all over the place!

Mandrake was later to change it’s name to Mandriva and I later became very friendly with their CEO François Bancilhon. We still run Mandriva on our home PC and I have it dual booting on my laptop. Unfortunately, there are still a few applications I need to use daily - that work only in Windows. So, we have not yet made a fully transition to Linux on the desktop. Through my connections with some of the leaders in the open source, I have become very interested in the movement.

On the server side of the house we are very much a Linux shop. Linux servers power countless applications at myguideTravel including;

• firewalls
• file and print servers
• databases
• HR systems
• websites
• phone systems
• instant messaging
• our intranet
• our internal wiki
• mail servers

For the most part, we use either Mandriva or Red Hat but there are a few other flavours floating about the organisation. The annual savings we make by using Linux in the organisation are considerable. That allows us to pass some of these savings on to our Guests.

In Part 2, I will look at some of the free and open source applications we use at myguideTravel

Entry Filed under: Travel