Dutch Record Shop Chain Migrates 1000 PCs to KDE on Novell Linux Desktop

The 'Free Record Shop' is a chain of shops in the Benelux countries along with a sister organisation Van Leest. The original Dutch company also has shops in Norway and Finland with about 400 shops in total selling CDs, DVDs and computer games. ICT Manager Ton Arrachart describes their core activity as 'distribution of content in the area of home entertainment'. In the past every division of the company had its own ICT department, but now they have all been merged into the main office in Capelle aan den IJssel. The central ICT department works as a shared services centre for all divisions.

"We didn't focus on cutting ICT costs, on the contrary, the headcount has grown", according to Arrachart. His department now has 14 employees in house, and 5 in the field. The strategy is aimed at doing only the essential ICT business in house and to outsource the rest.

The Free Record Shop has been using PC cash registers since the 80's, when the founder Hans Breukhoven deployed software for shop automation from Anoa Automatisering of Tilburg, running SCO UNIX on Intel CPUs. Around 2002/2003 they decided to move to GNU/Linux, SCO's new licensing policy being one of the reasons cited. At first they tested Red Hat Linux but found it did not meet their requirements. Arrachart says "We wanted to provide a supported service, a managed point-of-sale environment. Red Hat only provided support from the Open Source community, which wouldn't have been usable in the context of a service level agreement. Red Hat acknowledged this issue and suggested using their Linux Enterprise Edition, but we had some cost concerns about that approach."

Anoa then offered SuSE Linux as alternative, and Cappelle assigned him to port the UNIX application to Linux. For financial reasons, the Finnish division had already decided to migrate from UNIX to Linux. Because of that, the first shops in Finland were already running Red Hat Linux, but in the future they would move to Novell too. The whole setup was aimed at simplicity and effectiveness. "The cash register only has one task: billing and showing stock", Breukhoven says, "an efficient environment was wanted. We did not object to a graphical interface, but it needed to be stripped down as far as possible and Windows was not an option..". He continues, "..as then you would be subject to Mr Gate's licensing policies, and it would have also meant more investment in hardware."

The new cash register PCs run a stripped down version of the Novell Linux Desktop. According to Arrachart, although all essential components are present, a great deal of software has been stripped out of the KDE Desktop GUI. The applications remaining include a PDF viewer and X Server, with KDE's Kiosk mode and associated admin tool being used to lock down the configuration. Access to the central applications is provided via a web browser. At first, the shop employees will only get the base packages so email using a separate application won't be possible, although it can still be done via a web portal.

Each shop has about 2 or 3 PCs; one is the head console and can be used by the shop manager to access the central server based applications. The other PCs are used as cash registers.

At the moment, almost all shops in The Netherlands and Belgium already use the KDE Desktop. After that phase is complete, the migration team will go to Norway and Finland to migrate the PCs used by the Free Record Shop and Bravo chains. "It's a fun project" says Arrachart, "We can show that you can save costs with ICT, while at the same time allowing greater possibilities in the way the shops are organised." All the cash registers in the Netherlands Free Record Shops are geared towards simplicity and effectiveness. The Head of ICT concludes "so Windows is not a viable option."