Ubuntu

Ubuntu in small business

Asked by nasovski

This might be the place to ask this question and I have been thinking about it for a long time and really don't see a reason why this issue hasn't been addressed earlier.

I work for a small independent wine shop in London, at the moment we have one site and three computers (one desktop running WinXP, two laptops with XP and Vista) if any of those computers would fail this would mean a world of pain and cost to us. Spending extra money and time is something you don't really want to do trying to run a small company.

I use Ubuntu at home, and think that it would be a great OS to run on all the three company computers. The only problem is that I can not go to my bosses and tell them that it is the way forward when there are no apps out there for Linux that could replace the apps we use under Windows. Sure, I could try WINE and all that but experience tells me that it is not really the perfect solution as WINE struggles with the likes of Winamp. do I really want to risk loosing crucial data because the software isn't perfect - yet.
do not get me wrong - we already use Open Office on one of the computers, we did pay some £150 for MS Office about two years ago with a license for three installs - but we do want to expand.

okay, let me finish as I am circling around the main point!
What I really want to see is an App that can be used to poll data from electronic cash registers so that it can be used to stock control, payroll programs, serious accounting apps, applications to program cash registers etc.
We use old Samsung tills and an outdated soft called Samstock that would better fit Win98 than anything else.

i am not a coder, just a clerk looking for a better life, without having to worry which trojan is going to take my pcs down throwing me back to stone age and yes, we do regular backups - can you not running windows?

thanks for letting me vent!
all the best!
<email address hidden>

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Cristi Nistor (cristi-nistor) said : 		#1

Maybe you'll find this post interesting:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1251877

Good luck.

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Richard de Vries (richarddevries) said : 		#2

I've googled around a bit and there's no software to be found other than Samstock that can read the Samsung tills. I came across a few attempts to reverse-engineer the protocol though (http://www.tillservices.co.uk/discus/messages/33/161.html).

If Samstock is able to automatically pass through the data, you could set up one Windows machine that does just that. Grab an old computer, do a bare minimum Windows installation, don't connect it to the internet and put it some place safe. Any form of data will do, be it in a database, a CSV file or just plain text. Linux is very good at converting data to the form you want.

This, however, requires that the data retrieval can be automated. If this is not the case, you'll have to manually update the data using your one remaining Windows box.

Two off-topic questions: 1. What do you mean when you say "WINE struggles with the likes of Winamp"? 2. How can you have a wineshop and NOT run WINE?

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