Revision of Alex Interview With Mr.Omar from Thu, 09/09/2004 - 11:49pm

Egyptian companies have long relied on proprietary software to get their work done. There are many reasons for this, mainly lack of knowledge & unawareness of the Free/Open Source alternatives, especially Linux. Most business owners/managers are simply wary of free (zero cost) software. "How would a free O/S have the quality of windows ??" is a popular question. Even grandma has some sort of windows experience, which makes them feel assured that it will be easy to obtain technical support, should problems arise.

Well, how about showing a real Egyptian business which relies solely on FOSS ?? That's exactly what we've done. We, 3 members of EGLUG, interviewed Mr. Omar BayehElDin. Mr. Omar is the owner of Abou Youssef company, which works in cloth. He's been running solely on Linux & free software for years, and he's quite satisfied. He forgot all about crashes, viruses and has saved a lot of money ever since.

We are:

Ahmed El Sherbiny (ShErbO)

Sherif Nagy (DarKnesS_WolF)

Ahmed El-Mekkawy (linuxawy)

We: Mr. Omar, how and when did you start using Linux ?

Mr. Omar BayehElDin: About 5 years ago, when my relative (a university student in the USA) told me about it. We started playing with the system, which wasn't user friendly at all back then.

We: When did you migrate the company PCs to Linux ?

Mr. Omar BayehElDin: I've been running Linux solely on my company PCs for 3 years now. I had been using a Linux fileserver even before the complete switch - which was a 386 by the way!!!.

We: A 386 ?? but that's too slow to cope with the load !!

Mr. Omar BayehElDin: Thanks to Linux it could, I turned off all unnecessary services and it just ran fine.

We: What was your previous configuration like, before migrating to Linux ?

Mr. Omar BayehElDin: All windows PCs, running Foxpro - except for the Linux server. I then switched to all-Linux PCs, with SQL Ledger instead.

We: What was the main reason you switched to FOSS?

Mr. Omar BayehElDin: The main reason was the letter I recieved from (mosanafat) 3 years ago. They asked me to get rid of any pirated software or else I'd be fined & faced with criminal charges. I figured out it would be a cost-saver if I switched to Linux. I pay ZERO money for all my software needs!

We: Which distribution are you currently using ? Are you thinking of switching to a new one ?

Mr. Omar BayehElDin: I'm currently running Mandrake 10 OE. I tried all sorts of distros, such as Slackware, RedHat and Debian - which I failed to install. I'm Thinking of trying FreeBSD, heard it's quite stable and fast (not that Linux isn't).

We: What software does your company use ?

Mr. Omar BayehElDin: Besides regular internet applications and office suites (OpenOffice, KOffice), we use SQL Ledger - which is the centerpiece software. It's an accounting system that does almost anything - and everything. We will discuss the features later.

We: What about support, how do you obtain it and is it available ?

Mr. Omar BayehElDin: There is always support on the internet, as you can search for your problem and learn about it. It's not easy to find it though, if you don't know HOW and WHERE to search for answers.

We: Was the switch to Linux troublesome for your employees ? Does working on Linux require any special skills ?

Mr. Omar BayehElDin: Not at all. They just do the obvious File->open stuff. Nothing fancy, just regular GUIs with menus, data entry fields and stuff which is user-friendly and quite similar to windows applications.

We: How do you access common file formats, such as Microsoft Word documents ?

Mr. Omar BayehElDin: No problems with that. OpenOffice is almost entirely compatible with word.

We: Did you face any hardware and software problems during your period of Linux usage ?

Mr. Omar BayehElDin: A few hardware problems, some problem with the sound card (but that was long ago), the eternal winmodem problem and some problem with the remote printer on the LAN. Arabic support was troublesome in the old days and the shaping of arabic letters in openoffice.

We: How did you overcome those problems ?

Mr. Omar BayehElDin: I used an external (real) modem, now I'm on ADSL connection. The sound card problem was fixed in the recent distros, and the arabic problems were fixed in Mandrake since 9.1 (as I remember). I'm now using koffice which has no problems with arabic.

We: How about stability and security ? Any security incidents or virus infections ?

Mr. Omar BayehElDin: The O/S is quite stable. It rarely crashes. As for security, I've never been hacked before and I'm not affected by the (now popular) windows viruses.

We: We've heard that you've contributed something to the FOSS community. What exactly ?

Mr. Omar BayehElDin: I did complete arabization of the client interface of SQL Ledger.

We thank Mr. Omar for his contribution (FOSS is all about contributing and giving something back) - and for his precious time (as busy as he was, he gave us all the time we needed and was quite helpful). He showed us some of the very useful features of SQL-Ledger. It can produce invoices, calculate final tax, calculate costs, get the annual number of sales for an item, and alot of other stuff. It`s just a powerful accounting system. We took some screenshots of SQL-Ledger performing common tasks.

We hope this small interview would urge other businesses -who didn't have the courage yet- to migrate to Open Source software and benefit from the stability, security & cost savings. Having seen someone who's already done that may be just what we need.

And now here are some pics of SQL-Ledger in Action.

NOTE:We coudn`t get (elmosanfat) letter since it was hard to find.

Here is SQL-Ledger doing AR transactions of the invoices for the company (trial).

Balance for the account named (trial).

This is an invoice with some sold items, to be printed.

Balance sheet for the company (trial).

Sales total and tax total for the company.

Creation of the invoice, you can change the currency and add new currency for the items that the company deals in (selling or buying).

Incoming statments for the company (trial).

It can also show a general chart of accounts in the company.

Here is ShErbO and Linuxawy.

Mr. Omar ,DarKnesS_WolF and ShErbO - Mr. Omar was showing us some work with SQL-Ledger.

This is the 2nd computer on the network.