Revision of Alex Interview With Mr.Omar from Sat, 11/09/2004 - 3:11am

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 GNU/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 ??Mr. Omar BayehElDin. 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. and here is the story:

One day from 6 years ago one of Mr.Omar relative (he was studing in uni. in U.S.A) show to Mr.Omar And his Brother a strange Oprating System. that oprating system was GNU/Linux and thay keept playing and deal with it but it`s wasn`t that friendly oprating system like now days and it`s wasn`t knowen in egypt like now days too.

but in thos old days windows was alrady installed in Mr.Omar company`s Lan ( 2 computers , 2 Laptops ) but he was using GNU/Linux on 386 box as a file server. and it`s was just run so great after he close the services that he don`t need on that 386 box. and he was using FoxPro for database stuff and sure the microsoft office on the computers of his Lan. but all that is about to change.

that change happend since 3 years when el mosnfat send to Mr.Omar a litter asking him to arrang his software and get rid of any pirated software he use if he using any. so he chosed to forget about that Headache and save some money by switching to FOSS and GNU/Linux and use them full using in his company starting from accounting system with SQL-Ledger witch is a powerful accounting system that can do almost everything in accounting and there is was another 2 apps for accounting too called Nola and compier but he didn`t try them ,and also using OpenOffice.Org ,Koffice to get contact with files like *.doc *.rft and most sort of office files ,KDE as desktop env. , and some command line tools to find and grep things .for the support it`s always online you search for it and get it but it`s may be a littel hard.and he uses dist. like Mandrake Linux 10 official edtion after he tried some sorf of dist. like RedHat, Slackware and Debian. he will swtich to Debian soon. since he feel some unstabilty problems like remote printer in mandrake. and in the old days the sound card wasn`t work good same as arabic that start supported in mandrake 9 as i remmber and sure the problem of the internal modems.but he sticked with mandrake for sometime cuz it`s was easy to use and easy to install soo friendly interface. and he avoided such problems by using extarnal ( real ) modem and then switched to ADSL connection to avoide the problem of modems , The soundcard problem and the arabic support fix in the next versions of GNU/Linux.

Mr.Omar is quite happy and satistfied with FOSS and it`s work. since there is no viruses like windows and no hack , was sooo easy to switch to GNU/Linux becouse Linux don`t required special skills from the employees all thay have to do is 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.

Really FOSS is great for all kind of work. and Mr.Omar Advise other work owner to switch for FOSS if thay are can dig enought into computers and can handel it. By The Way Mr.Omar not just a GNU/Linux user but he is a contributer with FOSS community, he did the arbaization for SQL-Ledger User Interface and that was really a great work.

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.