Retail / EPOS Linux

January 9th, 2007Geek 3 Comments

I can’t beleive the state of the market with regards Linux for EPOS / Retail systems. It is basically a one player market. You have either IBM’s Solution, which is basically SLES 8 with OpenLDAP and bunch of Perl scripts for managment. Or you have Novell’s offering which is basically SLES 9 with a bunch of managment stuff on top of that.

The managment stuff is just keeping info about each till and what config it has. It’s not rocket science, and there is a bunch of stuff to keep the OS up-to-date. Both are quite ugly under the hood.

What I want to know is how come Novell / SUSE have been let to corner the market? Where is the Debian based distro’s that could do this sort of thing with it’s eyes closed.

I am glad we are running Linux, but sort of annoyed that the choice of distro is limited.

3 Responses to “Retail / EPOS Linux”

  1. Fredrick Greebes Says:
    February 26th, 2008 at 7:57 pm

    Integration with existing software, security & stability, technological restrictions, etc. are just a few of the reasons we never ventured into linux territory.

    Personally I’m a huge advocate of anything *nix, but for the retail segment I’m not sure its the best solution, in the same way I don’t believe Macs are either… Why would you choose linux over windows in regards to epos?

  2. Mark Says:
    March 4th, 2008 at 5:08 pm

    Reasons for choosing Linux are a few

    * Supportability, the supportability of a remote *nix box at the end of a relatively low bandwidth connection is very good. Things like ssh, ftp, rsync etc are your friends.
    * Performance, when it was first put in, Microsoft as you would expect tried to get us to use Windows. So we ran a trial in a store, half the tills were running Linux the other half were running Windows. The performance difference between the two was quite big (Linux outperformed Windows), also the Windows ones contracted a virus and so there was that to contend with too.
    * PCI, if you use *nix you don’t have to implement Requirement 5 of PCI which requires an Anti-Virus solution.

    Regards integration, our EPOS software is a Java based application and so is very OS agnostic, as long as there is a JVM, it’s happy. And stability and security, I would say Linux scores quite high on those.

    My only grumble is that Novell have been allowed to corner the market, and while Linux is the right choice for us, I would like to see more choice in the Linux flavors. I know we could roll our own distro or use Debian or something, but commercial support availability is important and so thats not an option. If some Linux distro was to offer a retail ‘tuned’ distro based on Debian now that would be good, (Mark Shuttleworth, are you listening?)

  3. Chris Says:
    June 24th, 2010 at 10:32 pm

    I agree with Mark. Remote managment tools and scripting leave Windows in the shade. I support a Linux EPOS installation of over 150 EPSON registers that handles 3 million transaction per annum. Superb reliabilty, never lost a transaction in 5 years. Registers are 1 – 1.3 Ghz Celerons 256M memory 80G HDD. Product file is nearly 1 million ( yes 1000000 ) PLUs on each till. Instant response to scanning. The application is built using GT.M ( http://www.fisglobal.com ) running on Slackware 10.2
    I am currently port the app to run on a PDX-057 5.7″ touchscreen mini PC ( http://www.icom.com.tw ) to create possibly the smallest cash register ever.
    BTW before the Linux implementation the application was running on DOS tills since 1989. A lot of the same code is still in use after 20 years. How about that for ROI.

    The reason there is so little Linux based EPOS is I suspect because M$ are buying market. See old press releases re Tesco’s initial decision to use Linux based tills until M$ made them an offer they could not refuse

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