Spanish Region Goes Entirely Open Source

greengrass writes to tell us TechWorld is reporting that the Spanish region of Extremadura has decided to go completely open source with their day-to-day operations. While the region has long been a supporter of open source software, within a year it will be a requirement that all officials use the ODF and PDF formats for all documents. From the article: "Extremadura, Spain's poorest region, made headlines following a 2002 decision to migrate about 70,000 desktops and 400 servers in its schools to a locally tailored version of Debian called gnuLinEx. The government has estimated that the total cost of this project was about 190,000 euros (£130,000), 18 million euros lower than if the schools had purchased Microsoft software. "

Comments

Re:gnuLinEx

[atomicstrawberry]

Based off here it looks like it's basically Debian Sarge with a set of useful applications - I assume the ones that have different names eg Zurbarán (Gimp 2.2) are localised builds.

Re:gnuLinEx

[4e617474]

From what I could find, it's mostly a localized Debian with a few tweaks for ease-of-use and some educational apps and such. Review linked by distrowatch.

Re:gnuLinEx

[Anonymous Coward]

The main advantages of the distro seem to be the creation of system to install programs via the browser (after root authentication). They have also developed a program to update free distributions with non-free amenities Windows users typically take for granted: namely Java, Flash, the ability to read commercial DVDs and Real and DivX codec support. The installation seems to be based on Redhat's installation system (anaconda) and it has the ability to resize existing NTFS partitions. They've also got a centralized "control panel" where one may install packages, update the distro, etc... The core of the distro consists of: Gnome 2.14, X.org 6.9, with specific updates for Intel 945 chipsets, Linux 2.6.16, with support for Core 2 duo as well as ipw3945 as well as nVidia, ATI, firmware ipw2*00 and ipw3945, etc.

For your information...

[jkrise]

Fedora Directory Services is a very robust implementation of LDAPv3, and is available under GPL. FDS also allows integration with Craptive Directory. Moodle and many other Courseware come with LDAP integration, so there's no problem if the school really wants to go in for Open Source.

Re:Credit

[MBMarduk]

Extremadura actually means "extra mature" so this would be like Grandma-ILF quality pr0n.










(*No peeps, I'm a native spanish speaker so need to point out the obvious ;-)

Re:From Spain

[Don_dumb]

..."both" your fathers?

A mistake in translation I think.
I assume the parent means "both parents", as in Spanish - father is 'el padre', mother is 'la madre', but both together are 'los padres'. This masculine dominance happens with many words for people :- for example, the word for 'sibling' uses the word for brother. I am learning Spanish and this can confuse as naturally I assume that someone is talking about their brothers, when they could also mean their sisters as well.

Re:Good now they don't have an excuse to pirate by

[davaguco]

Spain is not third world, by any account or figure.

Re:Spain is a socialist country these days...

[davaguco]

Saying that Spain is socialist is knowing very little about spanish politics. Even if the political party in charge of the government actually is called "socialist" party, it's politics have absolutely nothing to do with what you can find in any book that socialism is.

Re:Proof that MS-fanboys just don't get it.

[killjoe]

LArge organizations like that tend to have an IT team. The IT team tends to dictate which printers are bought.

Have you ever worked for a company? Check with you school. You will see that they too make centralized decisions about which printers are bought and installed.

Anyway most printers are supported by linux. There are few windows only printers but they are pretty rare because the printer companies want to sell to mac users too (mac and linux use the same printer subsystem)

Re:A Goal!

[Anonymous Coward]

Here in Spain, Government does pay indirectly to the GPL coders for their adaptations: they open a standarised-by-law public bidding process for contractors which have to suply the adaptations or developments or whatever service is needed. The lowest bidder which has enough technical expertise gets the contract and develops the software, which is then property of the government, and then the government releases as GPL.

Open Standard versus Free

[RahoulB]

Adobe has a few patents on it but anyone is allowed to use the PDF standard royalty-free. so it is an open standard (although not free)

Re:gnuLinEx

[xtracto]

Well, I can read spanish, and after reading the What's new information I found two or three quite interesting things. I will try to summarize them here:

• Primer arranque (First boot): Allows graphics booting using gfxboot, something quite nice for "normal" users, as I remember my flatmate got scared at the Ubuntu screen boot, with the list of the [OK] and [FAILED] services status (background here).
  
• Instalación (Installing): Just a graphical installer with graphical partition resizing, I saw this already when installing Ubuntu and Mandriva.
  
• Más comodidad (More confortability [is that a word?]): Just the old root/user password option with automatic login.
  
• Un Escritorio más vivo (more alive desktop),Mantente a la última (stay at the edge), El nuevo Actualizar LinEx (New LinEx Update): Some desktop backgrounds, system update and package installer. Nothing too fancy IMHO.
  
• Aptéalo con APTZILLA ("Aptate it" with APTZILLA) : This is something which I believe is worth to mention, I have never seen something simillar in any other distribution. It seems to be a Firefox extension that enables to install software from an internet page. It would be very interesting to try it because from what it seems it would be a way to achieve the "click+download+click^x+install" behaviour in Windows for the end user (my father for example wont be able to install Repast framework in Ubuntu because it is not in the repositores, whereas to install it on Windows he just have to download the installer and run it).
  
• El Panel de Control de gnuLinEx: A control panel similar to what a lot of other distributions have. HOWEVER I find quite relevant that they embed the WINE emulator (which btw I.N.an E.), I imagine they try to make as easy as possible to enable Windows applications to run in Linux. That is the other property worth to note, as I have not seen any distribution that gives so much importance to it (well, besides the commecial distros like xandros, lindows [ya ya I like to call it Lindows], etc).
  
• El wiki personal (The Personal Wiki [see, spanish is not that hard]): That is the other interesting application, which a wiki like note taker (the application seems to be Tomboy.
  

Well, all the other properties I did not listed are the ones that I have seen in other distributions.