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Spanish Extremadura Moving 40,000 Desktops To Linux

Posted by Soulskill on from the influx-of-the-tux dept.

jrepin writes with this quote from a post at the European Commission's JoinUp site: "The administration of Spain's autonomous region of Extremadura is moving to a complete open source desktop, replacing the current proprietary desktop platform, confirms the region's CIO, Teodomiro Cayetano López. The IT department started a project to install the Debian distribution on all 40,000 desktop PCs. 'The project is really advanced and we hope to start the deployment the next spring, finishing it in December.' The project makes it Europe's second largest open source desktop migration, between the French Gendarmerie (90,000 desktops) and the German city of Munich (14,000 desktops)."

3 of 137 comments (clear)

  1. A few clarifications by lufo · · Score: 5, Informative

    Please allow me to make a few clarifications on the subject, because there are some additional facts related than can be missed if you didn't read TFA and TF(Spanish Newspaper)A linked by TFA:

    • Extremadura became pioneer in Free SW creating their own Debian-based distro 9 years ago, LinEx (Linux Extremadura)
    • They implanted a PC every two school students (primary education, up to 13 yr) region-wide running LinEx, appart from the Regional Administration
    • Now they're closing the LinEx development project, handing it to a national-level (rather than regional)
    • The information is based in a 2011-12-31 statement by the regional CIO, saying they're migrating from LinEx to "pure" Debian as LinEx is orphaned
    • I've tried to find additional info (like planning, additional commentaries, etc) in newspapers, the official regional citizen-info site, etc. on the subject but I've found nothing
    • I've found some statements from LinEx project (now ex-)workers but these statements where just suppositions
    • Regarding to a HW and UEFI related comment I've seen, I don't think they will replace any hardware, they will just migrate the OS in those systems already owned by the regional administration
  2. Re:Europe is broke , Linux to the recue by lucidlyTwisted · · Score: 5, Informative

    They're not moving to Linux though, they are simply moving from a customer Linux distro (called "Linex") to Debian, purely because they were finding maintaining their own distro too much of an overhead.

  3. Re:Europe is broke , Linux to the recue by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Actually, only the computers in schools, high-schools and public health services work with Linux (at classrooms we used Linex some years ago, Debian-Edu last years and Debian squeeze this year). But we have many computers at offices working with Windows XP, 9x and W2000. These are the computers that are going to migrate.

    The changing name from Linex to Debian is provoked by a political change (progressives lost, conservative won) not for maintaining troubles. The brandname Linex was associated to the progressive party, so the new party doesn't want it around. Linex was Debian with Artwork packages and some selected programs. You can do the same without the Artwork packages.