Spanish Extremadura Moving 40,000 Desktops To Linux

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)."

Comments

Europe is broke , Linux to the recue

[Anonymous Coward]

While it is a pity that Europe is sliding into socio-economic oblivion, it's a great chance for Linux. Never waste a crisis!

Re:Europe is broke , Linux to the recue

[Mannfred]

As a taxpayer I'd prefer my tax money to go towards supporting lean security-hardened Linux distros (with some genuine potential for overall cost savings) rather than licenses for the latest Microsoft desktop OS, Exchange servers etc. This ought to be good news for taxpayers long-term regardless of how the economy is doing now.

Re:Europe is broke , Linux to the recue

[lucidlyTwisted]

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.

Re:Europe is broke , Linux to the recue

[dintech]

No one expected the Spanish Extremadura... to switch to linux desktop.

Re:Europe is broke , Linux to the recue

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Europe is broke , Linux to the recue

[mcgrew]

Now these 40,000 people will need at least 8 hours of training

FUD FUD FUD!!!

I see it's been over a decade since you tried Linux. KDE is so similar to Windows that anybody who has ever used Windows would have no trouble using KDE. I have folks bring me "broken" PCs all the time that are hopelessly infected with garbage and who have no reinstall disks for Windows. None ever needed any training to use Linux, and most came later and told me how much better they liked it than Windows.

How much retraining did it take to migrate them to Windows 7 from XP? Moving to Linux is less of a change. All of the "hard" parts, the administration, is going to be done by IT staff who presumably are well versed in Unix. Any admin that doesn't know UNIX is, IMO, not competent to be a network admin to begin with.

10% of these peoples [sic] PC will need to be upgraded, Yes yes Linux can run better on older hardware however if they are going to upgrade their OS they might as well upgrade their oldest PC's [sic]

That's just stupid, and I'm not talking about your misuse of apostrophes. That old machine is going to run a hell of a lot faster under Linux, since it has no ever-growing registry nor antivirus to slow it down. If it's powerful enough to run the software it needs, replacing it is a waste of money. They're not going to be playing FPSes or calculating PI to the tem millionth decimal point.

800 euro for a new PC seems fare.

I hope English isn't your first language. And 800 Euro??? WTF??? A good office computer doesn't even cost 800 dollars.

When you are in a depressed economic times is is sometimes it is better to stick with what you got [sic] and don't upgrade and maximize the use of your purchase.

Odd how you didn't take that into account when you stupidly suggested that since they're replacing an expensive OS with a free one they might as well spend more than a new copy of Windows costs on hardware "just because".

(I like Linux I really do)

Considering the earlier part of your comment, that's VERY unlikely. If you'd run Linux in the last five years you'd know migration woudn't take any training whatever. Sorry, but I'm calling you a liar. An illiterate one, too.

Extremadura has done a lot for linux

[emj]

They have hosted codesprints and Debconf 2009. So this is really just a continuation of a long time of moving towards Linux. But I do not like the part where he says "Our budget for this is zero euros", that will not go well.

Re:Extremadura has done a lot for linux

[serviscope_minor]

Money shouldn't be the only incentive, of course (I find the other upsides to a FOSS environment to be much more compelling), but anyone who understands the current state of affairs for software licensing would be reasonably expected to acknowledge that in a discussion about moving away from it.

True to an extent. I find FOSS particularly convenient and in the long term, fully open almost alwys winds up as the pragmatic choice as well. For me as an individual, that is easy to evaluate.

For a large business or organisation, probably the easiest way to get an overall number is by the cost.

It is, of course difficult to do. How do you factor in the short-term cost of lost productivity as users retrain? How much does it cost to have the exchange server down (again--is it that bad or just impossible to find good admins???)? How much will it cost in lost productivity as one has to mess around with DOCX versus ODT in the short term? What about in the long term (if you have 40,000 desktops, you are large enough for people to play by your rules). What about the long term advantage of hiving found that bugs that you find (and perhaps fix) get merged in upstream?

Hard to put an excact figure on.

Of course since it is a government organisation, there are yet more benefits. Even if it costs the same, the money spent on licenses which would otherwise disappear will be more likely spent locally on people to make the syatem work benefiting the local economy.

Nobody expects...

[Anonymous Coward]

Nobody expects the Spanish Extremadura!

Re:Undercosting much?

[PeterBrett]

"And of course, it needs to be free. Because our budget for this plan is of zero euros."

Yep.

Can't see this blowing up in anyones face. (See: the ongoing ordeal and budget overruns of the Munich conversion)

Um, last time I checked (which was a couple of weeks ago) the Munich project was going extremely well.

So, 2012 is the year of the Linux desktop?

[Anonymous Coward]

Finally! Just in time for the end of the world, too.

A few clarifications

[lufo]

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

Re:A few clarifications

[lufo]

It was done some years ago: in 2002 they bought 70.000 PCs and put the first 50.000 one for every 2 high-school students (so my first information was wrong, it's not under 13 but 13 to 17 years old) and the remaining 20.000 for primary education (under 13 yo.)

Here is a blog entry (in Spanish) from 2009 in which one of the responsibles comments on the conversion of the original PCs into thin clients:
http://www.itais.net/2009/01/26/reutilizando-70000-ordenadores/

Re:Typical misleading summary

[lufo]

I don't know what the automated translation looks like, but I can tell you that

a) LinEx was not a "ridiculous incest", it made sense big time and also was more than just the distro, they put a free-software-based-PC every two under-13 school kids, they put the same PCs in every public library in the region ("Nuevos Centros del Conocimiento", New Knowledge Centers), they created elder-persons computer-literacy programs and more...

b) how can they "suck in public money" if they were the very public administration? They stopped giving away public money to (US) private companies, and created a public entrerprise to create a public-interest, publicly-available, free-as-in-beer-and-also-as-in-speech region-wide computer network with public access to the internet.

Re:Be nice if this actually happened

[JasterBobaMereel]

They have no MS licences, they currently run Linux (their own custom Distro) and are migrating to standard Debian

Perhaps it is a Ploy to get a better price from Apple/Oracle etc ..who they also don't use ...?