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EU Debian Government Open Source Linux

Spanish Extremadura Moving 40,000 Desktops To Linux 137

Posted by Soulskill 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)."
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Spanish Extremadura Moving 40,000 Desktops To Linux More

Spanish Extremadura Moving 40,000 Desktops To Linux

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  • Europe is broke , Linux to the recue (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 24, 2012 @03:39AM (#38802479)

    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 (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Mannfred ( 2543170 ) <mannfred@gmail.com> on Tuesday January 24, 2012 @04:01AM (#38802547)
      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 (Score:5, Funny)

        by dintech ( 998802 ) on Tuesday January 24, 2012 @06:44AM (#38803293)

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

        • Better late than never. The invasion of England would have gone very differently had the Spanish Armada not been running Windows.

        • I actually thought they already had. They've had their own distro for years now.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by mcgrew ( 92797 ) *

          Microsoft: Trouble at mill.
          Apple: Oh no - what kind of trouble?
          Microsoft: One on't cross beams gone owt askew on treadle.
          Apple: Pardon?
          Microsoft: One on't cross beams gone owt askew on treadle.
          Apple: I don't understand what you're saying.
          Microsoft: [slightly irritatedly and with exaggeratedly clear accent] One of the cross beams has gone out askew on the treadle.
          Apple: Well what on earth does that mean?
          Microsoft: *I* don't know - Mr Wentworth just told me to come in here and say that there was trouble at th

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Hatta ( 162192 )

          Sure we did. Hell, Extremadura Linux is the only one Stallman will use, IIRC.

      • But is is really that much cheaper?
        Ok for licence costs say 250euro per windows license. we save 10 Million euro, sound good.
        Now these 40,000 people will need at least 8 hours of training say they average 15 eruo an hour. There is a 4.8 Million dollar expense (5.2 million euro left, well we are still saving money a lot of money).
        10% of these peoples 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 olde

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by gmack ( 197796 )

          If the old OS was XP they would be near a forced upgrade anyways to avoid being caught insecure after XP EOLs in 2014. XP to Windows 7 would require a complete hardware refresh. Windows 7 or Linux, no smart admin will want to wait until the last minute (next year) to deal with whatever transition they are planning.

          Also: 5 minutes of browsing on dell.es netted me a mid range machine (core i3, 4g ram, 500g hd) with a 23 inch monitor for 610 Euro and of course that price goes down when start talking bulk pur

        • Although cost is a concern, the true reason why ALL governments, no exception, must move to open systems is because it is simply unacceptable that a public service be ever subject to vendor lock-in.

        • Re:Europe is broke , Linux to the recue (Score:5, Interesting)

          by mcgrew ( 92797 ) * on Tuesday January 24, 2012 @11:57AM (#38807001) Homepage Journal

          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.

          • Clarification for all the uptight idiots.
            Where I used a numeric estimates to prove a point that their are other factors involved beyond just the cost of the license.

            8 Hours of training Yes...
            <i>"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 t

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by mcgrew ( 92797 ) *

              Your home PC the person will play with it, for work they need to get to work right away.

              If the thing's set up properly, they can get to work right away. Most shops have the same computers on every desk, it's just a matter of the wage of the person doing the installing. But you're going to have the same cost when you upgrade your hardware, and with open source you're not going to be forced to upgrade your hardware. Everyone using XP will HAVE to upgrade in two years, and the upgrade will likely need new hard

              • I haven't really much exposure to Linux on the desktop but as an architect responsible for delivering a Windows 7 desktop to 150,000+ desktops, training is most certainly an issue, from end users, on site support teams all the way through to the backend admins. I assume there would be a step change in support tools and processes. There certainly is a big change going from Windows XP or even Vista to Win 7. In my opinion it would be naive to think that a more to a completely different OS doesn't mean a co

                • Re: (Score:2)

                  by mcgrew ( 92797 ) *

                  I haven't really much exposure to Linux on the desktop but... There certainly is a big change going from Windows XP or even Vista to Win 7. In my opinion it would be naive to think that a more to a completely different OS doesn't mean a complete re-training exercise from top to bottom.

                  I'm not sure about the enterprise grade admin tools, but as far as users are concerned, believe it or not a move from XP (can't say about Vista, I never used it) to KDE is less of a change than from XP to Win 7; I'm using all

        • Thank you, troll. Those numbers are COMPLETELY bogus and pulled out of thin air. 1) You don't know 8hrs... I've seen much less (like a 30 minute briefing and a sheet of "use this program for this task" chart. 2) You just randomly threw in upgrades to pad your numbers. 3) You assume rebuilding applications (and the number of applications) to, again, simply pad your numbers. Please get at least a few facts before trolling.

    • Re:Europe is broke , Linux to the recue (Score:5, Informative)

      by lucidlyTwisted ( 2371896 ) on Tuesday January 24, 2012 @05:02AM (#38802779)

      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.

      • "custom Linux distro" not "customer Linux distro".

        • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

          by Anonymous Coward
          My Linux distro is the customest

      • Re:Europe is broke , Linux to the recue (Score:5, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 24, 2012 @06:59AM (#38803369)

        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.

        • Yeah, I was trying to look up that distro under distrowatch, but couldn't find it. Thought it was a localized edition of Linux. At least w/ Debian, they have a rich ecosystem in place. At least, w/ that there won't be a painful migration around.

          Makes sense to go to Debian from all those old versions of Windows. Although I wonder - does Debian Linux support a wider variety of hardware than Debian kFreeBSD? That way, one can get the advantages of FreeBSD along w/ the offerings of Debian.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by keeboo ( 724305 )
        Ah, that makes sense now, because I've read about the migration to Linux in Extremadura since few years ago [slashdot.org] and related news even earlier [slashdot.org].
        News on that migration were quite widespread. I'm not spanish nor living there, and still it rings a bell.

      • 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.

        Pitty that a comment that is wrong is scored "5, Informative"

        They're moving computers with privative software on them, not the thousans of machines that already run Linex (or Debian or whatever you want to call it)

        Regards

    • Europe is broke

      This is a mistake to make an association between an economic failure (Spain) and the Linux choice.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      It's only the service nations which are going broke. Those with quasi-socialist governments which own or heavily sponsor manufacturing are doing very well - from Germany to China. Those which have steered to the right, consistently eschewing investment in manufacturing and scaling back the welfare state (which, from an economic PoV, keeps people in sufficient health and education that they can remain productive as long as possible) to create a non-productive underclass, such as Spain and Italy, are pretty m

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by tao ( 10867 )
        How then can you explain Sweden, whose finances have become far more robust (and is doing a fair bit better than the rest of the EU countries) after the liberal/right-wing government took over after years and years of socialist rule?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by mcgrew ( 92797 ) *

        the worst of which are the trade arranagements which make it artificially cheaper to manufacture in countries half way across the world with barely any human rights and/or protections.
        What makes it cheaper IS the lack of rights and protections. It's perfectly OK for a Chinese company to make the air so dirty that you can't breathe, and the water so dirty that rivers catch fire like it used to be in the US. Plus, it's way cheaper to live. I, as a worker, cannot compete with someone who can ride a bus 300 mil

    • It has taken a long time coming. That autonomous region had their own distro (LinEx [http://www.linex.org/joomlaex/]) since 2002 (shut down december 29 2011... moved on to a national initiative, CENATIC [http://www.cenatic.es/]). Apparently they still had lots of computers to migrate.

  • Extremadura has done a lot for linux (Score:5, Informative)

    by emj ( 15659 ) on Tuesday January 24, 2012 @03:44AM (#38802489) Journal

    They have hosted codesprints and Debconf 2009 [debconf.org]. 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.

    • I wondered about that too but I guess as the statement was made by the CIO that he's talking about software licence budget rather than overall budget (including staff, equipment etc.)

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Bengie ( 1121981 )

        "Because our budget for this plan is of zero euros"

        Not arguing against you, but he said "plan". I guess his plan doesn't include "staff, equipment etc". My guess is he said what he said to sound sensational. Unless he truly has volunteers doing all the work.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by mcgrew ( 92797 ) *

          Probably not volunteers, but he probably already has an IT staff that is well versed in UNIX. You need no extra staff or equipment to convert to Linux. Hell, Ernie Ball [cnet.com] had very little trouble converting to Linux after Microsoft pissed its CEO and founder's son off.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by bgat ( 123664 )

      Yes, I find that perspective troubling too. Seems like at least PART of the savings coming from reduced licensing costs for non-FOSS software could be used to fund the transition away from same.

      The comment suggests to me a lack of clarity in the motivation for the transition. 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

      • Re:Extremadura has done a lot for linux (Score:5, Interesting)

        by serviscope_minor ( 664417 ) on Tuesday January 24, 2012 @04:17AM (#38802619) Journal

        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.

        • Not long ago I finished a project in a EU member state govt agency. That DOCX is already a major PITA for the IT support. And the way they work, mostly they don't need any Windows exclusive features.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by rev0lt ( 1950662 )
          If you have a non-redundant mail infrastructure (exchange or unix-based), then mail is not that important for you. And while there are networks where the migration to OSS desktops (not necessarily linux-based) can be done without much hassle, in many organizations it is next to impossible without redefining the entire IT structure. The Microsoft stack has its problems (as every other solution), but one of the big advantages is centralized management. Need to give access to a given terminal to a guy, bu

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by mcgrew ( 92797 ) *

            The Microsoft stack has its problems (as every other solution), but one of the big advantages is centralized management. Need to give access to a given terminal to a guy, but only 9-5 this week, and the guy can only run X apps and cannot save to the computer or an external device? No problem. Someone from accounting is working with the auditor team, and needs to be able to log in to their wokstations, but keeping the same privileges as in accounting? No problem. Don't want people in customer support changin

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by rev0lt ( 1950662 )
              Novell's eDirectory is probably the best directory service in the market today. But it's not opensource, and it can be run on Windows, as well as other proprietary unixes, such as Solaris and AIX. I may be wrong (I haven't used Novell for a long time), but I seriously doubt that a Novell solution is cheaper than a Windows one. Regarding opensource solutions, I haven't seen a product that comes vaguely close. If someone actually knows of such product, I'd love to hear about it.
          • It's the directory stack where MS wins currently. While Novell's eDirectory is fine, in a mixed environment, I may as well just pay for Microsoft's Active Directory and get things that pretty much "just work".

            I keep hoping that Red Hat will wake up, smell the coffee, and realize that an easy to administer open-source directory service needs to happen.

            (Admittedly, I have not had time to look at RHEL6.)

    • But I do not like the part where he says "Our budget for this is zero euros", that will not go well.

      Maybe what he meant was that they got no explicit budget that says migration to Linux. There might be several options for "funding" though - College/Uni students making code "contributions" for credits(or even part of mandatory coursework), budget for upgrading Windows machines and cuts in other services. That might be just plain accountingspeak that means that on balance the budget for Linux migration is actually 0. Without an inquiry, there is no way of verifying.

  • Nobody expects... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 24, 2012 @03:51AM (#38802515)

    Nobody expects the Spanish Extremadura!

  • "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)

    • Re:Undercosting much? (Score:5, Informative)

      by PeterBrett ( 780946 ) on Tuesday January 24, 2012 @04:01AM (#38802545) Homepage

      "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.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Gwala ( 309968 )

        Yeah now - but look at the original time and budget estimates.

      • Re:Undercosting much? (Score:4, Informative)

        by kamapuaa ( 555446 ) on Tuesday January 24, 2012 @04:58AM (#38802767) Homepage

        It's been nine years and more money than budgeted and they've converted 65% of the computers. The idea of converting to Linux is still so strange and uncommon that an autonomous region of Spain considering the same move nine years later is Slashdot-worthy news. It sounds to me like a huge failure.

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by Anonymous Coward

          oh don't be such a party pooper.

          • Re:Undercosting much? (Score:4, Insightful)

            by BlackCreek ( 1004083 ) on Tuesday January 24, 2012 @05:32AM (#38802943)

            oh don't be such a party pooper.

            The GP has a point. The Linux desktop went nowhere. 40K desktops in Spain, 14K in Munich and 90K by the French police are by themselves respectable numbers. But when you take the perspective that:

            • -- these are the 3 biggest deployments of (desktop) Linux within the whole European Union public services,
            • -- AFAIK the only 3 very large ones,
            • -- in 2012

              one needs to reckon that, yes, we may all use Linux at home and some even at work (I do) but the Linux desktop never made it anywhere close mass market presence.

            If I want to buy a high-quality laptop withOUT paying for an OS license that I am not going to use, the situation is as dire today as it was 10 years ago.

            • There are news that Hungarian public administration is moving away from Windows desktops as well. (Also because of licensing costs; there's a general asterity going on.)

            • Re:Undercosting much? (Score:4, Informative)

              by gerddie ( 173963 ) on Tuesday January 24, 2012 @08:08AM (#38803773)
              Not in Europe, but The Worlds Largest Linux Desktop Deployment: 500,000 Seats and Counting [linuxfoundation.org] in Brazil should count for something.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by Lumpy ( 12016 )

              Really?

              http://www.system76.com/ [system76.com]

              http://www.ohava.com/ [ohava.com]

              https://www.thinkpenguin.com/ [thinkpenguin.com]

              http://www.blackstonesystems.net/ [blackstonesystems.net]

              Yup it's dire... Nobody at all is selling desktops or laptops with linux preinstalled.

              Did you even look?

              • Really.

                System76 is US based. Ditto for Ohava.com. Ditto for ThinkPenguin. I could not look at BlackStoneSystems. I am on a RHEL machine, and their website requires a newer flash than the one I have. Regarding living in Europe and ordering a laptop from the US:

                1. I don't know about you, but I would prefer buying my laptops from a shop I could return something if necessary.

                2. I also would rather NOT pay import taxes on my laptop...

                (Ok, I didn't flat out state that I live in Europe, but then, why do you just assume

            • Re: (Score:3)

              by chrb ( 1083577 )

              The Linux desktop went nowhere. 40K desktops in Spain, 14K in Munich and 90K by the French police are by themselves respectable numbers.

              By that logic, the Apple desktop also "went nowhere", since there were no mass migrations of government departments to Apple computers. Or maybe there is another explanation? Maybe governments are very conservative in their IT procurement, and by default choose Microsoft, often without even bothering to consider other options? For obvious reasons, it is difficult to estimate the exact number of Linux desktop users, but according to Microsoft, Linux has a greater desktop share than the Mac. Here's are some i

              • The Linux desktop went nowhere. 40K desktops in Spain, 14K in Munich and 90K by the French police are by themselves respectable numbers.

                By that logic, the Apple desktop also "went nowhere", since there were no mass migrations of government departments to Apple computers. Or maybe there is another explanation? Maybe governments are very conservative in their IT procurement, and by default choose Microsoft, often without even bothering to consider other options? For obvious reasons, it is difficult to estimate the exact number of Linux desktop users, but according to Microsoft, Linux has a greater desktop share than the Mac. Here's are some interesting comments from a report from 2010: Debunking the 1% Myth [oreilly.com]

                Apple tries to occupy a very different market. Linux has been pushed as the 'ideal' public service desktop for years and years and years.

                FWIW I very, very much doubt Apple has less of a desktop/laptop presence than Linux. This is probably MS trying to downplay the importance of Apple in their (MS) home market.

                Judging from all my acquaintances, I can tell you that: (about 10 years ago) when I started my PhD many of my colleagues used Linux at home. With the years, each and every one of them migrated to Apple

                • Re: (Score:2)

                  by chrb ( 1083577 )

                  Apple tries to occupy a very different market.

                  Apple would love to occupy the corporate and public sector desktop market. It would mean vast amounts of guaranteed income every year.

                  Linux has been pushed as the 'ideal' public service desktop for years and years and years.

                  Really? I see the opposite - most Linux vendors have pretty much ignored the desktop and focused on niche areas like embedded systems, servers, HPC, etc. IBM said chasing Windows on the desktop was a deadend [channelregister.co.uk], and Red Hat famously pulled away from focusing on the desktop years ago. Ubuntu seems to have been the only one that has maintained a desktop focus, and they have an es

                  • Apple would love to occupy the corporate and public sector desktop market.

                    There is a difference between would like to occupy/own a market, and be actively working to grab that market. Apple is not fighting for the corporate market. Not saying that they are not go for it at some point, they are not into it now.

                    Anecdotal evidence and a biased sample - your colleagues are probably in the top 1% of global income, and the kind of people who don't mind spending large amounts of cash on their personal computers.

                    On the non-biased side: it remains impossible to buy a computer running a normal Linux desktop in a 'normal/mainstream' computer shop. Most gadgets I own, only have software support for using it with Windows or Macs, say, the image processing software that came with my photo

                  • Re: (Score:2)

                    by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

                    Apple would love to occupy the corporate and public sector desktop market. It would mean vast amounts of guaranteed income every year.

                    But at what cost? Corporate purchases, and by extension government ones, tend to be ones that generate lots of revenue, but have tiny margins as people drive to lower the bottom line cost. Even the server market, considered to be a high-margin part of corporate IT is still subjected to shrinking margins.

                    Apple simply isn't interested in that market because the purchasers can b

            • The Linux desktop went nowhere.

              Good thing I don't make my choice of OS based on a worldwide popularity contest then.

        • "huge failure" - You keep using that word, but I do not think it means what you think it means.

          Every single installed copy of windows could break tomorrow, and never ever be repaired...

          ... and I could still get my Email, search Google, push Git changes to my website, get paid online, make fun of people using Facebook, browse damn near all of the Internet, including my bank's site, so I can pay my bills online.

          Yeah, so all the important shit runs Linux... o_O "huge failure" Think about how much your wo

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by chrb ( 1083577 )

          It's been nine years and more money than budgeted and they've converted 65% of the computers.

          On the bright side: they have migrated 100% of systems to Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice, and ODF.

          more money than budgeted

          Yes, but this would almost certainly have also been the case if they were migrating all their systems to a more recent release of Windows. They were running enterprise wide NT4. The comparison point should not be against the pre-existing TCO, but against the alternative cost of migrating to a more recent Windows. "We do not have a goal to compare total cost of ownership. Microsoft stopped supporting NT 4.0, s

        • But it is Linux. So it has to be a success.
          Because the Operating System is by far the cause or solution to all of lifes problems.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by c0p0n ( 770852 )

        Also, the region (I was born there) has plenty of experience on rolling out Linux on institutions through LinEx [wikipedia.org] first (schools), then Debian itself (on the health system's IT infrastructure) later on. They were far from smooth at the time as mistakes were made, particularly when it came to re-educate and retrain staff. The region's government staff desktops is the last, and biggest, migration to make.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by Aloriel ( 934343 )
      Don't be an idiot, Extremadura developed and deployed Linex, massively deployed in every single public (high)school in Extremadura; they know how to do it and what it costs.

  • Be nice if this actually happened (Score:3, Interesting)

    by jimicus ( 737525 ) on Tuesday January 24, 2012 @04:04AM (#38802565)

    OK, so I understand from other posts that Extremadura has historically done a good job of supporting Linux. Whatever. I still can't shake the feeling - particularly given past experience with other big migration projects - that this is a ploy to get a better price from Microsoft.

  • Extremadura is one of the poorer regions of Spain and with the general funding squeeze trying to get the public deficit under control, I reckon they have a lot to gain from this.

  • So, 2012 is the year of the Linux desktop? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 24, 2012 @04:09AM (#38802591)
    Finally! Just in time for the end of the world, too.
  • I wonder if, in the future, having to buy hardware that is "designed for Linux", and is therefore in a market aside from the one of mainstream desktop PCs, could reduce the economic advantage of such operations.

  • A few clarifications (Score:5, Informative)

    by lufo ( 949075 ) on Tuesday January 24, 2012 @04:54AM (#38802761)

    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

  • LinEX is a debian based disto, so switching over to regular Debian is fairly simple and requires less maintenance.

  • Extremadura is one cool sounding name for a province! I haven't been this impressed since I came across the prison planet of Crematoria [wikipedia.org].

    P.S. Hear, hear for more Debian users!

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Sique ( 173459 )

      It is named thus, because it is in fact extremely dry. If it was in Asia or in Africa, we would classify the Extremadura as a desert.

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