French police plan Windows-free jails, offices
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The French gendarmerie has blown a big framboise at Microsoft by ditching Windows XP in favour of Ubuntu.
The paramilitary police force is to switch 70,000 desktops over to the Linux OS, two years after switching its browsers to Firefox, and three years after dumping MS Office for OpenOffice.
Deputy director of the force’s IT department Colonel Nicholas Geraud said the change will be gradual, according to the AFP. 5,000 to 8,000 machines are to make the switch this year, with the rest swapping over the next four years.
Geraud cited familiar reasons for the switch: diversifying suppliers, reducing costs and gaining control of the software. He claimed the switch to open source products was saving the department around €7m a year.
The 100,000 strong force’s leap to open source software is thought to be one of the biggest yet by a public organisation. Apparently, the French national assembly made the switch to Ubuntu last year.
In the UK, education IT agency Becta has advised schools to give Vista and Office a wide berth and to examine open source alternatives.
For its part, Microsoft has fought hard to stop public sector customers switching to open source, and has had a few successes in changing some public sector minds.
Still, it has had a hard time persuading anyone to switch across to its flagship desktop OS, Vista. At the same time, Microsoft intends to pull most versions of XP off the market later this year, after already being forced to extend the life cycle of the OS. ®
COMMENTS
Also started change
Sorry just no more money for the ever braking M$ pc. Eeepc have people exited and we change to Suse, stress down things just work no more pain. bye bye
Re: Re: Re: Echo chamber (and a discourse on irony)
"As a graphic designer I think I can say with some authority it looks like crap. KDE 4 - the latest and greatest - looks like crap."
Then build your own fripping desktop theme and use it. It's easy. Been there. Done that. All your points can be addressed simply by either installing a different icon set and theme or building your own. Which is as simple as making a few PNG graphics and twiddling the desktop settings a little until everything is to your liking.
Good luck on the same issue with Windows (the UI of which, btw, has been looking like crap since v. 1.0 and has taken a turn for the worse with XP and Vista, IMHO).
Hat, tuxedo, cab...
The french National Assembly use Kubuntu
BTW the French National Assembly (Assemblée Nationale) have already dump Windows XP for Kubuntu (KDE over Ubuntu) since a year now.
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