After switching to OpenOffice in 2005 and introducing MozillaFirefox and Thunderbird on their machines in 2006, the French paramilitary police (’Gendarmery’) will make the switch to 100% Free Software based desktops in the coming years. The migration should be completed in 2014.
All workstations will be converted to Ubuntu desktops, starting this year with 5000-8000 seats, growing to 12000-15000 over the next four years. By 2014, all 70000 (!!!) desktops should be running free software.
There are three major reasons for the full switch:
Remove dependency on one single supplier
Gain full control over the whole operating system stack
Reduce costs
Nowadays licensing costs sum up to 7000000€ (that’s seven million euros) every year.
I guess this must be one of the largest Linux desktops deployments ever?
I’ve been able to download the KDE4 LiveCD by now, so I wanted to give it a test ride and write a basic KDE 4 review. These are my findings. I first and foremost want to stress I do not ever want to attack, offend or whatever anyone in this post (as reactions of vocal users on posts like these can be fierce sometimes ;-)). These are my findings, both positive and negative.
One reason to read this until the end (in case you wouldn’t ;-)):
At first bootup the OpenSuSE bootsplash theme attracts your attention. I really like it, very smooth.
After a successful bootup (using VirtualBox virtualization) the KDE desktop starts. This takes a while, but this can be blamed on the use of a LiveCD, and a virtual machine. The splash screen is very clean, the use of black and rounded corners reminds me of Apple OS X a little, don’t ask me why. The icon animation is nice, although I think the transparency shouldn’t go all the way to completely transparent (at least, that’s what it looks like), an maybe it should change somewhat slower. Next to this, the last icon in row (the KDE icon) is much bigger than the others, which doens’t look nice. Anyway, minor details.
Once booted, the user is presented with his desktop and a ‘Useful Tips’ dialog:
KDE4 was released today. Most likely not a big surprise for most readers, but hey Congratulations to the KDE team!
I’d love to give KDE 4 a test-run asap, been trying to download the LiveCD ISO to boot it in my VirtualBox virtual machine, but the torrent is extremely slow here. Maybe my ISP also implemented BitTorrent bandwidth capping as iirc some others did in Belgium, which is completely unfair as this is, obviously, 100% legal content. Some of the screenshots I saw both during development phases and today do look pretty cool, especially taking into account I’m not a big fan of the KDE3.x look. I’m still a little afraid the bottom panel is very high (just like the KDE3.x one), which removes quite a lot of my precious display size… A 14.1 widescreen laptop isn’t thát big, using GNOME I only loose 2×21 pixels.
I remember some really long and heated threads on GNOME 3 (Project Topaz, which I still consider to be a great name) some months ago, maybe those should be revamped too, to keep the vibe alive
Last couple of years have been very interesting Free Desktop-wise: we got more integration of system components, very flashy UI stuff, great new iconsets and themes, more stabilization of desktop components, several great and innovative new applications,… PDE (Perfect Desktop Environment) doesn’t exist yet (most likely it never will… does such a thing exist, after all?) but current projects are progressing very nicely, each with their proper strengths, targeted user base and features, which can only be applauded and stimulated. Keep on rocking, all of you, so the years ahead of us will be even more surprising, creative, constructive and fun!
Someone just sent a mail to the xorg and compiz mailing lists, pointing to this YouTube video regarding a new way of (ab)using the Nintendo Wii to control a virtual environment. If you didn’t see it yet, check it out, it’s rather impressive:
I don’t know whether this could actually be useful in a pure desktop environment, but for games (although I’m no gamer myself) I could imaging this offers a whole new spatial experience. Up to Nintendo or third-party vendors to design and commercialize the necessary gadgets or remotes.
Too bad there’s not enough empty space around our TV at home, otherwise I think I’d buy a Wii, love the tennis game
Yesterday I came across my (most likely, as far as I can remember) very first bug report ever, here, filed on the 16th of november 2002. A bug in Mandrake 8.2 (kernel 2.4.18, XFree86 4.2.0, KDE 3.0RC2) because of which I was unable to use my mouse in X. The machine was an Acer Pentium1 166MHz with 40MB of RAM inside and an S3Virge video adapter.
This was not my first Linux experience: my first installation ever, on the same machine, was using a SuSe sample CD my dad got at Cebit2000. This was an evaluation copy of SuSe 6.4, providing kernel 2.2.14, XFree86 3.3.6 and KDE 1.1.2 (well, I can’t remember, that’s what the web tells me now).
Compared to those days (although not that long ago) installing and (especially) using a Linux desktop nowadays could be called somewhat easier
So, have you got any memories of your very first Linux install or a reference to your earliest bug report?
Congratulations to the 
