30 Jan 2008
Desktop, Linux
After switching to OpenOffice in 2005 and introducing Mozilla Firefox 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?
Source: AFP
Tags: Desktop, Linux
13 Jan 2008
Desktop, Linux, Technology
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:
Continue reading »
Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6
Tags: Desktop, free desktop, kde, kde4, Linux, productivity, review, virtualbox
28 Dec 2007
Linux
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?
Tags: Desktop, Linux
