Linux
News
Europeans Buying
Linux Desktops
The much discussed
contract by the City of Munich to migrate from Microsoft Windows to
Linux and OpenOffice seems to have passed its final hurdles and be
on the way to implementation, with a 50 to 29 vote of its city
fathers. The migration
is expected to start this week, but will not be completed until 2005
or 2006. It has been widely rumored that Microsoft
offered a price low enough that staying with and upgrading Windows
and Office would have been cheaper than the Open Source migration,
but political issues were part of the decision.
This IBM/SuSE
implementation doesn’t look like it will be alone. Bergen,
Norway looks like it will be next, moving 100 schools and 32,000
additional users
(a total of 50,000) from HP-UX/Windows
to IBM blades and SuSE running on HP Itanium servers.
Word from Paris is
that the city is also considering going with Open Source rather than
spending $195 million in a hardware and software upgrade.
Microsoft is said to be very competitive and offering discounts.
Paris is using the same European consulting firm employed by Munich
which may have some influence on the outcome.
Xandros Offers OEM
Edition
Xandros is now
offering an OEM edition of its Xandros Desktop Operating System to
allow hardware manufacturers to customize systems with wallpaper,
icons, browser home page, bookmarks, and other parts of the customer
experience.
This could include
files and fonts for bilingual computing, offering alternative
browsers, and customizing the look-and-feel of a desktop for a
particular customer. This fits well with the fact that white
box vendors are seeing an upsurge in demand for Linux Desktop PC’s
and they are looking for ways to make their products look unique.
Xandros offers
Linux users the ability to live in the Linux world while maintaining
access to some useful Windows features,
such as server accessed network connections with authentication via
Windows Domain Controllers and Active Directory Servers.
Customized
OEM builds are also available.
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