August 3rd, 2007 Benjamin Horst
Thanks to Tamil Nadu’s ongoing rollout of 40,000 desktop Linux boxes, Linux is “becoming visible on desktops” in the country, writes the Business Standard.
It’s already half complete, but it is not nearly the largest rollout in India:
“Novell along with the Electronics Corporation of Tamil Nadu (ELCOT) is installing Suse Linux in around 40,000 desktops in the entire state. Over 50 per cent of the estimated Rs 200 crore project has already been completed, according to C Umashankar, managing director, ELCOT.
“This is the second largest implementation of Linux on the desktop – the biggest one being that of around 60,000 desktops in LIC of India by Red Hat, which is estimated to have implemented over 200,000 desktop OS installations. Canara Bank too has around 10,000 Linux OS desktops.”
A chart in the above article lists 7 different Linux migrations totaling 140,000 PCs across India. I’ve covered a number of these before.
Posted in GNU/Linux, Open Source | Comments Off on FOSS “Becoming Visible” on Desktops in India
August 2nd, 2007 Benjamin Horst
It’s been a long time coming. For years, I’ve been looking on and off for an open source project management application. Now I’ve got something of a scoop, because of an email I received this morning from Marc O’Brien, CEO of Projity.
Projity will announce its new, cross-platform desktop project management application at LinuxWorld next week.
In the meantime, Marc wrote me to introduce the application: “OpenProj is free and open source software that is a complete replacement for Microsoft Project. OpenProj has equivalent functionality, opens native Microsoft Project files and is available on Linux, Unix, Mac or Windows. Microsoft Project resides on 7% of all Office desktops and is part of the Office family of solutions (retail is $1,000 or to be precise $999.99). However, Project is not included in any Office Suites so it is not pre-installed on any computers which means even Windows users need to purchase very expensive software for their project needs. OpenProj is free and also cross platform.”
Projity is looking to work with the OpenOffice.org community, as a project management tool is a natural complement to the open source office suite. Working together should find strong synergies between the two projects.
August 7 will see a full release and updated websites to support the project, but you can download it now from here. I’m currently testing it out and very much looking forward to using OpenProj.
Posted in Open Source, OpenOffice.org | 5 Comments »
August 1st, 2007 Benjamin Horst
Mozilla Links publishes French National Assembly receives first open source laptops:
“Open source software-loaded laptops are now being delivered to members of the French National Assembly. The French government found that software license costs surpassed training and deployment investments so the decision to move to open source was taken and Linagora, a French company specialized in open source software projects, was hired for the transition. The laptops come loaded with a customized version of Ubuntu 7.04 and productivity applications that include Firefox 2.0, OpenOffice.org 2.1, Thunderbird 2.0, Lightning, VLC Media Player and Adobe Reader.”
I’ve mentioned the plans for this migration in French Parliament Moving Toward Ubuntu and French MPs Dump Windows for Linux. It’s great to see it come to fruition.
Posted in Free Culture, GNU/Linux, Open Source, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on French National Assembly Receives First Open Source Laptops
