Munich's migration to GNU/Linux is steadily progressing. This February the Linux based E-learning programme of the city won the E-Learning award eureleA.
The prize was awarded by the Länder-Government of Baden-Württemberg. The contest awards European innovative educational projects that use electronic learning and teaching methods.
Munich is one of the first European cities to undertake a massive migration to Open Source software. The German city started looking for alternatives to proprietary software in 2001. A two-year study led to a detailed plan for the migration to Open Source.
About 500 PCs in the German city now run GNU/Linux, of a total of 14,500. Many more will follow in the next two years. For the time being, several hundreds of PCs still running the Windows operating system are being equipped with Open Source office application suite OpenOffice. Munich expects to install OpenOffice on five thousand PCs running Windows by the end of this year.
The Bavarian capital wants to supply 80 percent of all office PCs with Open Source Software before the end of 2009. The Windows operating system will be kept only when administrative applications leave no other option.
The LiMux project started with the objective to replace all Microsoft Windows operating software of the municipal computers with Open Source software, using GNU/Linux based PCs. LiMux is based on the free Linux distribution Debian/GNU/Linux 3.1 and the most recent versions of KDE, an Open Source graphical user interface and OpenOffice, the Open Source office application suite.
Step by step
The main reasons for the migration were to make Munich a less dependant on software suppliers and to foster the economic competition in the software market. The overall budget of the project is about 35 million euro.
The official launch and roll-out of the LiMux based client started in September 2006. "We are doing this project step by step. It will not be a big bang", said Florian Schießl, the deputy technical project leader and responsible for the public relations of LiMux. "To become more experienced, we are taking our time for the role out."
© European Communities 2007
Reproduction is authorised provided the source is acknowledged.
The views expressed are not an official position of the European Commission.
Disclaimer
Further information:
- Article Links:www.muenchen.de/limux