14 DAY TRIAL // Teodomiro Cayetano López, Extremadura's CIO (Chief Information Officer), confirmed on January 23rd that the administration of Spain’s autonomous region will move all their desktop PCs to Debian Linux.
"The project is really advanced and we hope to start the deployment the next spring, finishing it in December." said Teodomiro Cayetano López in the press release, referring to the Debian distribution that will be installed on all 40,000 computers.
The Extremadura administration's computers will receive the same Debian Linux OS used by the region's public health services and schools for about five years now, LinEx.
"That version gives us a good starting point to adapt Debian to the needs of a standard user and offer a light and secure desktop, compliant with the requirements of ISO and IEC 27001 IT security standards."
The installation of the Debian-based distro on all 40,000 computers will take about three months, during which it will also be prepared to be deployed on all the offices of the regional government, which will be completed in about one year.
"We aim to deploy the new desktop first in the headquarters off the Government, in Mérida, in a period of six months." says Cayetano López. After Mérida, the offices in Cáceres and Badajoz will be next to get the LinEx open-source operating system, followed shortly by the remaining small offices in Extremadura.
According to Teodomiro Cayetano López, migrating to an open source alternative is very important for the unification of all desktops of the civil servants.
Debian Linux offers a secure, easy-to-use, virus-free and totally free alternative to the Microsoft's Windows operating systems. "And of course, it needs to be free. Because our budget for this plan is of zero euros."
This is now classified as the second largest open source desktop migration project in Europe, between French Gendarmerie's 90,000 desktops and the 14,000 desktops of German's Munich city.