By: Edwin Villamizar *

Bogota is in the midst of a migration to Linux and free software. Mayor Gustavo Petro is leveraging the existing legal framework ( Agreement 279 of 2007 ), to advance the process of changing operating systems 992 personal computers.

The initiative has been successful in other cities such as Munich in Germany and saved about 11 million euros , or in countries like Iceland plans to migrate its infrastructure to the world of Penguin, is being launched in Bogotá.

According to public documents of the project , the 992 computers are part of the technological renewal that are subject to all public entities. A savings of almost 1000 licenses. The schedule includes customers transition to new mail, messenger clients and mail server. Moreover, the total cost of ownership reflects that invest in training future generating resource savings.

Ubuntu, the chosen

According Offray Luna, coordinator of the Free Software Office of Planning and Information Systems, will change to Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, with some modifications, to ease the transition from Windows users. “In the first instance to Ubuntu . While we distance ourselves from some of its practices, was the distribution that we provided a larger responsiveness according to the contractual terms already decided.

Moon added that made two customizations.

The desktop environment, which is a variation of Gnome 3 according to instruments applied watching the ease of use for those coming from a Windows environment compared to other options such as Cinnamon, KDE and Mate. Environments also distanced extremely tied to Ubuntu, to facilitate migration to other platforms in the future.

which is a variation of Gnome 3 according to instruments applied watching the ease of use for those coming from a Windows environment compared to other options such as Cinnamon, KDE and Mate. Environments also distanced extremely tied to Ubuntu, to facilitate migration to other platforms in the future. The mission and its support applications in the browser, which involved assessing and developing different user profiles in the browser with the tuning required.

Adieu Microsoft Office, wave LibreOffice

Perhaps the strongest change for officials and employees will welcome LibreOffice, productive package that will replace Microsoft Office. In other words Word, Excel and PowerPoint, will now be LibreOffice Writer, LibreOffice LibreOffice Calc and Impress. From now on the cards, balance sheets, presentations and general office all actions will also work with free software. However, productivity is proportional to acceptance and a good training process.

The advantages of the change

Worth remembering that beyond the savings in licensing, the real advantage and satisfaction of using free software in your philosophy. The free software community is the added benefit of using programs developed in society, and which by law can be studied, copied, modified and distributed without any cost. This means that the user at this time of Linux, for example , is receiving the support of hundreds of thousands of people who participated with their knowledge, not only of a handful of engineers payments for a single company.

Do they consider relevant and necessary change? Who of you use GNU / Linux and free software?

______

* Student of electrical engineering last semester Industrial University of Santander UIS. Assigned to group CIDIC IC design. Passionate about free software and its dissemination.

Source: enter.co