The CIO of Spanish autonomous region Extremadura says it is planning to move the administration's 40,000 desktop systems to a Debian distribution. According to a report on the European Commission's "Joinup", CIO Teodomiro Cayetano López says that the project is "really advanced" and deployment will begin in the spring and be completed around the end of the year.

Extremadura recently abandoned LinEx, its own custom Debian-based distribution used on over 70,000 school and university computers and 15,000 healthcare workplaces. Cayetano López says the new deployment will be based on the Debian distribution used by the public health services that "has been in use for five years", adding that it gives a good starting point "to adapt Debian to the needs of a standard user", and comply with ISO/IEC 27001 security standards. It will take three months to prepare the Debian distribution and around a year to deploy it, first in the government headquarters and then throughout the region.

"And of course, it needs to be free. Because our budget for this plan is of zero euros", said Cayetano López after noting that a desktop needs to be secure, easy to use and manage, and without viruses and other security problems. The project would be the second largest public administration desktop roll out after the French Gendarmerie's 90,000 desktop deployment. The well-known Munich LiMux project has only migrated 9,000 systems of a planned twelve to fifteen thousand systems since it began in 2003.

(djwm)