ES: Axarquía county administration moves all desktops to open source

"The civil servants at the town halls of Vélez-Málaga, Nerja and Colmenar have also shown their interest and we expect to soon also start replacing desktops in these bigger cities and towns", says Antonio García Pérez, who works at CSYD, a Spanish IT company specialising in open source involved in the migration project.

Once completed, more than three thousand desktop PCs in the county will have been moved to open source.

All PCs will be running the Guadalinex, the GNU/Linux distribution promoted by the government of the autonomous region of Andalusia and based on Ubuntu. By default all desktops will have Openoffice, web browser Firefox, email client Thunderbird. If needed, PCs will also be fitted with either Gimp or Scribus, applications for editing images and for desktop publishing.

"We basically will install any open source application that the user needs", says García Pérez. To help users to select open source alternatives to proprietary software, IT administrators have developed 'Inventory Libre' an application that scans a PC, determines its hardware capabilities and draws up a list of software that is currently installed and used. "We will then discuss with the users which programmes they use most often and which are most important to them. Wherever possible, we will then replace proprietary applications with open source alternatives."

Where proprietary applications can not be replaced, they will be made available on a central server, where they can be accessed from the user's open source desktop PC.

García Pérez says the IT-team is also beginning the first user training courses in the town halls where it is now migrating desktops. "The first course will explain the use of Guadalinex, Openoffice, Gimp and Scribus. We are planning advanced courses on some of these applications later on."

Introductory sessions are done in class-rooms but materials are also made available over the Internet, using the open source electronic learning management system Moodle. "Training is very important. Besides explaining to them these applications, we need the users to understand the importance of using open source and the reasons why we are changing their desktops."

According to García Pérez the county expects significant cost savings on licence fees to be one of the results of the migration, though he did not know specific amounts. "Public administrations moving to open source can expect other advantages, such as the freedom to use, change, copy, distribute software and the use of open standards. It will help make the governments IT more secure. We are building a better society based on information and knowledge. Using open source and open standards helps to bridge the gap between a public administration and its citizens."

The Axarquía county began preparations for the migration project in March 2008. The county IT administrators are collecting all the information on the project on a wiki site. García Pérez expects the site to be published within a month or so: "For the moment, this site is only in Spanish. But this week we decided to make it available in English as well."

The county has about 200.000 inhabitants and is located in the northeast of the province of Malaga. In total the county in the autonomous region of Andalucía employs about 1500 civil servants.

More information:

Proyecto Migracion Axarquia wiki (an introduction to the project in Spanish)