PT: "Nearly all school children getting familiar with open source'
Almost all school children in Portugal are becoming familiar with using open source, including the Linux operating system, says Paulo Trezentos, founder of Caixa Mágica Software.
By the end of this year, the company's eponymous Linux-based operating system will have been installed on 890,000 school PCs and school laptops, he says. "In a country with a population of 10 million, this means that Linux is reaching the majority of the young people."
The past two years, Portugal's government deployed 60,000 school notebooks running the open source operating system and open source applications. The government also distributed 450,000 Classmate PCs and 11,000 desktops PCs running both the Linux and a proprietary operating system.
This year, the government called for proposals to add another 250,000 Classmate PCs, also running both Caixa Mágica and a proprietary operating system.
Trezentos concludes: "That makes Caixa Mágica one of the most installed Linux distributions in the world."
Experts
The company this year published updates to its open source operating system. It uses the Oxygen theme of the KDE open source desktop environment.
The company also enlisted the help of usability experts from the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Lisbon, and checked the quality of the Portuguese translation of all applications with the help of linguists from the Instituto de Formação e Investigação da Língua Portuguesa.
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Not so familiar as supposed
All the information is correct but is misleading because nearly all teachers will prefer and incite students to work with proprietary software instead of the great Caixa Mágica. As there are no guidelines to the use of Open Source in Schools, each school/teacher does it's best.
From my point of view (as a portuguese teacher), this is a great programme but it lacks some central efforts to better promote the OpenSource point of view...
I wouldn't be surprised that more than 2/3 of the students with the famous "Magalhães" ClassmatePC wouldn't even heard about Linux, and as for the others I think the majoraty of them had never used it.