RU: Schools moving to open source hit by CD and DVD disk errors
Schools in Russia moving their PCs to open source, have received faulty installation CDs and DVDs, reports Alt Linux, on the IT service providers involved in the project.
The installation disks that were recently shipped to all schools in the district, contain both proprietary and open source software. The kit for example offers four GNU/Linux distributions, allowing the schools to select the distribution that best fits the hardware configuration.
However, according to a spokesperson for Alt Linux, one of the companies involved in distributing the disks, made a mistake when adding some information, making them unusable for installation.
"This is one the largest open source software migrations in the world, and this error is a nightmare", said the company's spokesperson. The current government project only covers distribution of the disks, so schools are at the moment left without much technical support. "We support over 2300 schools that started the pilot last year, but there has not yet been a call for tender to support all the other schools."
According to plan, all school PCs in in Russia will be moved to using GNU/Linux by next year. The decision follows successful pilot projects on all schools in the Tomsk and Perm regions and the Republic of Tatarstan.
It could take up to five years to complete the move to GNU/Linux, said Viktor Korneev, head of the 'Siberian Education Informatisation', an organisation responsible for IT in the schools in the Tomsk district, in a recent interview with the Russian news agency ITAR-TASS.
More information:
Vedomosti news item (in Russian)
ITAR-TASS news item (in Russian)
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