Authorities in two European cities last week announced
plans to move from proprietary operating systems, including Windows
and Unix, onto Linux.
The German city of Munich is installing Linux on 14,000 desktop and
notebook computers.
The city of Bergen in Norway is also going down the open source
route: it is planning to ditch its Unix and Windows applications
platform for Novell SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 8.
The roll-outs highlight the rise of Linux in public sector
organisations, which are attracted by its low cost.
The implementation in Bergen is expected to be used by 50,000 local
government staff in the city. Twenty Oracle database servers
running HP-UX, which power the city's core health and welfare
services applications, will be replaced by HP Integrity Itanium
64-bit servers running SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 8.
The second phase of the implementation will involve the migration
and consolidation of current Microsoft Windows application servers,
which currently run the city's educational network, on to SuSE
Linux Enterprise Server 8 on IBM eServer Bladecenters.