Hacker News Reader

Comment by Oculus | Hacker News Reader

Aside from the city of Munich, are their any other governments that are using Linux as their main operating system?

The Spanish region of Extremadura:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GnuLinEx http://gobex.es/salaprensa/view/press/press/detalle.php?id=8...

(I think other Spanish regions have talked about wanting to use more open source software, but that might be LibreOffice rather than MS Office, rather than a full switch away from Windows.)

Here's another: Lausanne, in Switzerland (pilot):

http://www.24heures.ch/vaud-regions/lausanne-region/Lausanne...

The JoinUp website has lots of examples of open software use in public administration settings. Try digging around in the news archive:

https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/news/all

North Korea.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Star_OS

Even North Korea, they're still training them on office/windows:

http://imgur.com/lQQGjyu

(taken in a school in pyongsong, autumn last year)

This is probably just to make it look like they do learn stuff on computers, but the level of poverty in NK is so appalling I doubt they have computers in most schools.

Oh, most people in NK never get a sniff of a computer. But it has some animation and IT-outsourcing businesses which are no doubt a nice little foreign-currency earner for the government:

http://www.koreaittimes.com/story/8242/north-korea-needs-set...

http://content.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1906219,00...

http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2012/8/153816-inside-the-hermi... (A¢M paywalled)

Wow, I love that sign! It has such a classic Soviet propaganda feel, it's appears to be entirely hand-painted despite the fact that it's offering computer courses (hand done sign lettering is a dying art in the West), and it has an awesome retro-futuristic robot!

Now I'm wondering what those dates on the bottom refer to.

In practice, the DPRK uses XP a lot. I base this off of the fact that in all the images of DPRK people using computers, they're all running XP.

Good parts of Brazil military.

I don't remember all details now, but the Air Force I am sure their official policy is that all their desktop machines run Ubuntu and all their server machines run Debian.

The Army and Navy don't have a broad policy like this, but also has lots of FOSS-related use and work.

Also Brazil government has several state companies that develop FOSS software, but several places still unfortunately rely too much on Microsoft (usually in the judiciary and executive branches)

the french "gendarmerie",a mix of military and police, moved their computers to Linux.

here are some cases http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_software_adoption_cases

Our parliament, too

The schools in Kerala, India use only Linux OS.

Kerela has 100% literacy rate , not so true for the rest of the country where the majority live in villages. It's tough to even get these kids to come out and study.

Even urban city engineering schools use pen , paper and drawing abilities of a left brained person for grading.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com