Category: Linux

Extremadura Regional Government of Spain switches to Debian and ODF all the computers

Roberto Santos, from Hispalinux, asked me to post this:

All the computers of the Junta of Extremadura (goverment state of Spain) will be running free software within a year. This project makes the Regional Government the first Public Administration to adopt standards upheld by international organizations, that favour “technological innovation and the reduction of user dependency

The councillor for Infrastructures and Technological Development, Luis Millán de Vázquez de Miguel, met the press this Friday to inform about the agreements reached in the last board meeting of the Government held last June 25. In said meeting, it was agreed that all the computers of the Junta of Extremadura would have to be adapted to free software office tools and gnuLinEx (the local flavour of Debian GNU/Linux) within one year.

Thus, as from now on, all workers of the public administration must use open document formats (ISO/IEC DIS 26300) for their office applications for information and creating administrative processes, as well as PDF/A (Portable Document Format ISO 19005-1:2005) for Exchange Documents, when guaranteed unalterable visualization is required.

Vázquez de Miguel has underlined the fact that the Junta de Extremadura “is the first Public Administration to adopt these standards” and that all the international organizations related to ITCs agree that this is the most important step towards “technological innovation, the reduction of user, company and public administration dependency on proprietary, non-compatible applications, and the increment of interoperability between systems and applications on a global scale.”

The councillor explained that a version gnuLinEx, adapted for the public administration, will be established as the obligatory operating system in workplaces of the civil servants of the Junta and that the OS will be gradually introduced to all administrative organizations of the Junta de Extremadura.

The deadline for the plan “is one year counting from the date the agreement is approved”, Vázquez de Miguel said, and he added that at the end of the period, all the computer work carried out by the civil servants of the Junta must be done so on the GnuLinEx operating system and that all additional software must be open source or be distributed under a free license.

“This is an important initiative that the Junta de Extremadura has been working on for a long time, accumulating experience and analysing the impact on our organisation so as to guarantee its success”, the councillor declared. He underlined the fact that the agreement will have “a profound impact”.

According to Millan, there are a number of advantages of switching to free software and even more when used by the Public Administration, with important consequences.

Amongst others, the councillor pointed out the long life of documents, which will guarantee the conservation of all the administrative documents for longer periods of time. It will also improve the relationship with the general public due to the fact that, by conforming to standards and free software, the public is not obliged to acquire proprietary software. According to de Millan, free
software also improves security, autonomy and rationalises public spending.

In this respect, the councillor pointed out that adopting free software will allow the administration to “not be so exposed to the tensions of enforced migrations”, allow the administration to be have a say in the choice of the applications and reduce the economic costs of support.

There is also a plan of migration support that is being prepared at the General Direction of Telecommunications and Networks, which addresses issues for system administrators and computer managers of each Council, that offers a wide range of information and allows to develop communication tasks amongst employees and adaptation training processes.

The Junta has also received collaboration offers, for example from El Corte Inglés through their Expert Center (including a cooperation agreement signed by the Junta de Extremadura and the computing division of El Corte Inglés), Intel, and other large companies, such as Bull España S.A. “with which we have especially interesting agreements” due to the large body of practical knowledge this project is going to generate and its application to other administration and organisations.

For the future, Vázquez de Miguel has announced that at the end of August the project will be presented un New York at the United Nations. A month later, it will also be presented in “The City of Knowledge” of Panama and in other related countries.

The Council of Infrastructure and Technological Development carries out, within its area of competence, The Global Project for the Society of Information and Knowledge of Extremadura, the aim of which is to guarantee the universal access of the citizens of Extremadura to new technologies and communications so as to improve their quality of life.

According to the councillor for Infrastructures and Technological Development, Luis Millán Vázquez de Miguel, the year 2002 signified a change in development of the project when gnuLinEx was created and used as general-purpose operating system for public education in the Autonomous Region of Extremadura. “A software that has evolved the technical aspects and the implementation of computer standards, backed up by European institutions and international standardization organisations”, remarks Vázquez de Miguel.

The councillor highlights the fact that the situation of free software in the region has had “strong influences” in international press, which have been following what has been happening in the region, covering matters related to the application of the information society.

He also points out that, in the area of the public administration, “we in the middle of the development what we call the Modernization, Simplification and Quality Plan for the Administration of the Autonomous Community of Extremadura (2004-2007)”. For this plan, Extremadura relies on the Regional Intranet, “the foundation of the interdepartamental communications of the Junta de Extremadura”.

For Vázquez de Miguel, to make a headway in the integration of the Information Society in modern day Public Administration and in the global society, it is fundamental “guarantee the control and administration of aspects so important as technological independence, interoperability between computer platforms, homogeneous information systems, computer security for information systems, real technological innovation and conformance to open and free standards.”

Talking with Microsoft

Last week I went to Tudela for a talk as part of the Semana del Software Libre organized by Fundación Dédalo. There were a few talks the previous days, which I missed them all, but on Thursday evening, it was the last debate, with 2 guys from the Microsoft camp (José Parada, Microsoft employee, and Chema Alonso, from Informatica64 and who works closely with Microsoft Spain) and 2 guys from the Free Software camp (Sergio Montoro from Knowgate, and myself). Each speaker had 20 minutes for their presentation and then 1.5 hours of debate.

José Parada talked about the new? concern about security in Microsoft, and all the things they’ve been doing for making their systems more secure. He mentioned User Account Protection and the automatic tools they use for finding exploits (not like in Free Software, where they use nothing).
Then Sergio Montoro talked about the businesses that can be made with Free Software, and then I talked about what FS represents for all users, developers, companies, public administrations (based on a presentation by the great Jesús Barahona). I tried to focus the debate on the real differences between propietary and free software, that is, the social, technological and business advantages. But then, Chema Alonso used the number of vulnerabilities argument to demonstrate that Free Software is more insecure than propietary software 🙁 Not sure if he succeeded in convincing the few people that attended the debate, since his talk was really funny and might have catched better the attention of the attendees than Sergio’s or mine. But, as I told him after the debate, it is a bit unfortunate to see the same argument over and over.

It was a pity I hadn’t prepared the “Microsoft is insecure” part of my talk, since that would have served as a good counter-argument. I didn’t think that was the argument to defend (attacking your enemy might be seen from the outside as a lack of arguments on your part) though.

I also was given a Microsoft t-shirt, which I was planning to wear in all FS-related events, but unfortunately I left it in Tudela 🙂 I’ve been also invited by Chema to visit the Microsoft offices in Madrid, on a guided tour. It might be an interesting thing, given that Chema was asking if Microsoft could create its own Linux distro (he seemed to not get the point, since he had doubts about it), so maybe I could spy a bit about their MS Linux plans 🙂

All in all, a good debate, and a pity I had to run back home after the talk, so missed the pintxos (tapas) in Tudela.

Extending the Nautilus scripts support

We all know now about Nautilus Actions, and I think people agreed, while discussing its inclusion in 2.14, on having this much better integrated into Nautilus itself. And, you know, I am in a quest to provide UNIX power to all kinds of users 🙂 So, I’ve been wondering for a few days about some ideas, which can be summarised in a mix of nautilus-actions, Automator and, of course, Nautilus.

What I’m thinking is about the Scripts menu in Nautilus context menu to provide better tools to write scripts. One, the simplest, is to create scripts directly (by allowing the user to enter a command or a full script in any language), and allowing the user the kind of tweaks nautilus-actions offers, like specifiying for which files/protocols to show the script in the menu. The other is to provide a mechanism for writing scripts like what Automator does.

In Automator, there are ‘actions’, which are just calls to AppleScript/Automator modules (and which could be calls to D-BUS services and normal commands in our case), and then there are ‘workflows’, which are combinations of actions in a specific order and with specific input parameters/sources. In our case, a XML file describing all the actions and their relationships, and an accompanying command-line tool to run those files through, could be enough for users to write scripts without even knowing a thing about programming. Experienced users could also define more actions, by just specifying commands to be run. And applications could provide even more actions, via D-BUS.

As you can see, my ideas are not still very clear, so would appreciate any opinion on how this could be done, or if it should be done at all.

GNOME startup speed

After some great advise from Michael, I’ve committed 2 changes that improve a little bit more the GNOME startup time. This, with the previous changes (to gnome-settings-daemon to lazy load not critical services, like screensaver and typing break and use a single GConf client instead of calling gconf_client_get_default repeatedly), along with the GConf improvements recently announced, login time for CVS HEAD is, for me:

  • Cold startup: 14-18 seconds
  • Warm startup: 5-7 seconds

My “benchmark” is very basic (chronometer), so if anyone could benchmark it better, I’d appreciate it.

Disapointing polititians

When the PSOE, the party that is governing Extremadura, won the general elections last year, the Free Software community in Spain had the feeling that the dream of having a country-wide law for the use of Free Software in public administrations was going to become true.

After more than a year waiting, with no significant changes, all our nightmares are becoming true, after the refusal of a project for that law by the two big parties, PSOE and PP, yesterday in the Congress. As always, our polititians just disapoint us, prefering the benefits offered by the big companies (which surely have been offered) over the general interest.

As Felipe González, former President of Spain, said once: “they are all the same shit”.

DSL problems

The last 3 weekends, on Saturday, my Internet connection has been down, for hours (usually until Monday morning) and yesterday, it happened again. At around 4 PM, all connections started to drop, and after checking what the problem was, I called the support service at Telefónica. Usually, the people answering the phone, even though asking the same questions over and over, are nice enough to not get you upset, but yesterday, things were different:

  • Me: so, the line is having problems again
  • Support girl: ok, just reboot the computer and try again
  • Me: reboot the computer, what for?
  • SG: to reconfigure the router
  • Me: But the router is not connected to the computer, it is connected to a hub, as is the computer. Rebooting it won’t touch anything at all in the router. And the router is correctly configured
  • SG: what windows are you using?
  • Me: no windows here, just linux
  • SG: linux is not supported I’m afraid
  • Me: ok, right, but this has nothing to do with linux/windows. I tell you the router is configured correctly but gets no outside traffic
  • SG: no, your router has lost the configuration
  • Me: I am seeing, via telnet, the router configuration, and nothing has changed, it’s configured correctly, the problem is in the line, as it was the last 3 weekends. Also, pinging from the router to an external IP gives ‘unreachable’ errors.
  • SG: ok, run an ipconfig on the computer
  • Me: the computer has a local address (192.168.x.x)
  • SG: the router has lost its configuration then
  • Me: what?
  • SG: look, you’re gonna need to create a partition for windows so that we can send someone to reconfigure the router
  • Me: but I can configure the router myself via telnet/HTTP, no need for windows
  • SG: I SAY YOU NEED A WINDOWS PARTITION, OR PAY SOMEONE TO CONFIGURE IT ON LINUX
  • Me: but the router is configured (sigh)
  • SG: no, it’s not
  • Me: look, I work on computers, I know what I’m talking about, and the problem is on the line
  • SG: heh, if you knew computers, you’d know you need windows to configure the router
  • Me: Ok, thanks for not helping me, bye

The conversation was much longer than what I wrote here, and the girl was much more unpolite than what you can see from this. So, just went out for a walk, came back, and called again, this time to talk with a much more polite person, who gave me a support incidence number. As I was telling the first girl, the problem was on the line, and this morning my DSL line was back, without the need for a fucking Windows partition.

So, lesson learned. When you call and they tell you to reboot the computer, just say “ok”, wait a couple of minutes without doing and saying anything, and then say “ok, computer rebooted, what’s next?”. Also, when they ask about which windows version you use, just answer with “98”, “XP” or whatever (supported) version you prefer. And when they tell you to run Windows programs, just try to find the Linux equivalent, if there is. That way, they’ll treat you much better than if you try to be clever.

PXES

I am in the process of installing many distros on a single machine, and would like to have all of them available at all times (ie, no need to reboot to switch to another one). So, I’ve heard about PXES, which, if I understood correctly, should allow to do that.

Anyone with experience on this able to give some advise?

Long time no blog

Not many exciting things have happened since I last bloged, but some of them are worth mentioning.

University: I talked some time ago with Javier Ros, from the Universidad Pública de Navarra about doing Free Software-related tutorials with the students. A few weeks ago, he told me some students were interested in a GTK course, so asked me if I could do it, which, of course, I accepted. So, since then, an evening per week, I’ve got 17/18 pupils (10 from the University, the rest being teachers in High Schools and Free Software lovers) and so far it seems to go ok, with people really interested in learning GTK.

Films: I’ve been getting up to date with some films I hadn’t watched yet, like Dark City (very good), The 6th day (not bad, good beginning, but, as with all Arnold’s films, with an expected end), Deathwatch and The Last Samurai (which indeed I didn’t watch till the end, since I didn’t like much the beginning, or my mood wasn’t very good, can’t remember exactly). I’ve been also rewatching one of my favorites TV comedies, Red Dwarf, from the BBC, which I suggest everyone to watch, if not already. Still left some films to watch, like Kill Bill 1 & 2 and Star Wars III (yeah, I know I’m one of the few humans not having watched them yet).

Linux in bars: I know, like most people involved in Free Software, how it’s been penetrating in the markets in the last few years, so finding people use it should not be a surprise. But still, when I see it “live”, I can’t stand becoming surprised and excited, like last Monday, when I saw, in a bar where I use to go, which was closed due to reforms for a few weeks, the new OS (they used Windows before) they were using in the PC that plays the music in the bar. Yeah, it was Linux, running XFCE, but don’t worry, I know the owners so I’ll be pushing for a switch to GNOME 🙂

Health: I’ve been visiting the dentist 3 times in the last 10 days or so, and will be going a couple times more in the next few weeks 🙁 So, yeah, not exciting at all.