Verona's University Migrates 4000 PCs to Linux

Aug 10, 2009

Verona is about to become famous for more than just Romeo and Juliet and opera: the university of the romantic Italian city is migrating 4000 of its desktops to Linux and open source.

The migration, which started in Jan 2009, follows a three-year program called Open Source di Ateno (OSA). The step by step change-over began with applications like Firefox, Thunderbird and OpenOffice. From next January, open file and document standards will replace proprietary formats and by 2011, the change over of all PCs to open source software should be complete.

Staff at the university have already started courses in Ubuntu, also part of the program. One responsible administrator, Dr. Guido Gonzato, speaks on the Open Source News Portal the EU (OSOR) of initial successes. "Participants find it not hard at all to work with Linux, OpenOffice and Firefox," and he adds, "Some of the them even helped us by highlighting some differences, so we could explain these to others."

On a website set up specifically for the program, the university informs of the project's progress. It also lists the operating systems currently in use, including Fedora, Open Solaris and some Ubuntu variations. The Linux-variant Ubuntu is being recommended as system of choice for the desktops. That the server software has already migrated to open source is evident, with Red Hat Linux as operating system, Apache Webserver, Samba as file and print server with PostgreSQL and MySQL data banks. Seven from nine scientific programs currently being run at the uni are under open source license.

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Comments

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  • Awesome!

    It's so encouraging to see stories like this more and more often.

  • Misleading headline?

    "it was written intentionally to mislead"

    Maybe, but there's a simpler &easier explanation, leaving yours sliced by Occam's Razor: your version of the headline doesn't fit in the space available, using Linux Mag's standard font and typeface.

    Further, using the present tense ("migrates"blunk in English as they did conforms to standard 'newspaper' headline style of abbreviated titles. According that pattern of usage, the use of the present tense is ambiguous, and doesn't necessarily imply a completed action. Actually, even in standard usage present tense can refer to future events, as in "the train leaves tonight at 6 PM".

    Perhaps, English is not your native language?

    To intentionally mislead, would be to do as MS did a few years ago, when they announced a Brazilian bank was converting to Vista. My brother-in-law, who samples field data for network profiling and load modeling happened to be at that bank a few weeks later . . . and the IT staff there knew nothing of that conversion.

  • Headline is misleading.

    The headline should read: "Verona's University Plans Migration of 4000 PCs to Linux." I don't really think this was a mistake, but rather it was written intentionally to mislead the reader and put as much positive spin on the story as possible.

  • Bravo !!

    Standing ovation to the IT staff, the University management for courageous decision and the academy employees ..

    May all you be an inspiration to the rest of academic community and rest of the users.

    Good luck and again bravo !!!

  • Good Move!

    Good move! You save lots of money, create a better scientific plataform, begin to use standards, access to lots of good software, educate better, incentive innovation and free enterprise, and also become more performant and secure system network.

    Usually the Companies and Universities does not have the courage to do this, specially in my country, Portugal, for lack of technology education of their IT staff that does not try to implement this great solutions. Or just because Microsoft just give some hidden money or incentives to the management people to choose Microsoft.

    This action is a great example and a model world wide, that should be applied in every academic university or institute. Congratulations for their management and IT staff.

  • Great

    Great. Hope your example inspires other universities all over the world. It only makes sense going the open way to safeguard the future against obsolescence of file formats, like the way MS does it just to add more $ to their huge cash pile.

    Wonderful! If the university could only now actively inspire others...
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