The French government has published a call for tender for a 2 million euro contract to support Debian and CentOS systems throughout the French public administration. The news is a month old, but the call for bids is open until 9 January 2012.

The client is a large call-out business headquartered in NOIDA with call centres in 5 other cities in India, including New Delhi. At the time we started, they had no IT or automation on the call floor at all.

In response to a questionPDFGerman language on “the use of open source software in the Foreign Office and other Government departments” submitted in parliament by the SPD (Social Democrats, the main German opposition party), the German government has confirmedPDFGerman language that the German Foreign Office is to switch back to Windows desktop systems.

You can live your life free of Microsoft, and free of their thousand and one petty annoyances. And you can save money in the process.

After long time I’m posting this. In this time, I got a fantastic experience of switching myself from ubuntu to debian. Reasons? may be silly but here they are…

“We would do it again,” said the vice director of the Munich project, Florian Schießl. Pictures of penguins, the Linux mascot, adorn the walls of the Munich city IT department. By mid-2012, at the latest, 80 percent of the 14,000 computers in the city administration will be moved to be Linux

Working with the Brazilian government and virtual terminal vendor ThinNetworks, the company has won a contract to deploy 356,800 virtualized “Userful Multiplier” desktops to Brazilian schools.

Last night, I spent a few hours migrating this production server from Ubuntu 8.04 “Hardy Heron” to Debian 5.0 “Lenny”. Many have asked me online and in person why I would make the switch, especially being a heavy Ubuntu advocate.

Debian has released the latest version of its operating system and is set to be particularly attractive to budget-conscious enterprises looking to cut costs.