[no subject]

Am in the international Open Source Conference held in Malaga in
Andalucia. Andalucia and Extremadura are the two states that have adopted
Gnome across the board: education and government. There are 400,000 users
in these two areas (20% of the Extremadura population are Gnome users) and
have around 100,000 Gnome desktops deployed.

This is a very big number of Gnome desktops deployed. This might be the
largest Linux desktop deployment in the world (China will follow later
with the Gnome-based JDS system next year).

This is entirely a Debian/GNOME setup, and there is a local industry that
has emerged out of this: various small companies here are providing the
support to the governments of Andalucia and Extremadura (Will get the name
of the consortium of open source companies tomorrow, because right now I
forgot).

They have developed quite a set of interesting tools: from back-porting
changes to the stable version of Debian (addressing one of Debian's
weaknesses) to developing tools to manage large network deployments
(similar to Red Carpet's enterprise features, but for Debian) and a nifty
tool to create bootable distributions and turn them into CDs that people
can carry around (metadistros).

(more on his blog ...)