today HP and Novell introduced a project here in germany, that might be of some interest to some of you, so i thought i let you know :) As you might know, some municipal administrations in germany are moving their desktops from windows to linux. With munich being the biggest city of those, which is going to migrate 14.000 clients, this has also come to public attention. Lately there have been some troubles, either caused by technical issues, but also because of the pending decission of the european council about software-patents. While there is still no final decission made about the software patents, luckily most administrations (including munich) decided to move on with their migration efforts. So much about previous history.

Now HP and Novell started a project which is called "Linux Kommunale" ( could be translated as "linux municipal" ). The goal of this project is to support the migration to linux in municipal adminstrations. HP is going to provide mainly hardware, from thin clients over notebooks, desktops and servers up to network infrastructure, printers and scanners. Novell will be offering their SuSE Enterprise Server 9 and client distributions, while some associated companys will provide support and special applications. To lower the migration-costs they also have some financing offers, like providing leasing of hardware with a 24-36 month life-span and 0% interest. The initative is also accompanied by a website ( http://www.linux-kommunale.de ), which is serving news and some kind of knowledge base about the migration. -- Martín Olivera

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