The CIO of Spanish autonomous region Extremadura says it is planning to move the administration's 40,000 desktop systems to a Debian distribution.

"Right now, some Debian Developers (and also not yet Developers, like me:), are on the work sessions in Extremadura, I am on the QA and release teams meeting..."

"...RTVE, Spain’s national public TV network, claimed Gates was referring to a successful pilot project in schools in the region of Extremadura.

"...Cáceres, Extremadura, Spain, 12 December 2008 - The Debian Project, the team behind the free Debian GNU/Linux operating system, confirmed the dates and venue for its next annual conference, DebConf 9..."

I previously posted about governments around the world using Linux, doing research on such topic was really insightful. But one example stood out more than any other, and that’s no other than the Spanish region of Extremadura. Extremadura’s migration to Linux is quite remarkable, especially that it is fully backed up by the local government. The whole case really intrigued me, so I decided to explore more about this region’s Linux escapades. I sat down with a lead developer of the project Daniel Campos, and had the following discussion.

The Debian release team recently announced the current status of the next Debian release Squeeze. Based on past experiences there will be at least 4 months needed after the freeze to release the next stable version.

After 24 months of constant development, the Debian Project is proud to present its new stable version 6.0 (code name "Squeeze"). Debian 6.0 is a free operating system, coming for the first time in two flavours. Alongside Debian GNU/Linux, Debian GNU/kFreeBSD is introduced with this version as a "technology preview".

The Debian project has been working in removing non-free firmware from the Linux kernel shipped with Debian for the past two release cycles. At the time of the releases of Debian 4.0 "Etch" and 5.0 "Lenny", however, it was not yet possible to ship Linux kernels stripped of all non-free firmware bits.

The Debian project is planning a whole series of enhancements for Debian 5.0 "Squeeze." A few results of the currently running Google Summer of Code are beginning to creep into it.