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<img src="http://parcom.pro-networks.org/PROneT-News/linux.gif" align="right" alt="Munich fires up Linux at last"> Munich fires up Linux at last
By Richard Thurston
September 25, 2006, 11:07 AM PT

Munich has started to migrate to Linux on the desktop--a year later than planned. The local government in the German city has transferred 100 staff members in the Lord Mayor's department to a Debian configuration, and it intends to migrate 80 percent of the city's PCs by mid-2009.

It has not been an easy transition for the government, which first announced its intention to move to Linux in 2003 and which had scheduled the first launch to occur in 2005. But the project, dubbed LiMux, hit numerous delays after a dispute over software patents, extended contractual negotiations and a 12-month extension to the project's pilot phase.

"The tests are over. We have fixed the bugs and solved some of the problems," Florian Schiessl, deputy chief of the city's Linux project, told CNET News.com sister site ZDNet UK on Monday. "Everything we wanted done for the first release is working at the moment." Schiessl said it would be impossible to migrate all city workers to open source, but that 80 percent would move across by between late-2008 and mid-2009.

"I don't think that we can (achieve 100 percent migration) because of interdependencies," Schiessl said. "There are business applications which run on Windows and hardware interfaces that need Windows operating systems." Schiessl plans to migrate another 200 systems by the end of the year.

<img src="http://www.pro-networks.org/forum/images/smiles/source.jpg"><a href="http://news.zdnet.com/2100-3513_22-6119153.html" target="_blank"> ZDNET News</a>