 Well, here we go. Hi, and thank you for being here. I'm just going to introduce you to what are we doing actually in exclamadura regarding free software in general. First of all, where is exclamadura located? As you see, it's a region which is west to today's to Portugal. It's a very dry area, a very hot area. And only 1% of the area is water and rivers. We have 1 million inhabitants from which 80% lives in towns of less than 50,000 people. So it's mostly a rural area. Actually, we have only three cities with more than 50,000 inhabitants. So basically, we have a big region with no people. And the people who is living there is mostly rural area and stuff like that. So I must say that, statistically, is also the poorest region in Spain. And it was the fifth poorest region in the Europe of the 15. Right now, I don't know exactly. So what was the situation? And we have a region which is mostly rural with very few communications, if not non-communications at all. And in 1997, the telecommunications and business was going to be freed to any operator. Until then, it was exclusively property of the state, of the Spanish state. And after that time, it was a kind of particular moment because in one side, internet was growing. The dot-com boom was exploding. But the other side, and all the new operators didn't want to bring telephony or internet access to Extremadura because of the wide area and the small size of every town. We are talking about tons of 300, 500 people to 8,000 people. So it wasn't profitable for them to bring technology and to bring communications and internet to the region. So this always starts with a European-founded project, which is Infodex. And we started to think about this communication problem we are talking. So we decided to bring a live to eExtremadura. Extremadura basically was a set of projects surrounding all the information society to bring the Extremadura not only communications, but to bring good use to the infrastructure, actually. So the first thing we did was to create a regional internet, which is a private network and owned by the government, which connects more than 1,400 points at two megabits. The speed is mostly limited, but the age of the network and the geography. In the north of the area, it's very too much mountains and we needed to connect all the points by radio. While in the south, we are also using fiber optics. So in the beginning, we had this network, which is also connected to the internet. And how do we use this infrastructure was the first question. Well, we started with a pool of projects. Being the first one, the new, the NKC, it means new knowledge centers. It's something like, you know, it's not like telecenters or telegraph. It's more like computer community centers located in small towns. It goes from town to town. And its main objective is to teach people, to teach normal people, people from 16 to 99 years old, about the use of the new technologies. In a sense, not only, you know, let me give you an example, right? We choose to look at communities. One, the NKC, it's in a town. We try to identify communities. And there are several communities, like in housewives communities, and all people communities, unemployed communities, and the like. And one of the most difficult communities is the old people community. Because the first thing that they say to you when you try to get them into these technologies is, what do I need this? Because if I'm going to die soon, right? So that's a question that I actually don't have a right answer right now. But at least we try to make their lives a little better. For instance, they used to play bingo a lot. You know, bingo, right? It's universal, I think. Well, so one of the things we made, it's to create a small bingo program, which was kind of crappy actually, is like all the numbers in red, if you click it turns green, and the like. And we told these people, just come by to the center. We are going to play bingo this afternoon. They came to the center and they found the computers. One note, and the teacher is not allowed to touch the computer, only the user can't touch it. So every center have like from seven to 15 computers dependent of the size of the town. So all these men sat and we started to play bingo, right? It's 12. So in a moment when one man have the number, there's always one person that actually moves the mouse and click. And perhaps the guy sitting next to him doesn't even know, you know, it's very artificial, the mouse thinks most of the people doesn't want, doesn't know how to use it. For a man who is 75, 80 years old, the action of moving a mouse and action actually clicking to the number is quite a challenge. You know, this is one of the first exercise they do. And for the purpose of winning the bingo, they all end up at least pointing and clicking to the thing. And well, and things like that. And you know, the old people is quite invaluable community for us because they have, for example, all pictures, picture from the beginning of the last century. There's a lot of documentation of Extremadura itself that it's not in the books, but these people have. So actually teaching them, for example, to scan a photograph and fill a form and tell us about and what they used to do, what they used to work and how were the weddings and the like. It's a way to, well, to document how the history of Extremadura in itself and the like. That's a small project, but it's so insightful. The second one, the second one, it's perhaps the most spectacular one because of the numbers. It's the Educational Technological Network. And from a population of one million inhabitants, we have perhaps 150,000 students. This is our high school students. And our objective was to bring one computer, every two students in every classroom, in every school. I don't mean, I'm not talking about just computer science. I'm talking about regular lessons, regular classrooms in every school. We'll talk about this later. The third project is VivaNet, which is a business incubator for, to new startups, all regarding new technologies and free software in particular. And the fourth one is Febal, which is a business fair of companies focusing on free software and e-commerce. This pool of projects, it's what we call E-extremalura. It's like to bring E-extremalura to, from the farmer E-extremalura to a new level of operation. So the question is, well, we have a network, we have nice projects, but how do we assure that these projects are going to work? And the answer was Linux, which come from Linux, from E-extremalura, and it's okay. Which as a matter of fact, when the counselor decided which software to use, we choose a free software as a matter of cost saving, as we are going to see later. And then after that, we found out that there are several things that often doesn't get into account when you're making a budget that can only be made with free software. For example, and when you have an educational network, well, you have several teachers from several signatures, and it's quite often that a teacher sees something on the internet, some software that he likes to install. And imagine, for example, the situation when we have, well, and let's suppose that there's no virus and worms and giving the security side. The teacher who needs to install a simple program to use with their students. If we were using proprietary software, and first of all, the software might not be free or distributable, or might not be even be able to install it and be a network. Right now, and we have a cascade system to administer every computer on the network from a single point. So that kind of an ability can only be finding in free software. So, NewLinux is not just a Debian derivative. It's what we call the whole project at the whole, right? It's the tool that we use to bring the project that we used before and the new knowledge centers, the network, Feval and BeaverNet, to make them alive. So, Linux is based on Debian Search. It's used in the public administration, in schools and the new knowledge centers, BeaverNet and every project who is co-financed by the Extremadura whole project. Some technical aspects just for the freaky guys over here. Well, and Linux is based on Debian. Well, we all know Debian. A distribution that, thanks to its design, makes it easy to create other distributions that can inherit its advantage and get rid of some of its faults. For example, the difficulty of setup and configuration. Actually, the fault that is talking about it's something, it's mostly the most common problem that we must face when creating a distribution for origin. Okay, Debian is very easy to upgrade, to install software, but for example, sometimes when some normal people, housewife installs or upgrades a program, and some dead conf question or something like that and appears in English. So, most of the time, people don't press enter and don't choose the same as default. Perhaps they just close the window or reboot the computer, broken the whole thing, you know. And most of the work we have to do is to try to, well, to seed dead conf to avoid those questions and stuff like that to prevent the user to fuck it up, basically. Well, the first Linux version was based on Debian Potato 2.2. It really, we really began using it with a Debian Boody version like two years ago, and right now it's based on, on search, actually it's a search snapshot from December. So, we have a search based in system, nyom.dat, we are using the Anaconda as the graphical installer, and we have a, well, that's kind of an answer. We just sign agreement with Kioser and Oki to make free drivers for printers, scanners. They are all actually, well, of course, they are going to Debian, too. So, what can Linux do? That's the main question, several things. These things, people from, people of 75, 80 years old, this is the first version of Linux they are showing us. This is the Fable Business Fair, which is a huge fair. What we are looking at there is, and Hoya Linux is a special version of Linux with several games and stuff for teenagers, because one of the problems we had was that the Linux was being used in the schools what the kids want to play games. So, we just made some, it's the same. It's a DVD version with 150 plus games, and stuff. So, the Extlemaduras Technological Network is one server per high school, one computer every two students in every classroom, in every high school, one printer per department, one computer per teacher, any student can log in in any computer. All the network can be controlled remotely. The teacher can control the classroom. We also have one computer every five students in primary school. We started doing this last year. So, some in the high school and primary school, we are almost 90,000 computers in the same network. Everything can be administered remotely, and well, that's it. 90,000 in the same network using free software, excuse me. So, it's quite refreshing to work in that kind of network. This is a typical classroom. You see these are normal tables, just with a monitor in the middle. This is a classroom actually in use. I took those photos myself, so perhaps they're not so professional, but you get the idea much better, right? This is a snapshot of the desktop. This is the three of zero version based on Booty, and everything using Debian. And the one over there is your boss, actually. That's Jan Murdoch when he visits Clemadura last year. He was kind of shocked to see so many computers using the thing. Well, we also use Linux in several ways. We have Linux and Presa, which is Debian for small and medium companies. 90% of the companies in Clemadura are small. So we have several accounting and programs, and point of sale programs, and stuff like that. Huega Linux, which is Debian for teenagers and gamers. Linux Edu, which is a special suit for educational purposes. And we also have different localized versions for Portuguese, Brazilian, Portuguese, Italian, Greek, and soon we'll have a traditional Chinese. And most of these localized versions are part of cooperation agreements between extend Madura and different governments. We are also using Linux for the vehicular and technical inspection. That's cool, because when you go with your car to the annual check, you see the guys using a special version or with free software. So it's like free software land. It's nice, that's what it is. Cooperation, well, Huaga Linux is the the Linux version for Andalusia, which is the southernmost region in Spain. Very well known for its beaches and parties. We have Issafer, which is a project and European project to validate your Linux in different platforms. We have a cooperation protocol with Porto Legre Brasil. We have also a Linux version for Colombia. That was a surprise, because we almost didn't know about it. These Colombian people came to Te Madura and the following year, they came with the CD and they were using Linux call in several centers like the new Knowledge Centers. We have Huaga Linux to India and we always have make cooperation agreements with Brazil, Chile, Argentina, Uruguay and Salvador, actually. As you see, we usually tend to make agreements with South America, which culturally, perhaps is the closer most region we have. Oh, this is the front page of Linux call for Colombia. And now, until here, some kind of question. Well, because get the facts by original government. This is new kind of publicity. Well, this is the total investment we made for the whole thing and 61.3 million euros. As you see, 37.2 million euros were spent on computers, two millions on printers, 11.2 millions on the internet and the network, and nine millions in the special furniture to hold the computers. As you see, there's no software cost in that budget. Actually, the preliminary calculation about how much will it cost to install another system, closed system, it was like 25 million euros without counting all the applications. It's just the base system. So, as you can see, what we saved in licenses, we spent it on hardware. Yeah. Well, people, that's one of the best part because most of us actually are our public servants. So, not me, for instance, but Linux itself, I mean, the information society project as a whole do exist with free software or without free software. You know what I mean? It will be the same for us to work with Linux or to work with Fedora in a sense that and make Linux as a distribution doesn't cost us nothing in human resources. It's only the weight of one or two person. It's almost free in the sense of making it, you know. This is the cost of the network. This only involves the cost of the network and the hardware, not the people. The people, we are counting the people in the cost of maintainership, which is the next slide. Which cost the average, for example, the maintenance cost of the software per year of the entire educational system and each computer maintenance updates and all the software 1.8 cents of euro per year per computer. This includes the salary of the system administrator of the school, because every school has a season in. That's it. Get the facts is not much more than this, really. They spend a lot more in the hardware failures. Yeah, yeah. Actually, right now now, because the hardware is under warranty, we have a five year, eventually, yeah, yeah. This includes, yes, it's very common for students to, when we started, we used to use a mouse with a ball. And you know, the children used to throw the ball to each other or every, we have a cabinet under the table, which has a key. And one day, and we found some teenager selling the key at one ear or in the, so to the others and stuff like that. It's like a black market inside the school. So this includes things like that. Or no, the thing I love the most is when they play Scrabble with the keyboard. For example, some, they just take off the keys and make phrases. So it's not a Quarty keyboard, it's a Fakoff keyboard, depending on the kind of phrase they make. So you tend to see all kinds of things when you put 90,000 computers to children. So this is the cost of keeping that controlled. This is almost free, actually. So, questions? Yes? Sir, can you give more specifics about the technical side? Like, is it like a live CD? No, no, I won't. So it's a plain installation of a computer? Okay, okay. If it's a plain installation, how can you manage 90,000 computers? Well, actually, it depends. Actually, the Linux for the public in general, it's a devian which can be installed. It uses the Anaconda installer, which ported to devian by Proceany. It's basically a devian, but we modify some packages, especially the one who had some questions in English and stuff like that. We added some packages. Sometimes we need to backport some newer versions to ours. This is desktop oriented distribution. So for us, perhaps, MBU is more critical than other things. That's the general public Linux. In the schools, what we do, every server in the school has an image. Every client installs it via PXE. So if it gets broken, if it breaks, the administrator shall install it over the network. So we have, in every school, we have a system administrator and we have a central server. In the central server, we put the updates or everything we want to do in any network, in all the networks in the school. This, we call that tasks. Then the school fetch the tasks from the master server and then the client fetch the task from the school server. So theoretically, we can't reinstall any computer from the central point of the network. That's why, how we manage it. With some, it's all shell scripting, it's nothing more like that. A huge one, but... Yes. Here's another question. Okay, I think it's really great that you are trying to get old elderly people into computing also. You mentioned the possibility of them to put old photos or perhaps information about themselves. I'd like to know, have you had any experiences like with getting, how do you teach them how to put the data onto the internet and what type of system would you use to do this? Well, actually, that project, those centers, this was the first project. And that project started six years ago. In the beginning, they were using closer software. Then they switched to free software. But the system is the same. It's going to a town and try to identify communities and then identify what the community do and what, how you can, it's almost, and creatively. I can give you another example. Extlemodura, for instance, has one million people living outside Extlemodura. They used to emigrate a lot. There are several people who never saw a causing and stuff like that. So, to those people, you kind to organize and be the conference meetings. And well, after they see each other face or meet some relatives for the first time, and they always want to keep in touch. And well, afterwards, you teach them to set up an email account. I mean, you force them, you create them the need for the technology, like the bingo, the old mail, or the old pictures for the old man. The housewives, for instance, like to share recites a lot, like in software, but for cuisine. And you make meetings, perhaps the first meetings are not technical, just to make them meet each other. And once you define the necessity of the community, you translate the community to a technological level. It's, in that way, it's easier to make the translation. The most important thing is that the first contact is really face-to-face. Yeah, actually, it's like the first month and without touching the computer, just trying to identify the needs and that thing is, that's the procedure, you know. Thanks. Okay, welcome. Any questions? Small question? Yeah. My name is Petter Ehnelsen. I work at the University of Oslo. We have a bit smaller numbers than you have, but we have a few problems with the numbers we have. We have 15, 1600 computers, UNIX computers. We have to keep updated all the time. And we always run into version skew because we are unable to upgrade all the machines at the same time because they are in production and it normally doesn't synchronize well with the time we have to upgrade them. How do you handle upgrades or a version skew with packages of 90,000 computers? No, no, well, it's in the same network, but as you can see, it's almost 180 schools. So every school also has its own network. Every school might have like 25 kilometers of wiring. Those are complicated networks, but it's a smaller network. And every school, there's a system administrator. So this is admin who makes the update. It usually doesn't update, it reinstalls because since we have all the students, the documents and staff centralize it, we're just installing the computers, the access to their documents too. So that's the way we use it. Every system admin handles the update of his school and the school is usually reinstalled. And the server, yeah, the server is updated, but it's a vanilla devian server, so that doesn't have any problem. Do you have an estimate of the total number of system admins and developers involved? Yes, yes, actually. Did you already say that I missed it? No, no, no. Well, developers are free, you are free. And system admins is one per school, which is 180. That's the total number, yeah. Hi. Hi. When you talk about how you involve communities of elder people, it's really a masterpiece of user analysis, task analysis, ergonomics, find needs, I mean, find the good ones and then find a solution for them. The bingo one is great and many others you're doing, which is astonishing to me because every day, I meet lots of people who just don't get these kind of things and keep doing errors like all the way and you seem to be like show up out of the blue and do everything right. So where's the deal? Do you have the assistance of some sociology university or are you smart because it's a agricultural region so everyone is tied to practice? Well, actually, and that might be the key point because in every center, the person who is in the center and coordinating the tasks doesn't have a clue about computers or software. I mean, he knows or she knows how to use them but it's not an informatic computer science advocate. So they are most of them sociologists, psychologist and things like that. Anyway, if you're interested in the topic, that project made three manuals and describing the methodology we used and the results and all the things during the past six years, we are doing this. So in any case, we just talk afterwards and we keep in touch to get those manuals if you'd like to. Okay. How standard is the hardware that you are using because with 90,000 systems and well, I'm involved in the installer for Debian and I know how many problems you can get installing on different hardware. So how do you deal with that? Well, actually, the network started in 98 but the computers in the classroom might have three years old which is when we started the technological network. So they are Pentium 4, they are the first one, Pentium 4 is like 1.5 gigahertz and we have seven different brands. I mean, we didn't buy the whole thing to a single supplier. We choose seven different brands to, well, some of them are local companies. So it's not all. I mean, it's Pentium 4, 1.5, they have 256 megabytes of RAM. They are cool, nice machines. It runs smoothly. Okay. No. But when you're buying lots of computers, it's most likely that the supplier will bring you what you want. I mean, that's something we are fighting with right now. I mean, we and Andalusia have joined in trying to follow some kind of INR certification. INR is like the ISO certification authority for Spain. So when one public servant wants to buy, I don't know, a webcam, it makes the listation to buy it and it asks for an INR certified webcam for Linux. So then the supplier must, it usually is not in the manufacturer of Taiwan, but the guy who sells the cameras, the ISV, et cetera, in Spain who works to make the camera certified in the field, that's what we are doing right now. In the beginning, no, it was a matter of, I am buying you 30,000 computers, they must work, and if they don't work, we just don't pay for them. It's the thing. Yup. Special, well, especially in which sense. No, well, we are, well, for the small and medium companies in Linux and Press, our Linux company, we made the applications of accounting and point of sale, which must, and which we had to make them work with Spanish laws and stuff like that. In the educational system, the application, the most original application we use is the application, but it's like a set of applications. The one that the teacher have in his computer. So he can watch what the kids are doing, turn off the computers, turn them on, allow them to print, to browse the internet, and stuff like that. It's actually that application, it's free. I mean, and they'll see our using it too. It's more like, it's made in Gambas, it's a frontend to several applications, BNC, and all that thing. So yes, it's more like a glue code, we made to try to make things easier. Nothing huge right now. Yep? Sorry? Attack? No, no. Nobody cared for us, so right now. Okay, yep. I could stand up and yell. Thank you. I know probably most of the people in attendance here don't follow US domestic politics, but I just wanted to comment that your numbers in terms of the size of the deployment and the overall cost is just astounding. If you were to talk about this to someone in the United States and say, we need to do this for the public schools in the US in poor regions, not in rich areas, they would tell you it was flat out impossible. And it would be interesting to see. Unfortunately, I don't know the right people to put this into place, although maybe I could find out. It would be, I think, would be tremendously interesting for your project to get in touch with some people in the United States and try to make this happen in areas. I mean, there's a significantly underserved Hispanic population in the US, as I hope most people know. And it would be a fascinating thing to get working in the US, because the US is crushed under the weight of Microsoft. And people, and because of that, they just wouldn't believe these numbers, 90,000 deployments. So I just wanna congratulate you and express my amazement. I, you know, you can't live in the US and not just believe that, well, public schools, they're never gonna work, they're underfunded, they're gonna stay underfunded. Yeah, well, in our case, we just don't want to public the numbers, we also have to policy numbers because these are all European funded projects. Actually, last year, this project received the award of the project which best spends the public funds. So that's the weird thing, because in 2004, the European Parliament and give surprise to a region who uses free software at the next year, they are talking about software patents. So that doesn't, it's not very coherent, you know. In the US, it would have to be a municipal initiative because anything larger would be politically infeasible. I mean, the United States has the money to do this kind of thing. It just has, the federal government has very different spending priorities, like, you know, 50% or more of all the world's defense spending, but I probably shouldn't go off on a political rant. But again, it's just, this is great work and I'm sure you've heard it from lots of people, but I wanted to add that. That's, this is impressive and you guys deserve a lot of credit for making this a reality. We can talk later, if you want. Absolutely. Okay, and the last thing, and please, if whoever wants, we are making an international conference. Actually, this is a conference where we are making with Andalucía. We have one date in Málaga, in the south of Spain, and the other date in Mérida, 25th and 26th of October, called for papers open, so just go to that address and whoever wants to come and see the thing, it's cheap, it's nice weather, will come. So it's going to be fun, okay? Thank you. Thank you. So we're gonna take 10 minute breaks now since it's been a long talk and continue afterwards. It was with the region of India, actually. I can get you more detailed information.