Nearly all school children in portugal are getting familiar with Linux

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Almost all school children in Portugal are becoming familiar with using open source, including the Linux operating system, says Paulo Trezentos, founder of Caixa Mágica Software.

By the end of this year, the company’s eponymous Linux-based operating system will have been installed on 890,000 school PCs and school laptops, he says. “In a country with a population of 10 million, this means that Linux is reaching the majority of the young people.”

The past two years, Portugal’s government deployed 60,000 school notebooks running the open source operating system and open source applications. The government also distributed 450,000 Classmate PCs and 11,000 desktops PCs running both the Linux and a proprietary operating system.

This year, the government called for proposals to add another 250,000 Classmate PCs, also running both Caixa Mágica and a proprietary operating system.

Trezentos concludes: “That makes Caixa Mágica one of the most installed Linux distributions in the world.”

 Experts

The company this year published updates to its open source operating system. It uses the Oxygen theme of the KDE open source desktop environment.

The company also enlisted the help of usability experts from the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Lisbon, and checked the quality of the Portuguese translation of all applications with the help of linguists from the Instituto de Formação e Investigação da Língua Portuguesa.

Source: OSOR (Open Source Observatory and Repository Europe :The Open Source Observatory and Repository for European public administrations (OSOR) is a platform for exchanging information, experiences and FLOSS-based code for use in public administrations.)

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