GendBuntu
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| Developer | French Gendarmerie (french military police force) |
|---|---|
| OS family | Unix-like |
| Working state | Current |
| Source model | Based on main LTS UBUNTU distributions, with some external and internal proprietary softwares |
| Initial release | 2008 |
| Latest release | 12.04 LTS / 2012 (december) |
| Available in | French |
| Package manager | APT |
| Kernel type | Linux |
| Default user interface | Unity (user interface) |
| License | Various free software licenses, plus proprietary. |
| Official website | www |
With 100,000 employees distributed all over the country and overseas on 5,000 police stations, the french Gendarmerie is one of the two french police forces. It owns 62,500 covered computers, and 27,500 older ones (more than 6 years old), which are still used without coverage in case of crash.
The IT team has developed the use of Open Source softwares since 2001. They were first dedicated to servers (LAMP over Debian), and were gradually used, during 4 years, on the Microsoft Windows XP desktop (OpenOffice first, then Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird, VLC and so on...). In 2008, when the french Gendarmerie became OS-independent on 90% of its computers, the CEO decided to migrate to Linux Ubuntu on these computers[1]. GendBuntu is the name of this project : it is based on the main LTS Ubuntu distribution, with some external and internal proprietary softwares
Objectives
The GendBuntu project in the french Gendarmerie aim at being independent on the desktop from software distributors and editors. The main strategy was :
- to run an open source and cross-platform common grounding on 90% of the desktops and laptops ,
- to use and develop web-based business applications (and kill platform dependent softwares which were still in use).
- when done, to buy the 10,000 annual replaced computers without OEM operating system, and install GendBuntu on 90% of them. This is the main success factor to make the change fully accepted by the end-users. GendBuntu comes with a new computer and a new wide screen !
The main goal is to migrate 80,000 computers within the end of the year 2014, due to the end of Microsoft Windows XP support.
Current review
35,000 GendBuntu computers (desktops/laptops) have been deployed on the last 4 years.
Technical review
The main technical problem is to deliver updates all over the world (country and overseas locations) without :
- crashing the private network used for the daily work of the gendarmes (policemen).
- crashing any business (or not) installed application
It was solved with the help of :
- redistributing on each LAN : dedicated servers or workstations (depending on the number of employees working on the LAN)
- ITIL-compliant qualifying process
Team
The IT team is divided into 3 cells :
- the core-team : 6 people located in the french Gendarmerie headquarters at Issy les Moulineaux (France)
- the running-team : 4 people located in the french Gendarmerie datacenter at Rosny sous Bois (France)
- local IT teams : 1,200 people located all over the country to help the end-users if needed
Timeline
- 2004 : the 20,000 Microsoft Office and 50,000 Microsoft Word softwares were replaced by 90,000 OpenOffice suites. The change was easy because of two facts. On one hand a full productivity suite was offered to each gendarme, and on the other hand, a new OpenOffice based GUI was provided to the gendarmes to make their reports in an easier way.
- 2005 - 2006 - 2007 : gradual use of a common grounding of Open Source softwares (Firefox, Thunderbird, VLC, 7-zip, Gimp, VNC, OCS Inventory-NG) and proprietary softwares (Oracle JRE, Adobe Reader, Adobe Flash Player)
- 2008 : the CEO of the french Gendarmerie decided to migrate to Linux Ubuntu on 90% of the 90,000 computers until 2016.
- 2008 june : 5,000 workstations installed all over the country (one on each LAN), in order to prepare the end-users with this new OS and to be able lately to update the Gendbuntu desktops without any WAN impact.
- 2009 : preparation of an industrial deployment (thousands of computers per month) : NAGIOS supervision - private repositories ...
- 2010 : 20,000 computers order, without OEM Operating system
- 2011 january : beginning of the massive deployment with GendBuntu 10.04 LTS
- 2011 december : 25,000 computers deployed with GendBuntu 10.04 LTS
- 2012 november : 35,000 computers ....
Next steps
- 2013 february : migration from GendBuntu 10.04 LTS to GendBuntu 12.04 LTS. The dist-upgrade will be done over the private network. It will take only 1 hour to upgrade one computer. The end-user and the local IT team will decide when and which computer migrate, in order to maintain the operational capabilities of the police stations.
- 2013 may : end of the migration to GendBuntu 12.04 LTS - 35,000 computers upgraded.
- 2013 december : 43,000 computers deployed with GendBuntu 12.04 LTS
- 2014 february : migration from existing Windows XP computers to GendBuntu 12.04 LTS
- 2014 september : end of the migration - 80,000 computers deployed with GendBuntu 12.04 LTS.
External links
www