The city of Munich is a major contributor to free and open source projects, sending bugfixes to upstream developers, making available software solutions and sharing best practices and technical information. In August, Munich IT staff members shared the city’s accomplishments with the community of Debian developers, one of the main free software distributions.
A number of the city’s IT staff members participated in this year’s Debconf, the Debian Project’s developer conference, which took place in Heidelberg. Here they shared best practices, talking about their approach to managing 17,018 Linux workstations.
The city is combining Gosa² – a web-based solution to administer accounts, groups, servers and workstations, with LDAP distributed directory information services, and FAI (Fully Automatic Installation) to make available software updates and new solutions to all workstations. These are spread over 50 offices across the city.
Munich is using the fifth version of Limux, which is based on Kubuntu, and comes with web browser Firefox, email client Thunderbird and Libreoffice version 4.1. Also available on all workstations is Wollmux, the city’s document template and form management solution.