Vic Greens set to complete Linux switch by year-end: "Victorian Greens convener Adrian Whitehead said the idea of moving to an open source set-up had been born about 18 months ago when the party was looking at an expansion in its membership and administration needs after the Federal election of 2001... As the party had no idea how to begin the process, it approached ComputerBank, a national initiative set up to supply free Linux systems to low income individuals, community groups and disadvantaged schools, and asked the group for ideas.

"The trial then began about a year ago with Whitehead himself being the first guinea pig. "This led to changing my machine to a Debian KDE Linux box to trial the system for 12 months. During this period we looked at issues of training, programs, combatibilty, ease of set up, internal support, security, stability and user acceptance," he said. "The second phase consisted of putting Linux on other boxes. We decided to install Red Hat Linux on a box with increased RAM and use the Linux Terminal Server Project (LTSP) thin client to run Linux on other machines. This minimised installation and maintence effort. Our choice of Red Hat was simply based on familarity of the installer and desktop interface design.""

Vic Greens set to complete Linux switch by year-end: "Victorian Greens convener Adrian Whitehead said the idea of moving to an open source set-up had been born about 18 months ago when the party was looking at an expansion in its membership and administration needs after the Federal election of 2001... As the party had no idea how to begin the process, it approached ComputerBank, a national initiative set up to supply free Linux systems to low income individuals, community groups and disadvantaged schools, and asked the group for ideas.

"The trial then began about a year ago with Whitehead himself being the first guinea pig. "This led to changing my machine to a Debian KDE Linux box to trial the system for 12 months. During this period we looked at issues of training, programs, combatibilty, ease of set up, internal support, security, stability and user acceptance," he said. "The second phase consisted of putting Linux on other boxes. We decided to install Red Hat Linux on a box with increased RAM and use the Linux Terminal Server Project (LTSP) thin client to run Linux on other machines. This minimised installation and maintence effort. Our choice of Red Hat was simply based on familarity of the installer and desktop interface design.""