I am pretty proud of my adopted country, Macedonia. (Full disclosure - my wife is Macedonian.) At the end of 2005 Macedonia became the world’s first wireless country. The full BBC write-up is here. Two years later, in 2007, Macedonia became one of the few countries to roll out, en masse, Ubuntu throughout the educational system.

Popular Linux Distribution To Appear On More than 180,000 Classroom Desktops Nationwide

LONDON, November 20th, 2007 - The Macedonia Ministry of Education and Science will deploy more than 180,000 workstations running Canonical’s Edubuntu 7.04 as part of its "Computer for Every Child" project.

Miroslav Jovanovic, former head of Macedonian Ministry of Finance IT department, gave an overview of the Open Source utilisation at desktops and servers during a conference organized by the United Nations Development Programme at the capital Skopje in 2007.

To coincide with EURO 2008, I’m embarking on a virtual European tour, taking a quick look at open source policies and deployment projects in the 16 nations that are competing in the tournament. The Czech Republic team was just three minutes away from qualifying for the knockout stages of EURO 2008 on Sunday before Turkey managed to turn a 2-1 deficit into a 3-2 win.

The One Laptop per Child's XO, better known as the $100 laptop, gets most of the headlines but NComputing is showing in Macedonia, with its Ubuntu Linux based servers and virtual PC terminals, that there's more than one way to get inexpensive Linux desktops into students' hands.

Intel insists that its project to make low-cost laptops for school children in poorer nations began nearly three years ago, before it heard of Nicholas Negroponte’s initiative, One Laptop Per Child.

If we could digitize paper, music and video and store them in files on a computer and then bring it alive when needed, why not a digitize a whole computer into a file? These days, computers are so fast that it is possible to feed them a description of an ideal child's computer and have it bring it alive on the screen in a flash.

Jason Hiner, Editor-in-Chief over at Tech Republic, wrote an article where he describes what Canonical and Ubuntu can teach Microsoft, Apple, and others. Ironically, every virtue he praises Ubuntu for are all virtues they gain from practicing the open source way.

Yesterday I saw the monitors for my computer lab stacked outside of the IT Room at the American International School were I teach Computer Science part time. It was a nice site to see. By Monday, my student’s should be returning to Linux after a long 3 weeks away from it. I