Horizons Regional Council will take open-source software for a spin on its desktop computers early this year under a push to bring free software to public sector PCs.

The regional government of Sardinia, an Italian island usually thought of as socially and economically backward, has approved a bill designed to promote the use of open-source software throughout the region, a regional government official said Monday.

The regional government of Sardinia, an Italian island usually thought of as socially and economically backward, has approved a bill designed to promote the use of open-source software throughout the region, a regional government official said Monday.

The administration of the Danish municipality of Lyngby-Taarbæk is installing OpenOffice on some 1700 school desktop PCs, the administration announced yesterday. The first school where OpenOffice will be installed is the Lindegård school. At the school earlier today mayor Rolf Aagaard-Svendsen showed the first desktop running the open source suite of productivity tools.

The Italian region Puglia will make the use of open source software and open standards mandatory for its public administrations. A law, adopted on 2 December by the regional administration, instructs regional and local public administrations to use open formats for the electronic disseminations of documents, and wherever possible use free and open source software.

ROSA Desktop is a Linux distribution derived from Mandriva Desktop and developed by ROSA, a technology outfit based in Moscow, The Russian Federation. ROSA Desktop 2012 beta is the first pre-release edition of what will become ROSA Desktop 2012. It is supposed to be a Long Term Support (LTS) edition, with a 5-year support period.

ALT Linux, published by ALT Linux Ltd., a software vendor based in Moscow, Russia, is a distribution that originated from what used to be Mandrake Linux, now Mandriva Desktop. The first review of an ALT Linux edition was of ALT Linux 5 ARK Desktop, followed by Simply Linux 5 review. This article is a review of ALT Linux 6 KDesktop, released on August 30 2011.

Today enterprise users have two new choices in desktop distributions. Mandriva Corporate Desktop 4.0 is an all-new version of Mandriva's enterprise workstation, while White Box Enterprise Linux 4 Respin 2 incorporates the recent OpenOffice.org and OpenOffice.org 2 updates.

This is the Moscow-based outfit’s desktop distribution that uses the Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment, a low-resource usage desktop environment that the release announcement states “is guaranteed to work on machines with 256 MB of RAM and will likely work even with less amount of memory.”