According to squadron leader Stéphane Dumond, of the French interior ministry’s technology and IS services department, there are now 37,000 PCs running GendBuntu, the organisation’s Ubuntu LTS distro featuring gendarmerie-specific apps, and there will be 72,000 by the time the rollout is complete next summer.
This last phase of the project marks a massive acceleration in the pace of the rollout, prompted by the looming deadline for the end of XP support. When plans for migration were first drawn up, the Ubuntu deployment was supposed to be completed by 2015. However, with Microsoft ending support for XP in April, the thousands of machines still running the antique OS will be shifted to GendBuntu by the middle of 2014.