azangru
March 5th, 2012, 09:58 AM
Just thought it worth sharing.
I remember the talks (a year or two ago probably) about how Linux is getting more and more popular in different countries. One of the countries frequently mentioned was Russia. There were announcements that Linux will be used in Russian schools and in the Russian government and eventually throughout the public sector.
Well, that never really happened. Some of the schools (a tiny minority) were indeed switched to Linux during the pilot programs; others just renewed their MS licenses. And I never heard of Linux in the Russian government again (if anything, I frequently see Macs in the news). But there has been an enormous presence of Linux during the Russian presidential elections yesterday.
The idea was to monitor the elections (how the ballots are put in the boxes and how they are afterwards counted) with web cameras to prevent any violations. <snip> But this is politics, and politics is not allowed here, so I won't go into that.
I'll just describe the technical part from the layman's viewpoint. Almost all polling stations were equipped with web cameras: two cameras per station. The cameras were connected to newly-bought computers (laptops mostly, I believe) and streamed their feed live on the Internet. Since there are about 90.000 polling stations, there were about 90.000 computers. The computers apparently had been bought without any OS and then had "a free operating system" installed on them.
The "free operating system" was, of course, some Linux distro. It wasn't specified which, but most likely it's the Russian ALT Linux.
So. Yesterday, during the election, anyone could visit a particular web site, choose any polling station out of the thousands that were equipped with the cameras and observe the elections live. Even for a regular guy like me, who is not really into politics, it was a sort of an exciting reality show (ever seen those web cameras streaming video from a bird nest? then you'll know what i mean), and I wasted about two hours switching between the cameras. They worked! :) And the whole show was powered by Linux. Pretty impressive, I say!
P.S.: As far as I am aware, here, in Russia, despite many talks about web cameras during these elections, the word Linux or FOSS was almost never uttered by the media. They are simply not interested.
P.P.S.: Where will the computers with Linux go after the elections? Don't know, but most likely will be donated to schools where the polling stations were.
P.P.P.S.: Despite all this, I would say that Linux is still less popular here than in the US. At least you have System 76, ZaReason, and several other companies that sell computers with Linux pre-installed; we don't.
I remember the talks (a year or two ago probably) about how Linux is getting more and more popular in different countries. One of the countries frequently mentioned was Russia. There were announcements that Linux will be used in Russian schools and in the Russian government and eventually throughout the public sector.
Well, that never really happened. Some of the schools (a tiny minority) were indeed switched to Linux during the pilot programs; others just renewed their MS licenses. And I never heard of Linux in the Russian government again (if anything, I frequently see Macs in the news). But there has been an enormous presence of Linux during the Russian presidential elections yesterday.
The idea was to monitor the elections (how the ballots are put in the boxes and how they are afterwards counted) with web cameras to prevent any violations. <snip> But this is politics, and politics is not allowed here, so I won't go into that.
I'll just describe the technical part from the layman's viewpoint. Almost all polling stations were equipped with web cameras: two cameras per station. The cameras were connected to newly-bought computers (laptops mostly, I believe) and streamed their feed live on the Internet. Since there are about 90.000 polling stations, there were about 90.000 computers. The computers apparently had been bought without any OS and then had "a free operating system" installed on them.
The "free operating system" was, of course, some Linux distro. It wasn't specified which, but most likely it's the Russian ALT Linux.
So. Yesterday, during the election, anyone could visit a particular web site, choose any polling station out of the thousands that were equipped with the cameras and observe the elections live. Even for a regular guy like me, who is not really into politics, it was a sort of an exciting reality show (ever seen those web cameras streaming video from a bird nest? then you'll know what i mean), and I wasted about two hours switching between the cameras. They worked! :) And the whole show was powered by Linux. Pretty impressive, I say!
P.S.: As far as I am aware, here, in Russia, despite many talks about web cameras during these elections, the word Linux or FOSS was almost never uttered by the media. They are simply not interested.
P.P.S.: Where will the computers with Linux go after the elections? Don't know, but most likely will be donated to schools where the polling stations were.
P.P.P.S.: Despite all this, I would say that Linux is still less popular here than in the US. At least you have System 76, ZaReason, and several other companies that sell computers with Linux pre-installed; we don't.