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PC's PCs to run on Linux

Windows in police stations too risky apparently...

By Will Sturgeon

Published: 22 January 2002 13:20 GMT

The UK police force is to investigate the issues arising from a planned deployment of Linux across 60,000 desktops nationwide.

The Police Information Technology Organisation (PITO) has contracted open source specialist netproject to examine the feasibility of moving bespoke applications running on Windows over to Linux.

One reason for the migration is a perceived increase in security that would result from the move away from the Windows OS.

A statement from PITO said: "The police need very secure, virus resistant and stable desktop computing. We believe that Linux can provide this."

According to a statement from netproject, the plan is for the Linux PCs to be configured for optimum security with the use of both smartcards and biometrics for user identification.

Software will also be updated over the network and the PCs will be configured so users cannot modify or add any applications to the PC to eliminate possible operator error.

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