Today in Open Source: The French police move to desktop Linux. Plus: Google Chrome 30 released, and a review of Knoppix 7.2 French National Police Move to Linux Wired is reporting that a French police agency has moved thousands of desktop computers to Linux. France’s National Gendarmerie — a national law enforcement agency — is now running 37,000 desktop PCs with a custom version of the Linux operating system, and by summer of next year, the agency plans to move all 72,000 of its desktop machines to the open source OS. To make the switch less abrupt, the Gendarmerie first moved to cross-platform open source applications such as OpenOffice, Firefox, and Thunderbird. That allowed employees to keep using Windows while they got used to the new applications. Only then did the agency move them onto a Linux OS running these same applications. More at Wired I’m always glad to see people and organizations move to desktop Linux. The migration by one of France’s police agencies seems to have been done very well, after careful planning. Web based applications seem to be making the transition to Linux easier for many organizations. Google Chrome 30 Released Softpedia is reporting that Google Chrome 30 has been released. Google Chrome 30 also includes over 50 security fixes, in order to make it a more stable and reliable web browser. For more details, please check the official blog announcement. Download Google Chrome 30 for Linux. Download Google Chrome 30 for Mac OS X. Download Google Chrome 30 for Windows. More at Softpedia You can also download Google Chrome 30 for iOS and Android devices. It looks like the highlights of this release are security fixes and an enhanced image search. Plus there’s some new gestures for the Android version of Chrome, according to the Google Chrome blog: Starting this week, all Chrome users will be able to search by image and Chrome for Android users get some new gestures to quickly navigate open tabs and access the menu. Image credit: Google Chrome BlogMore at Google Chrome Blog Knoppix 7.2 Review Everyday Linux User has a review of Knoppix 7.2. Knoppix is really good. There are a few quirks here and there but it is definitely a distribution you can get your teeth into. The fact that there is an office suite and GIMP installed means that you can use Knoppix without ever worrying about installing it to the hard drive. This might not be the distribution of choice for somebody new to Linux as there is some reading required to get all things working perfectly. More at Everyday Linux User I haven’t used Knoppix in years, but it’s nice to see that it’s still chugging along. You can snag Knoppix from the download page on the Knoppix site. Here’s the official description of Knoppix, in case you aren’t familiar with it: ” KNOPPIX is a bootable Live system on CD or DVD, consisting of a representative collection of GNU/Linux software, automatic hardware detection, and support for many graphics cards, sound cards, SCSI and USB devices and other peripherals. KNOPPIX can be used as a productive Linux system for the desktop, educational CD, rescue system, or adapted and used as a platform for commercial software product demos. It is not necessary to install anything on a hard disk. Due to on-the-fly decompression, the CD can have up to 2 GB of executable software installed on it (over 8GB on the DVD “Maxi” edition). “ What’s your take on this? Tell me in the comments below. Software DevelopmentOpen Source