Linux penguin dances tango in schools

THE MAJOR OF Argentina's largest city, Buenos Aires, has gambled on Linux big time. I wonder if I will soon find little voodoo dolls resembling the incumbent center-left major Anibal Ibarra near Microsoft's local headquarters, specially now that he's seeking a re-election.

In any case, the move has been already made: public schools throughout the city are now hooked to the net thanks to UtutoR, GPL free software which stands for "Ututo Router". Ututo, is locally developed and CD-based Linux distribution developed by Diego Saravia at the Salta National University.

It is based on Debian GNU/Linux and SuSE. What sets Ututo apart from other distros is that it allows a full Linux desktop experience without even touching the system's hard disk, as it boots and operates from CD.

According to its creator, Mr. Saravia, Ututo got its name from "a lizard common in the Salta region that pokes its nose into every hole and is never at rest".

UtutoR, simply put, is an Ututo distro tweaked to function as a dedicated router to connect a school's local LAN to the Internet through ADSL, Cable modem, wi-fi and/or dial-up links

The Ututo distro home page is at this address, the UtutoR project page is here, and the juicy details about the UtutoR implementation in Buenos Aires' public schools (including a list of all the sites where this UtutoR solution is currently working) can be found here. All Spanish language links. µ