Open source solutions are used in all parts of the organisation at the Military Prosecutor's office in the Bulgarian province of Plovdiv. The public administration's IT staff by default uses the Debian and Ubuntu free software distributions, which has found its way to all kinds of computing devices, large and tiny. The use of these solutions helps the organisation save thousands of euro.
Plovdiv's Military Prosecutor's office has about ten workstations running completely on open source. It also has about 25 workstations running a ubiquitous proprietary operating system. The actual numbers change depending on user needs, availability of proprietary licences and support. The organisation in total manages 5 server hosts, four of which are running Linux.
The authority's IT administrators are well-versed in combining quintessential open source programming and configuration tools such as Bash, Python and PHP.
Most of the host computers in the organisation will run Debian Linux, says one of the IT engineers. For the web services, he and his colleagues combine Debian hosts with either the Apache, Lighttpd or Nginx web servers. The IT department manages similar hosts for routing and provisioning of network-services.
Even back-up and replication services are on Debian hosts. For these services, the IT staff uses several customised solutions, developed in-house.
Plovdiv's Military Prosecutor uses separate hosts for internal multimedia files, for which it uses Getstream, Icecast and mediaplayer VLC. Some of these hosts run Ubuntu Linux.
This is also a common operating system on some of the workstations in the organisation. And for office productivity, staff can choose between Apache OpenOffice and LibreOffice. The administration also uses thin client workstations, and a wide range of smaller computing devices based on board running x86/x64, Rasperry Pi, CubieTruck and PicoIP. Some of these are used for access control services and others for surveillance.
The Prosecutor's office provides its users with Linux workstations running LibreOffice and Apache Open Office, yet also supports the ubiquitous proprietary office suite and PC operating system, depending on user needs.