Not too long back, some Linux using Canadians felt frustrated as they were being left out of the loop. The online census was available for Windows users, but not for the Linux folks. Well, today this has been taken care of…

Statistics Canada has responded to concerned free software users by adding GNU/Linux support to the online census. While other free operating systems remain unsupported and issues about security and policy remain, this response is an important first step in ensuring open access to Canadian government online services.

As often happens in high tech, the response was left to developers, who have been working overtime for much of the past week to add and test support for GNU/Linux. On May 12, I had a conference call with Anil Aror, Director General and 2006 Census Manager; Graeme Gilmour, Manager, 2006 Census Internet Response Task; George Kriger, Chief, Infrastructure, IT Security Services; and Lise Duquet, Assistant Director, Systems Development Division, who is also the liaison with Secure Channel, the back end system for all government online services. In a cordial conversation, they discussed their efforts to supply GNU/Linux support and invited me to log in to their test bed to assist their efforts. Although I was unable to log in successfully from Debian 3.1 or Fedora Core 5 using Firefox 1.5 and Sun Java 1.5.0_06 on May 12, I was able to do so on May 13.

According to Kriger, other GNU/Linux distributions now known to work with the online census include SUSE 10 and Kubuntu with Firefox 1.0.7. An attempt to access the site using Konqueror was unsuccessful. Asked about other free operating systems, Kriger says, “FreeBSD is the next on my list.” Whether FreeBSD support will be enabled by the May 16 deadline for submitting census information is unknown….. Source: NewsForge

Tags: canada, census, linux distributions, konqueror