Five thousand French students now have laptops running Ubuntu, thanks to a local government initiative.

The Centre Region’s local authority has distributed the computers to second-year university students in and around the famous Loire Valley. Each laptop dual-boots Windows XP and Ubuntu 6.06, with the intention of giving students a painless introduction to free software.

To ensure the students have every opportunity to sample free software, the Windows installation also features OpenOffice.org, The Gimp, Firefox and Thunderbird.

Francophone readers can get the full story from Linuxfr.org.

Top dog ‘mdz’ joins the walk of fame

Kenny Duffus sent us word that Behind Ubuntu have a shiny interview with Matt Zimmerman (aka mdz), Ubuntu’s Chief Technologist Officer (CTO).

Matt was one of the early people to come on board to the Ubuntu project having been recruited from his involved work with Debian, particularly in their Security Team.

For those people who’ve met Matt and attempted to work out where his driving motivation comes from, you may find some intriguing clues. The interview contains a series of question across many topics, the larger part being about life rather than computers. In response to whom Matt admires most, he expresses:

I admire people who relentlessly pursue their own curiosity and, in the process, challenge the rest of us to do the same. People who question what they see and explore it deeply, who are never satisfied with an incomplete answer.

If you are the type of person who is also inquisitive to the extreme, answers await you inside this interview! Could you be the next Ubuntu CTO or lead the Ubuntu Technical Board?

The full text is available on Behind Ubuntu along with several previous interviews.