The municipality of Vienna will offer about half of its officials the choice of switching from the Windows computer operating system to Linux in 2005, the mayor of the Austrian capital said late Tuesday.

The head of the city's information services, Erwin Gillich, said about 7,500 of the city's 16,000 municipal officials will be allowed to choose Linux, which is considered less virus-prone, and an evaluation will be made in

Vienna is the latest in a trend of other European cities and institutions which have switched to Linux, the open-source system invented in the early 1990s.

The municipality of Munich, in southern Germany, has been operating exlusively on Linux since 2003.

Vienna is opting for "a slow transformation", Gillich said, adding that those expected to make the change were mostly personnel who had strong knowledge of information technology.

Installing the new system will cost some 1.1 million euros (1.3 million dollars) over five years and the main aim of the project was to be less dependent on Microsoft, he said.

Linux was invented by a Finn, Linus Torvalds, and has become one of the biggest competitors of Microsoft, which is the operating system used on nearly 90 percent of the world's computers.

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