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DebianEdu Announced
Bill Kendrick writes "There's been an announcement on debian-devel-announce about a new subproject, DebianEdu, which "aims to make Debian the best distribution available for educational use." As a developer with some stuff in Debian Jr., I'm happy to see some focus on an honest-to-goodness education project!"
I hope more projects are started with the aim to put Linux in the hands of college students - they're usually BUYING their first computer and they have the time, energy, and friends who understand computers to be adventurous.
It seems like the educational market has been forgotten lately. I remember when I was in school, Boreland was offering Turbo C, Turbo Pascal, or the newest thing, Turbo C++ for $69-$99. This was when Microsoft C was around $500.
Everyone I knew had a Turbo compiler. Microsoft lost major ground. And, since the students were most comfortable with Boreland, that was, of course, what they recommended to their future employeers.
But, for some reason, companies have recently been neglecting the educational market. Kudos to Debian for re-starting the trend.
"GD: For one year, we had a so-called "World Class Management" team that left us in a very bad financial situation, and engaged the company in ventures (such as e-learning) that we should never have been involved with. But that's all part of our history now, so I'd prefer to not dwell too much on that. "
I wonder if this is the kind of project he was talking about and if Debian have taken on board the Mandrake experiance.
My teachers were always worried that we would poke around in the system too much, or later, that we would use too much network bandwidth. Then, the teachers wanted to configure the system themselves... (knowing less about stuff than we did...)
I work with a local school (Long Beach School for Adults) recycling machines and one of the biggest pains in the butt is having to buy an OS license (redmond tax). This is going to be a big thing for me and I am glad to see an educational directed distro.
Desktop? School server? Programming tutition? Educational settop box? Internet box? University level or under 10year olds?
'Education' can mean so many different things... I don't mean this as a troll, but I hope they realise that mere mortals can not use Debian as it is. It'll have to be made alot easier before it can be used in non-techy educational environments. Maybe something like http://www.bluelinux.org.
As commercial vendors tend to provide schools and universities with cheap or free licenses for educational uses - to make the students familiar with their products so that they would buy them when they finally graduate and enter work-life. So, am I terribly wrong if I assume that there is not the cost benefit or atleast it is not very significant?
- Derwen
http://fsfeurope.org/
Those are why I liked "computer days" (not frequent) when I was in 2nd or 3rd grade, or whatever hazy grades it was.
:) (Or, just for fun, is there a Logo variant apt-gettable now?)
Logo? Squeak!
Oregon Trail? I dunno. Are there any reasonably complete, complex-scenario text simulation / adventures with a learning slant (not just nethack) like this ready for kids / teachers to apt-get?
There are a lot of other things I'd like to see of course, but those two came to mind first.
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
Ummm, what about K12? http://k12ltsp.org/
I admit I have never tried debian due to bandwith issues. I heard the installs are one of the hardest out there and is designed for hackers. Does the user actually have to edit all the files by hand to get the system working? I do not know if this is true but I hope debianjr and debianEDU will have to have an easy to use installer. Students do not have the time to tinker with there computers since they have projects and assignments due on a daily basis and need their machines to do like uh work. Kids do not have any interest in learning crpytic commands and get frustated alot more easily then adults as they have shorter attention spans.
I for one would develop a graphical installer for these projects and leave the text based one for the regular distro of debian.
http://saveie6.com/
With Woody, the Debian people concentrated quite a bit on the install procedure. Except for being exhorbitantly long, (and not mentioning that agpgart is required for X to run... Jerks!), it installed without too much trouble.
The problem is that Debian isn't intended for the person who is replacing windows, but as a tool for the admin who needs to setup a server every few days and who knows exactly what he / she wants and what they are doing. Apt is a powerful way to remotely install software over a shell, without having to be present at the machine to search for FTP sites, etc. And it can keep you *reasonably* up-to-date with security patches.
Yes, that doesn't preclude having an easy installer... and by all accounts they should work on that. But if they have limited funding (which they do), they should use it in the way that is best for the people who use their system every day. They should keep their software updated, they should work on auto-detect routines, and they need less babysitting in the apt and installer procedures. They also could use a simple way of handling kernel modules. Debian is not about being 3133t, it's about doing your job as an admin as well as you can without having to be on site. If you know exactly how to use it, it's great. And if you kind of know what you are doing, Woody is great too.
And if you haven't touched Linux before, there is no reason not to instal Mandrake or Red Hat. I know a lot of sysadmins who put Mandrake on their desktops because it is just bloody easy. Why waste the time if you aren't going to use Apt? And why not with Mandrake's new Apt-clone?
-Chris
P.S. There is only one excuse for Gentoo: it is a very young distro. It is not intended for you, it is not intended for me. It is intended to show that software and computers can be faster if people take advantage of open sources and compile all of their software for their chosen platform. It is a proof-of-concept. At some point, it will probably be easy enough for anyone to use, or the concepts behind it will be integrated into other distros. In the meantime, not all distros are intended for you or me. Some of them don't fit our needs. I'm impressed when someone can install Gentoo, or for that matter linux from scratch, but there is no reason for me to want to.
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