Slashdot Mirror
Custom Linux Distributions from Educational Institutions?
Benoit des Ligneris asks: "The engineering faculty of Sherbrooke University, the Sherbrooke University LUG and Mandrake Canada just released a Linux distribution called EduLinux, which is based on Mandrake 9.1. The event had good press coverage [in French]. Now, it looks like several universities in Canada are interested in the project. EduLinux targets novice users and educational users, alike. As one of the leader of the project, I wonder if other universities or corporations are endorsing Linux like this? What does Slashdot think of the future of this kind of personalized Linux distribution?" Note that the Canadians aren't the only ones doing this, NewsForge reports that the Swiss are, too. How long do you think it will be before colleges in the US start following suit? Update: 06/20 04:34 GMT by C : The EduLinux website is now available in English.
I don't mean to troll, but doesn't someone come out with a linux distro for novices once a month? I wonder what is going to be so special about this one? and what was wrong with the other user firiendly ones that they had to make a new one? mandrake is usually considered one of the friendlier ones by itself, and then they modified it? too bad the site is in french (and i'm to tired to babelfish it[i.e. karma whore]) best of luck to them, though
Here in Norway there is "SkoleLinux". Debian based and used in many primary schools though version 1.0 is not released yet. www.skolelinux.no
Point is the schools do not have much money, with skolelinux you need one "terminal" server, and other old machines are used as thin clients. Allows much reuse of old hardware , and the cost is minimal.
"We are developing a Linux distribution for schools. Our aim is to make it simple to install and maintain. Furthermore, to be of real use from primary school on up, it should be available in as many local languages as possible. For Norway, that means both official standards of Norwegian (Bokmål and Nynorsk) as well as Sami. These pages are under construction, and will be developed further when a full version 1.0 of Skolelinux is launched. Until then, our main arena will be http://developer.skolelinux.no"
Here at RPI, the ACM (at least when I was a freshman) would release RedHat CDs that they'd made for the IBM model laptops that you could get through the school. Since so many students had the school model laptop, these allowed the students to have a Linux that they already knew would work on the hardware, and was designed to remove any difficulties that might arise with it. Not an educational distro, per se, but of course, Maple and all those other titles can be run remotely over X, so the point of an educational distro would be a little odd.
We're on a mission from God.
The University of Missouri - Rolla keeps it's own custom version of Redhat Linux that gets installed on any machine that requires linux on campus. It takes care of the repetative steps of setting up kerberos, nis, and afs, along with the custom software path and login scripts, etc.
Here, we've SLAES and AbulÃdu. And I'm sure I heard about more projects (if I remember well, the Spanish Debian-based LinEx is also geared towards education). These are not made by a single educational institution, but they are clearly targeted at them. The main problem is that educational software is always made for Win32, but this is slowly becoming a moot point, as free software is developed, and emulation solutions get better support for these programs.
BTW, I talked recently with an official from a high school who pushes Linux in his establishment, and he sure saw the benefits of switching to a system with such a better manageability. His main problem was (amazingly !) Microsoft-infeodated executives trying to find every little flaw they could to push their solutions instead (despite national directives recommending Open Source to be used where applicable). PR are still the Achilles heel of Linux, it seems...
Xenu brings order!
Debian has been running a sub-project called DebianEdu for some time now. You can read up on the project at the above link or from the mailing lists.
assert(expired(knowledge));
Isn't the point that this is aimed at French Canadian education: the Open Office spell checker is in French, it uses Frenchmozilla, and assumes a Quebec keyboard. So it avoids the anglophone configuration of most other North American distributions, and the Eurocentric assumptions of most other francophone distributions. Then it has kdeedu as an education package. I am sure that reducing configuration choices is the right answer for some potential users, but clearly not for others.