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Skolelinux Project Releases Version 1.0
jakobgrimstveit writes "After about three years of hard work, Skolelinux (with its own cute Tux-with-bag-mascot) 1.0 is released to the public. The distribution was started as a reaction to how much the Norwegian schools and the government relied on systems using closed source. Skolelinux is meant to be an easy way to set up a large and secure network of LTSP thin clients (normally PXE boot) for regular users. The Skolelinux-organization won the Norwegian Free Software Prize in 2002. The distribution is based in Debian GNU/Linux, and is also being used and evaluated [1] [2] several places in Africa due to its low demands for the client PC. Kudos to the developers and good luck!"
I work as the only tech guy on a whole large high school campus. I would just on this thing and do a test runw ith 3 computers, but theres a problem. The District Office is run by a bunch of Mac Zealots who will hear nothing of linux. Even though its free. It runs on old hardware we can get for dirt. And we don't have to buy anti-virus or patch it. We insist on getting iMacs! We are in a budget crunch and they can't get their head out of their asses and see the real picture. Assholes.
Skole means school in norwegian.
Well, this project has been going on for around three years. It's now being used by several schools here in Norway, and I can't imagine it'll go away too soon.
The reason why we use KDE2, is because we don't have resources to maintain our own KDE-packages. Thus, we have to use those in Debian Stable.
Thin clients run KDE3 just as well as KDE2 - it depends on the thin client server.
Due to the nature of this project, we have expected to be slashdotted.
I have set up a combination of Squid and Apache to be able to survive such load.
If you try to use the dynamic pages, you'1l get an error from Squid.
I'll document the setup on those pages later on.
Skolelinux is Norwegian for "school linux".
Skolelinux also goes under the name "Debian-Edu" (as in Education), as it's a modded Debian distribution - tailored for schools.
> Wow, yet another distro. One year from now, half the original contributors will have lost interest and no one will want to maintai it any more, and the poor users will spend their lives under the hood.
The number of schools showing interest for Linux and Skolelinux has surged.
http://www.skolelinux.no/testskoler.php?lang=en
The project is three years old, and now is when Linux is really starting to take of in Norway - not too long ago, Bergen became one of Europe's greatest switchers.
> Linux needs a couple of well maintained distros, not willions of roll-your-owns
Skolelinux is based on Debian, which is well-maintained and stable. Skolelinux is just adaptions and Debian made easy.
The municipality of Bergen has recently decided to move to Skolelinux (Sorry, Norwegian) and throwing out Windows and other UNIXes (Sorry, Norwegian again).
Victims of 9/11: <3000. Traffic in the US: >30,000/y
Skolelinux is not a distro as most people think of distros. Skolelinux is a full featured thin client solution originally created for schools. Sure, you could use any distro for this - but Skolelinux makes it easier. For schools to take on Linux they need to be convinced. Low price, easy maintaining and high stability are three important arguments. Skolelinux makes this possible.
Actually, Linus is from Finland, and he's part of the Swedish-speaking ethnic group in Finland, who are left over from when Swedes were the big imperialist power of the North. Swedish is close enough to Norwegian that they can mostly understand each other without having to resort to English (but Linus does speak English quite well :-), as opposed to Finnish which is significantly unrelated.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
> AlexB: What would it take to maintain your own packages?
:-)
Time we can use on enhancing Skolelinux in other ways - Skolelinux is not at all a perfect product.
KDE is such an important component in the distribution, that it has to be maintained well and just work.
There's work in progress on using sarge and sid as the base distribution for Skolelinux, but that's at earliest 1.2
The Scandinavian languages are of Germanic heritage, while the Finish language is of Slavic heritage. Actually, Finnish is a Finno-Ugrian language and is less related to any other European language than Persian or Hindi. See e.g. this article. Understanding Swedish for a Norwegian is like understanding cockney for an Englishman. Yes, this is probably true. However, few Swedes understand spoken Norwegian. (We have to blame TV for this one.)