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!"

Comments

Fun Fact

[Jeppe Utzon]

Skole means school in norwegian.

Re:Fun Fact

[Atmchicago]

That explains why their logo is a penguin with a hat on backwards and a backpack. All Norwegian children are now expected to conform to that look, or else peer pressure will get the best of them and they will commit suicide.

Re:Learn to spell

[shlaf]

It's "SchoolLinux", not SkoleLinux... what the hell language is this guy speaking?

Norwegian, maybe?

Bad name

[neurojab]

>Skolelinux

sounds too much like

SKOAL linux (linux for rednecks)

or

SCO Linux (Linux for litigious bastards and masochists)

Re:Welcome to a new distribution !

[palfrey]

Hence one of the really good reasons to make your new distro based off of debian. Effectively, they get to pick what of the 9000+ packages are suitable for their users, provide additional bits and bobs of configs and so on that are specific for their desired userbase, without having to design a whole new setup/packaging format from scratch. Plus, if all else fails, this gives a really easy upgrade path...

Re:Great!

[Alex Brasetvik]

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.

Re:Plone site still holding up!

[Alex Brasetvik]

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.

Re:Learn to spell

[orzetto]

Du får nok lære norsk, din selvopptatte engelsksentrige tulling!
This is all the Norwegian you need to know (download the wav file!).

Why so many distros?

[the_y_man84]

I personally like linux alot. But why make so many distros? Doesnt that just fragment the linux community itself more? Doesnt it also it harder to keep things up to date?

Re:Why so many distros?

[Thyrhaug]

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.

Re:Welcome to a new distribution !

[Alex Brasetvik]

> 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.

In the older news

[orzetto]

The municipality of Bergen has recently decided to move to Skolelinux (Sorry, Norwegian) and throwing out Windows and other UNIXes (Sorry, Norwegian again).

K12Linux.org

[dvanatta]

K12Linux.org is the Fedora distribution with LTSP already configured. I know many schools in the United States are using it successfully.

Re:Schools in US are tight

[students]

Hey... parent is super relevant. This is the most important aspect of linux in schools. Most school systems have too much inertia to convert a whole network to a new operating system, even if they will save large amounts of time and money in the future. This is why Skolelinux won't take off for years. I would like to hear a good solution to this issue. If you have one, visit my sig.

Re:Great!

[Orgazmus]

From my experience, debian unstable is far more stable than fedora ;)

AlexB:
What would it take to maintain your own packages?

Scandinavians all look alike to you, I suppose :-)

[billstewart]

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.

Re:Great!

[Alex Brasetvik]

> 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 :-)

Re:Schools in US are tight

[Alex Brasetvik]

Mac OS X integrates very well in a Skolelinux network, as Skolelinux uses NFS and LDAP.

Guidelines on how to make an OS X machine part of a Skolelinux network are available in Norwegian - translations to English will definitely follow shortly.

See http://developer.skolelinux.no/~klaus/notater/a280 4.html

The book Klaus refers to is being translated these days.