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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!"
Skole means school in norwegian.
It's "SchoolLinux", not SkoleLinux... what the hell language is this guy speaking?
Norwegian, maybe?
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...
Beware the psychokinetic mimes!
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.
Du får nok lære norsk, din selvopptatte engelsksentrige tulling!
This is all the Norwegian you need to know (download the wav file!).
Victims of 9/11: <3000. Traffic in the US: >30,000/y
> 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.
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.
From my experience, debian unstable is far more stable than fedora ;)
AlexB:
What would it take to maintain your own packages?
The system had the verbosity of HTML combined with all the readability of compiled assembly viewed as bitmap images
> 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
Mac OS X integrates very well in a Skolelinux network, as Skolelinux uses NFS and LDAP.
0 4.html
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/a28
The book Klaus refers to is being translated these days.