Edubuntu - Linux For Young Human Beings!

hzs202 writes "Are you a Linux user? Are you a parent? If so there is something that the two have in common. Edubuntu is a newly released fork of the Ubuntu Linux distribution. It is targeted at children from the ages of 5-12 years old. There are lots of games and even kindergarten appropriate activities for children. The developers and supporters of Edubuntu have developed a Manifesto which lays out the intent and objective of this open-source and freely distributed OS development effort. The current stable version is Edubuntu 5.10 'Breezy Badger', the same as Ubuntu 5.10's alias. Edubuntu comes complete with installations for x86 and AMD64 architecture. Edubuntu will be a nice addition to your home-network."

Comments

Ubuntu provides an excellent base.

[CyricZ]

Indeed, we are seeing one of the truly powerful features of Debian and Ubuntu: the ability to use them as a solid base for specialized distributions.

Re:Ubuntu provides an excellent base.

[Anonymous Coward]

Other possible Ubuntu spinoffs:

Retarduntu: Kubuntu with an XP theme. Konqi offers hugs and high fives everytime you manage to launch an app.

Pr0n0buntu: I heard it has a custom taskbar icon to switch mice from right to left-handed in one click.

Slashbuntu: the welcome screen says "Frist psot!" and you get CowboyNeal as your wallpaper.

Micro$untu: because some folks just can't let go of those nostalgic GPF days. See "Retarduntu"

RTFMuntu: Gentoo's younger brother.

Debuntu: Debian Is Not Ubuntu -- take that, you crazy recursive-naming bastards!

Re:Ubuntu provides an excellent base.

[CyricZ]

Pr0n0buntu: I heard it has a custom taskbar icon to switch mice from right to left-handed in one click.

Why don't you just learn to masturbate with your left hand?

Re:Ubuntu provides an excellent base.

[i_should_be_working]

and as with all the other *buntus, if you already have Ubuntu installed you can just 'apt-get edubuntu-desktop' to get this one.

Really just a meta-package if you already have Ubuntu.

Re:Ubuntu provides an excellent base.

[Anonymous Coward]

Why can't someone install Ubuntu and add in educational packages by hand? You could, but hey, it's all about creating specialized distributions, right? ;-)

Re:Ubuntu provides an excellent base.

[Lehk228]

actually you can add the entire package to an existing ubuntu install, as a previous poster pointed out

Re:Ubuntu provides an excellent base.

[G-Licious!]

For that reason (it's in the main repositories), isn't it more like a branch than a fork? Or possibly even less than that.

Re:Ubuntu provides an excellent base.

[bfree]

We've already seen it in exactly this case.

Re:Ubuntu provides an excellent base.

[oztiks]

I think more so this distro should be acklowedged by Toy vendors, it would be a real useful tool to use in kids products such as a "tickle me tux".

When ever you press his belly he spouts a random man entry.

NOW THATS LEARNING! :)

Re:Ubuntu provides an excellent base.

[woolio]

Why does every group feel a need to create a new distribution for every purpose?

Wouldn't it be easier to just take whatever packages that were new/modified and maintain them for an existing distro?

The number of distros that pretty much all do the same thing is starting to get way out of hand...

What is so different about EdBuntu? A new window manager? A new color scheme? A new configuration tool?

Unless they changed the package management system and the people that maintain it, I don't see why it deserves to be called a new distribution....

Re:Ubuntu provides an excellent base.

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, yeah! It's like another person.

Re:Ubuntu provides an excellent base.

[DariaM84]

As disturbing as some of those were, the comment is still amusing. On the article itself, I love the idea. If I had kids...(oh the wisecracks that could go here.......)

Re:Ubuntu provides an excellent base.

[Anonymous Coward]

Looks like you've got your work cut out for you... better get started!

Re:Ubuntu provides an excellent base.

[chrj]

Debuntu: Debian Is Not Ubuntu -- take that, you crazy recursive-naming bastards!

That's not recursive.

Re:Ubuntu provides an excellent base.

[aichpvee]

I think I'll make my own distro, "Ubuntu Construction Kit", designed for creating Ubuntu-based distributions. It will of course be based on Slack.

Re:Ubuntu provides an excellent base.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not a fork and nothing like that. It's a project inside Ubuntu. It's Ubuntu with different installer.

Re:Ubuntu provides an excellent base.

[munpfazy]

>That's not recursive.

Ha! Good point. I read it, accepted it, and found it funny without pausing to consider that. Amazing. It actually makes no sense at all, except as a play on the wacky habit of naming things based on what they're not. (To the posters credit, that habit certainly does correlate with recursive naming, which must be why the joke seems funny anyway.)

Perhaps the poster meant "DEBUNTU is not Ubuntu" where the acronym "DEBUNTU" is composed entirely of. . well. . . the first word of the whole phrase. Not a particularly good way of forming an acronym, but sadly not the worst ever suggested in public.

Or, on further reflection, the poster never actually claimed it *was* recursive. He simply said, "take that, you crazy recursive-naming bastards!" Which could be interpreted to mean, "To those who create recursive acronyms, I hate you, and I hurl a very badly formed non-recursive acronym at you and hope it offends you." Not the obvious interpretation, perhaps, but none the less a valid one.

Or, perhaps he's just an TSURA. (TSURAs screw up recursive acronyms.)

Re:Ubuntu provides an excellent base.

[jbolden]

Wouldn't it be easier to just take whatever packages that were new/modified and maintain them for an existing distro?

Not necc. You may want packages with different settings. You might want lighter dependencies. For example assume a package requires a webserver to work properly. You may want the default on Ubuntu to be Apache since most Linux users want apache. For a kid's distribution you might want some sort of very light low powered server that defaults to only serving 127.0.0.1. For things like Gnome and KDE you might want the menu structure to be different; for example instead of organizing by function (productivity, communications, games) organize by topic (math, reading, composition). Etc...

Excellent

[Eli Gottlieb]

Give people Linux in their youth so that they won't be completely computer-brain-dead and M$ vulnerable when they get older! An excellent idea!

Re:Excellent

[Ravatar]

The way you put it makes it sound as if you'd rather them be computer-brain-dead and *nix vulnerable. Then again, your tasteful use of the dollar sign makes me think you're beyond help in that regard.

Re:Excellent

[Eli Gottlieb]

You got me on my own foolishness. Still, if I ran things they'd all be in programming classes during elementary school and could write their own damned OS by the time they graduated high school.

Re:Excellent

[aywwts4]

You make linux sound one step away from the tobacco industry. 'Hook em while they are young.'

Re:Excellent

[ettlz]

Yes, but you should always make a child aware of the existence of Microsoft Windows as an operating system used by many people every day. That way, he or she will not be shocked when they encounter people who lead this alternative lifestyle.

But tell them to stay away from BSD users because they'll just lead you astray ;)

Re:Excellent

[linuxfanatic1024]

FYI, I was (and still am) pretty young when I started using GNU/Linux. I wsa 17 when I started. Most people I know who won't use it are much older than me. This is a valid point.

Re:Excellent

[Cyclops]

Yes, but you should always make a child aware of the existence of Microsoft Windows as an operating system used by many people every day. That way, he or she will not be shocked when they encounter people who lead this alternative lifestyle.

Yes, but you should always make a child aware of the existence of the Devil's Hell as a place many people go to every day. That way, he or she will not be shocked when they encounter people who tell them to lead that particularly colourful lifestyle.

Re:Excellent

[Anonymous Coward]

17? Pfft.

I was SEVEN. And my first kernel patch was at the age of TEN.

Re:Excellent

[geminidomino]

But tell them to stay away from BSD users because they'll just lead you astray ;)

Don't expect it to work though. There's always something prompting them to take that first step.

Re:Excellent

[Takumi2501]

Still, if I ran things they'd all be in programming classes during elementary school and could write their own damned OS by the time they graduated high school.

<rant>Yeah, who needs that whole "compatibility" thing anyway?

All joking aside, I understand what you're saying, but I think your views are a little extreme. I think that people as a whole should be better informed about security issues and whatnot, but most people couldn't care less about what goes on inside their computer. Personally, I can't say I blame them.

BTW, for the record, I've been writing computer programs as a hobby for the past 17 years, and I'm a Linux user myself, so don't take this as being anti-OSS/Linux.</rant>

Re:Excellent

[Gryle]

Excerpt from the famous Linux hearings:
"It is my opinion Mr Senator, confirmed by evidence, that Linux is not addictive..."

Re:Excellent

[Anonymous Coward]

I like where that puts Microsoft:

"Hey kids, Linux may seem cool now, but have have you ever heard of a little thing called TCO? Just say no!"

Re:Excellent

[jleq]

When I saw your post, I was going to reply with the following smart-ass remark: "Well, have YOU written your own operating system?" Then, I saw the sourceforge link under your name. Damnit, you have. I lose.

Re:Excellent

[robsmama]

Actually, he hasen't written anything that I can see. If you actually check the project you'll see absolutly no downloads, no cvs commits, and only a two line description of what he *hopes* to build. My guess is he's just going to join all the thousands of other sf projects that are created and never have even a single commit. Very telling of the open source community in general, I think.

MOM

Re:Excellent

[johansalk]

I don't know when I started with 'linux' (In fact, it's better to just call it unix/gnu, because that's what it is, I never cared for the kernel, it's the unix-posix tools+culture+mindset and the gnu-fsf software that I care for) but I wish I had started much, much earlier. I have here now a setup of scite+tetex+rcs+ccrypt, and let me tell you, it didn't take me long to get productive, it's actually pretty easy, and it's already better and I'd argue easier than anything I'd do on MSWord, and a whole lot more fun. Even openoffice feels redundant to me now. I'm also learning other things, it's so much better on the unix-gnu side.

Re:Excellent

[Dare nMc]

> they'd all be in programming classes during elementary school
I was with you save the "all" maybe one grade school in a 10,000 could get away with this. but if everyone is forced to learn this, then truly skilled and entusastic programers would be buried even further under millions of forced into the field types, it could kill the entire job market to reward the skilled.

Re:Excellent

[Hosiah]

Give people Linux in their youth so that they won't be completely computer-brain-dead and M$ vulnerable when they get older! An excellent idea!

We appreciate the sentiment, but we were doing this eight years before you thought it was an excellent idea. And we've been using Slackware, Mandriva, Knoppix, Hirarunix, and MediainLinux instead of the *buntu series because, rather than have them be half-computer-brain-dead, we don't want them being the slightest bit computer-brain-dead at all.

Re:Excellent

[Robocoastie]

yea, so they actually know how a computer works. Ever seen a "computer science" class these days? They're really just lessons on using Internet Explorer (and never covers the security features btw) and MSFT Office. -- A far cry from what "computer science" was in the '80s when I was in school on Apple II's and the first IBM clones. These days people don't know that the desktop icons are just a faster way of typeing c:\program files\kornprogram\favoritekorngame.exe

or in linux all one would have to do is type at a command prompt: favoritekorngame and bam watch it load and run because *gasp* Linux actually knows where to find the program.

Re:Excellent

[Eli Gottlieb]

Yep, I haven't done any CVS commits at all...

parents who use linux?

[JebusIsLord]

Are you a Linux user? Are you a parent?

Query returned 0 results, please try to broaden your search parameters.

Re:parents who use linux?

[ImaNihilist]

ROFL. +1

Re:parents who use linux?

[hzs202]

JebusIsLord (566856) wrote:
> Are you a Linux user? Are you a parent?
> Query returned 0 results, please try to broaden your search parameters.

OK... Are you a Linux user? Are you a parent? Are you twelve yeas old?

Query returned 1 result(s)
--
ID
566856

Re:parents who use linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

My seven year old uses Kubuntu. As a parent I feel it is a lot easier to narrow down the list of things she is able to do than with that other OS claiming to be ready for the desktop.

Re:parents who use linux?

[plams]

And the few parents who actually use Linux were probably convinced by their kids :)

Re:parents who use linux?

[mavherzog]

There are a LOT of linux users whose experience with linux predates their children. I, for one, first started using linux in the early/mid-90's. I ran a FIDOnet-enabled BBS and downloaded slack from fellow BBS file archives. Since then I have spent several years as a UNIX admin (solaris, hp/ux, unicos, irix, aix, etc (as well as linux, of course)) and am currently working as a IT security professional. Linux has been a part of my daily personal and professional lives throughout. My usage of linux predates my 3 children (6, 4, and 9mos) as well as my 10 year marriage.

Re:parents who use linux?

[liliafan]

I have been using linux since the mid 90's, I have been administrating linux, solaris, *bsd for the past 6 years and I have 3 step children and a wife who have all to some extent started using linux. Linux is a great operating system as someone mentioned earlier for controlling access to what kids can and can't do on their machines especially when you introduce some of the more powerful access control elements like extended attributes on the file systems. All internet traffic in my home passes through a combination of squid and squidguard which allows me to further control my kids access to the internet as they get older they move into less restrictive access groups my 18 year old has almost unrestricted access the 16 year old still has some major blocks and the twelve year old has basically allow lists rather than deny lists.

Re:parents who use linux?

[emptycorp]

But.. you should have done...

SELECT * FROM Parents WHERE OS = 'Linux';

0 rows returned.

Re:parents who use linux?

[TheHornedOne]

While it's true that I have exponentially more CPUs running Linux (~128) than Human Child 4.5 (1), I do take exception to your broad sweeping assertion! Seriously though, my little girl's computer runs OS X but we are learning LOGO (Turtle Graphics) and plan to move to something like SmallTalk when she can read more than simple words. She is well aware that your computer is a tool and that you can make it do just about anything!

Re:parents who use linux?

[Hosiah]

Well, what, doesn't it sound likely to you that a person with kids to raise might pick a free operating system over payware? More so than a swinging bachelor with extra income to spend?

My kids know Linux. They just picked it up from mom and dad. They still go to school and use the Windows PCs there, too, which blows away the myth that using Linux somehow cripples the "skills" for a Windows system. They *have* expressed disdain for Windows on their own. Pointing at the crash screen and informing everyone "They're not supposed to do that!", and such. At home, they not only know how to click 'n' drool in KDE like some users who call themselves leet Linux users do; they know how to wrangle a command line, they pick up programming languages to play with (python and Tcl are just that easy - as was Apple 2 BASIC for me when I was that age), they use alternative window managers and even know their way around in the console, and they *definitely* know how to shut down and reboot to their favorite live CD (like one with lots and lots of games on it!).

In other words, they have an advantage over adults. This is NOT the advantage of having young, agile minds that I'm talking about. The advantage they have is that they haven't had 20 years of corporate brainwashing telling them how stupid they are. As for the rest of you, when ARE you going to stop chugging that KoolAid?

This is valuable, why?

[Xampper]

This seems slightly pointless, as I could take a standard Ubuntu system and install educational apps I want myself. That way, the entire family could use the system and not have to look at the bright colors and corny applications which are installed by default. Besides, what 5 year old can install Edubuntu?!! ;)

Re:This is valuable, why?

[NullProg]

Moderators, parent post is not a troll, just an opinion a person is entitled too.

Ubuntu is installed on my eleven year old's box (dual-boot Win98) and he loves it. Its easy enough that his nine year old brother gets on and plays bzflag, heroes, neverputt and even uses mozilla to play games at nick.com. The eleven year old uses OpenOffice, Blender, Stellarium, Scribus, and Inkscape. He cranks out his mp3's and shoutcast using xmms.

Linux not for kids my ass.

Enjoy,

Re:This is valuable, why?

[linuxfanatic1024]

Well, do you realize that you can just install a standard Ubuntu system and then install the edubuntu-desktop package? The Ubuntu systems can be converted by installing the ubuntu-desktop, kubuntu-desktop, edubuntu-desktop, and/or xubuntu-desktop packages. It does not matter which one's CD you used to install the OS. Edubuntu makes it easier to pick kid-friendly packages.

Re:This is valuable, why?

[Tim C]

This seems slightly pointless, as I could take a standard Ubuntu system and install educational apps I want myself.

So could I. I could write my own text editor too, and mail client, web server, etc. I choose not to, and to use what others have created instead, because it saves time and lets me get on with the things I actually want to be doing. Same deal here - even a lot of us that *can* do it, simply don't want to waste time doing it ourselves.

Re:This is valuable, why?

[badspyro]

more to the point, how many can pronounce or spell it!?!

Re:This is valuable, why?

[MirrororriM]

Ubuntu is installed on my eleven year old's box (dual-boot Win98) and he loves it. Its easy enough that his nine year old brother gets on and plays bzflag, heroes, neverputt and even uses mozilla to play games at nick.com. The eleven year old uses OpenOffice, Blender, Stellarium, Scribus, and Inkscape. He cranks out his mp3's and shoutcast using xmms.

I have a 10 year old and 5 year old. They both use Debian 3.1 on the machine they share. My 10 year old loves the facts that there were so many free games to install on the OS and she can choose from a ton of "pretty" desktop themes. The only issue we ran in to was when she was running out of room (one 10 gig hard drive) and wanted a little more space. To my amazement, she just asked if we can "delete windows" because she didn't use it any more. I removed Windows, but still ended up throwing in another hard drive because hdd's are so cheap nowadays. On another note, I'll be installing Ubuntu on my friend's machine (dual boot with XP). I showed my machine to her daughter and she liked the eye candy as well. The only questions she had was "can I use the yahoo IM client and AIM?" - showed her Gaim - she was amazed that it handled both clients and more. "Can I still use Word and Excel?" - showed her OpenOffice - looked good to her. Lastly, "does it got any cool games?" - showed her the games area on my menu - definitely caught her attention.

Linux not for kids my ass.

I agree, it's as silly as saying Windows is not for kids. However, now with Edubuntu, it would seem to me that Linux is (and can more easily be) geared more for kids than Windows.

It's too bad they didn't base it off of Kubuntu.

[CyricZ]

If they had based it off of Kubuntu, they could have easily taken advantage of KDE's superior internationalization and localization support. Such support would have made this system usable by students and educators in many other nations, including those who do not use English.

Thankfully it is quite easy to install KDE on an Ubuntu system anyways. But it would be far more convenient for administrators and teachers to already have such fantastic and easy-to-use functionality installed by default.

That's why...

[jpardey]

...you hire that chicken that you used to install debian.

It's a fantastic timesaver.

[CyricZ]

Yes, _you_ could probably customize it like that. But many teachers, educators, and even school computer system administrators do not have such knowledge and experience. Even though they could easily pick it up, they may not have time to.

Thus a system like this proves to be quite useful. All of the specialized applications are integrated, and provided by default. So teachers can go ahead and install this on their classroom computer, for instance, without having to make sure it's got a network connection so they can download other educational packages.

Re:It's a fantastic timesaver.

[richdun]

Agreed. This is why Linux has trouble going mainstream. We the /.'ers can do it ourselves, but the vast majority of people can't. Sheep like whatever pasture they're given, whether or not the smart sheep have built a cool looking bridge to a much better pasture with fewer bugs and wolf-protection and vi. The only thing that is still lacking from this kind of thing, though, is the momentum to drive it through to more than just a few educators. If someone gave schools, especially public ones, science equipment and musical instruments and the like, in addition to a herd of Linux geeks to install this for the schools on their existing hardware (or give new hardware as needed), it could really take off. Apple, Microsoft, Dell, etc., like to make "community development" donations that go beyond just their computers/software, and this is what gets many on their platforms.

Re:It's a fantastic timesaver.

[ilyaaohell]

Giving kids Linux in it's present state to teach them about computers is the equivalent of giving kids Maya software to teach them how to draw.

The only place where modern-day Linux would be appropriate would be in grades 6 and up, meaning that the kindergarten-level artwork is vastly inappropriate and the kids (teenagers) will not accept it without some whining.

Re:It's a fantastic timesaver.

[Ethan Allison]

Speaking as a student and Linux advocate, I can tell you right now that if the IT guys don't know it they won't install it. I set up and administered two Ubuntu machines on a couple old iMacs in the back of our computer lab last year, with backing from local and district IT personnel. The project was scrapped after nobody besides me could administer the boxes.

Excellent!!

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll have the only five year old that knows how to edit an fstab file!

Re:Excellent!!

[agildehaus]

and you'll be the only /.er to procreate

Re:Excellent!!

[ericcantona]

ha ha. But they all can !, and worse.
Here is a test: get a windoze box and leave 5yr old in front of it for 5 min
Bet you anything you like 100 times out of 100 by the time you return:
-15-20 windows will be open or (more likey) half hung waiting to open
-some systems settings or files ! will have been scrambled or deleted
-you wont be able to work out what they've done, or reverse it easily in less than 10x5=50min (no rcs here, its windoze remember)
-the prog the poor little soul actually wants to use wont have come up and they will be frustrated and crying
For all these reasons a kubuntu-like (see other post comments) set up is ideal for young kids.
Its secure, solid, easy to lock down. It works. The kids are happy. The parents are happy. Dad has a beer...hooray !

Re:Excellent!!

[Anonymous Coward]

How old are you? Not trying to insult or anything, but I'm curious.

Re:Wonderful!

[ZakuSage]

The great thing about the many distributions is that you can find one specialized enough for you/someone else. In this case, if your son/daughter wants a computer, but you don't want it to get fucked up with malware yet still want it to be fun and easy for them, Edubuntu may be a great solution. Doesn't need to be the best thing since sliced bread, really.

Specialized distributions are actually the key.

[CyricZ]

Actually, this is the best way for new distributions to go. They build upon a solid base, like Debian or Ubuntu, and thus free themselves from the tedious work of maintaining a base system.

Yet they are also able to add value to the system, targeting a specific user group. In Kubuntu's case it is KDE users. In this case it is educational users. Such systems offer all of the benefits of Ubuntu, while also offering their own specific additions.

It's much the situation that arose in the 1970s, when people really started building software upon fairly common or standardized libraries (ie. what became the C standard library, POSIX, etc.), rather than writing it all from scratch. This time it is people building specific functionality upon a solid Linux distribution base.

Re:Specialized distributions are actually the key.

[bitfoo]

Umm...this is just a package. The reason they bundle it as Edubuntu is to make it easier on teachers when installing. There is absolutely nothing specialized about this "distribution." Besides, are you telling me that *anyone* who can read can't type "apt-get install edubuntu-desktop" to generate the same effect? Hell, I've seen more confusing extraneous documentation with regards to coffee machines.

Work Those Niches

[Quirk]

Start the little ankle bitters out on edubuntu and, maybe they'll end up in the nerdy niche of Scientific Linux which has just released version 4.2.

The philosophy and developer base of OSS allows for products to be made to fit niches that big closed source companies like Microsoft can't be bothered to service. The ability to develop to suit the needs of fringe groups is a powerful tool. It's good to see it being fully exploited.

Re:it looks like a penis

[CyricZ]

That's an airplane. Cocks don't have wings.

Curious

[Anonymous Coward]

Does this distro come with a program that can help people improve thier typing skills? Actually are thier any open source programs that will help improve typing skills. Vi doesn't count.

Re:Curious

[hazmat2k]

It would definitely come with a dictionary. Something you could really use.

Re:Curious

[Chaffar]

From the Synaptic Package Manager of Ubuntu 5.10:

KTouch KTouch is a program for learning touch typing - it helps you learn to type on a keyboard quickly and correctly. Every finger has its place on the keyboard with associated keys to press. KTouch helps you learn to touch type by providing you with text to train on, and adjusts to different levels depending on how good you are. It can display which key to press next, and the correct finger to use. This package is part of the official KDE edutainment module.

I dunno if it's what you had in mind, but it seems correct...

Re:Curious

[Eideewt]

Actually I've found that instant messengers have helped my typing, along with just doing a lot of it. Of course, you'll have to use proper language if you're planning on being good at typing real words with all those fancy big letters and little dots rather than bizarre lower case abbreviations.

Re:Curious

[ettlz]

Actually are thier any open source programs that will help improve typing skills. Vi doesn't count.

Emacs.

Re:Curious

[Anonymous Coward]

Tuxtyping.

Re:Curious

[Kyro]

try gtypist - text based but works well.

Re:Curious

[HermanAB]

Yes, thier aer both grammer end speling chekkers, specially fro hour American publiek skool frends...

Re:Curious

[Triple Click]

Gaim, but the output might be less than thesis-level quality.

Re:Curious

[Anonymous Coward]

gtypist is no-frills, but clear, at least potentially polyglot, and tells you everything you need to know. I've found it helpful, in the (non-geek) job pool.

educational targetting?

[v1]

This would be nice if it had an educational twist on it. Keyboarding skills, math, ABCs, reading comprehension... that'd make a nice replacement for what we have at the school right now, and schools are always interested in low cost or no-cost technology.

I'm Jealous, all we had were Apple IIE's =(

[v3xt0r]

All we could do in school was play Math Blaster or Oregon Trail =/

If kids can learn to properly learn computing techniques, such as a bash/csh shell starting off when they're that age, just think of what they'll have helped innovate/develop by the time they're our age.

"The true purpose of schooling, is to produce an easily manageable workforce to serve employers in a mass-production economy. Actual education is a secondary and even counterproductive result since educated people tend to be more difficult to control."

Give it a try.

[CyricZ]

Give Ubuntu a try. Personally, I'd suggest using the Kubuntu variant, as it offers KDE rather than GNOME. You'll immediately notice the benefits it offers, especially if you have used distributions like Red Hat/Fedora, Mandrake/Mandriva or SuSE in the past.

What you'll notice is that it offers the power of Debian. Packages are extremely easy to install. Far easier than with Red Hat or SuSE, for instance. Upgrades are painless and very easy, too.

What I found to be the best feature, however, was the extreme stability of it. It's a rock-solid system, while proving very recent releases at the same time. I found it to be more stable than Fedora, for instance. I'm not sure if that's just because there may be more people maintaining the Debian packages, but regardless the increased stability is a fantastic feature.

The Ubuntu community is great. It is very friendly, and people are always willing to help out.

Others have found that it's the perfect platform to build specialized distributions upon. You get all the power and stability of Debian, with the support of the Ubuntu community, and in the end the result is a fabulous system.

Re:Give it a try.

[justsomebody]

Personally, I'd suggest using the Kubuntu variant, as it offers KDE rather than GNOME

Just a mild and simple warning.

And if he is a Gnome user? KDE is your preference. Not mine, for example. It is better to keep away with comments like this, you can easily start flamewar and send one completely valid topic to hell. You don't want to do that. Flamewars between KDE and Gnome do more damage than good.

There's a lot of choice: Ubuntu, Gnubuntu, Xubuntu, Kubuntu, now Edubuntu (even demudi is Ubuntu based). Few more and people can skip the Ubuntu part:)

Packages are extremely easy to install.

Just as everywhere else, not easier, not harder. Except maybe bigger repositories.

Re:Give it a try.

[jZnat]

Just to let you know, Cyric, I think it was you who finally convinced me to switch to KDE (other than the fact that Debian wasn't supporting Gnome 2.12), and I've loved it ever since I got it customised to my liking. Sometimes I've been able to randomly get something working properly (as opposed to NOT being able to get it working in Gnome), but otherwise it has become SO much better than Gnome (or at least the typical Gnome distros).

Although, I do find it somewhat annoying that you will post this at least eight times whenever a Linux-related article pops up on /.

Re:Give it a try.

[CyricZ]

I'm glad that you have been able to increase your productivy. Indeed, that's what open source software is all about.

Have you considered writing a short article describing your experience? That is, outlining the problems you had with GNOME, how KDE fixed/avoided those issues, and what you find most useful about KDE?

Such an article may start some much needed discussion within the GNOME community. Indeed, it would be ideal if they were made aware of the numerous issues which plague their software, and then they proceeded to fix them.

Re:Give it a try.

[Anonymous Coward]

just use fluxbox.

Re:Give it a try.

[jZnat]

I haven't written an article, but I think I might one day (I've written about far more pointless things before). The main good points are applications (e.g. amaroK, all the system-related and utilty-related packages, Konqueror (although I prefer Firefox), etc.), maturity (actually has plenty of toolkit-related things working very well, no need for an old Qt to be used to make a bunch of apps look like ass like GTK1 does), usability, cleanliness, and several more things.

Re:Give it a try.

[woot account]

I did, as have several of my friends. One of them can't get it to give him a proper screen resolution (I would guess this is something that just be fixed in his xorg.conf file, but I haven't had time to look yet). Another friend bought an external, USB hard-drive that Fedora Core 4 wouldn't even recognise without booting into 'linux-expert' (an undocumented feature). Ubuntu, on the other hand, did recognise it, however, upon boot, all it did was kernel panic. He finally settled on gentoo (which installed perfectly, I might add). For all the hype about Ubuntu, I sure haven't seen anything that makes me believe it.

Re:it looks like a penis

[Exodious]

Pfff. Maybe yours doesn't.

Are you a Linux user? Are you a parent?

[countchoc12]

Obviously, not.

Montessori School

[cyber_rigger]

I recently showed Edubuntu to my 5 year old's school.

They were very interested.
Many of the games were like the Montessori method of teaching.

Re:Montessori School

[thrillseeker]

Many of the games were like the Montessori method of teaching.

I've been teaching my 12-yr old daughter how to use a spreadsheet (Gnumeric) with various puzzles I find. I think the forced formality of breaking a problem into pieces that fit into a spreadsheet helps develop problem solving skills - I used a spreadsheet to help me to understand digital filters, for example, and to . I found her a few weeks ago building a spreadsheet to solve a puzzle on neopets. It was some sort of pyramid shaped set of blocks 100x100 at the base, and she had to figure out the cost of all the paint for it, I think. Very pleasing.

Re:Montessori School

[Anonymous Coward]

It's nice that your kids will feel good about themselves when they graduate, but will they be able to read.

Re:Montessori School

[Anonymous Coward]

It's nice that your kids will feel good about themselves when they graduate, but will they be able to read.

Will you be able to properly punctuate a question ?

Re:10 years later...

[whowho]

On the other hand, they might actually grow up knowing how to write proper code instead of wysiwyg-clicky-wizard type code autogeneration, and contribute to a better Linux platform.

Re:it looks like a penis

[Anonymous Coward]

Then you mean... I'm a freak!? Nooooo....

Where is the killer app?

[TheQuantumShift]

Or does apt-get install Oregon Trail work...

Re:Where is the killer app?

[hzs202]

TheQuantumShift (175338) wrote:
>
> Or does apt-get install Oregon Trail work...

You are showing your age now.

Re:Where is the killer app?

[ericcantona]

its called firefox (it lets you browse something called the world wide web).
kubuntu lets your kids browse the web, while you drink beer
if you've got kids you'll know how much that is worth...

Re:Where is the killer app?

[agraupe]

What the hell are you talking about? I vividly remember playing Oregon Trail in elementary and junior high, and I'm 16! Perhaps you're showing something... your stupidity.

Re:Where is the killer app?

[thephotoman]

Y'know, that's not a bad idea! A free version of "Your oxen have died."

Re:Where is the killer app?

[jZnat]

I don't think either the package `Oregon' nor `Trail' exist. You'd probably want to `apt-cache search oregon trail' to find a package before trying the obvious when it comes to trademarked names. Example: a Warcraft II type of game is called `stratagus'.

Re:Where is the killer app?

[hzs202]

agraupe (769778) wrote
>
> Perhaps you're showing something... your stupidity.

Perhaps... However, I think it is my age that is on display here more than my lack of mental acumen. I recall using Oregon Trail on Apple IIe's when they were the newest "personal computers" that money could buy!

*Another little tid-bit to put my age on display, I was the supposed whiz-kid programmer with the broken arm in the Turtle Graphics(R) commercial (1986).

Re:Where is the killer app?

[ChairmanMeow]

Oregon Trail does work in Dosbox.

Re:Where is the killer app?

[zerocool^]

Yeah, I remember the version for the IIe. It was coded in applesoft basic, but used a lot of advanced functions. For example, when hunting deer, type "POW" or "BLAM" or whatever to shoot, and the faster you type, the more likely the kill - the timing function used a lot of chr$() commands I had no idea what they did.

~Will

Re:Where is the killer app?

[agraupe]

This is, in a way, akin to saying "I used Word, therefore I'm old". There are many versions, so it doesn't really help to date anything. I, too, vividly remember Turtle Graphics... that was a fun program.

What happened to Apple?

[ATeamMrT]

Give people Linux in their youth so that they won't be completely computer-brain-dead and M$ vulnerable when they get older! An excellent idea!

Does the computer operating system a person uses as a child have any predictive value in forseeing what OS a person will use as an adult?

My first memory of a computer in a school was an Apple II+. I remember a program our history teacher used to show how the electoral college works- we all had budgets, knew which states leaned which way, and had to allocate funds to each state. We had an after school computer club that played Bard's Tale on those same computers. We knew the Apple II+ inside and out, we were 11-13 years old and were writing our own programs.

In high school, we all loved the new Apple IIgs systems. We did our homework reports on them. There were programs for our science labs.

But as soon as I hit college, the Pentium was introduced, and there were no Apple computer labs? Even though getting a pirated copy of Windows 98 was easy, there were people using Linux. Why?

I say the #1 reason is money. If someone can't pay for an OS, they will use a different one. Reason #2 is control. If a person can not accomplish a task on an OS, they will search for a different one. Reason #3 is why OS/2 failed- they could not get enough support from third party software companies. There was a computer store nearby that gave out 500 free copies of OS/2. But they had no software titles for sale to go with OS/2.

What OS a person starts out with when young will have ZERO impact on what OS they stay with. OS'es are not like McDonalds, we will not keep going to them into our 30's just because we had lunch there when 7 years old. OS'es are more like a tool, like a hammer. We will go and get the best one we can find for the job. You might as well try and predict what wrist watch a person will wear at age 30 based on what watch they wear in the fourth grade. Or calculator. Or anything. It is just a tool.

If linux is to get more of a market share, then linux needs to improve. Just targeting kids to use linux will not make it more used later in life. Linux could become all Apple was 20 years ago, and they still might not be used in universities or buisness if Linux does not do a better job than the large corporation in Redmond.

Re:What happened to Apple?

[Eli Gottlieb]

Actually, I more meant that perhaps they'd learn about proper security models and the command line when they where young, but I suppose the comment was phrased in rather typical-Slashdotter Linux-marketshare-is-good language.

Darn me and my hasty posting.

Re:What happened to Apple?

[MarkByers]

What happened to Apple? They charge too high for their hardware and so they will never get a majority of the market. OK, Microsoft also charge a lot, but you can pirate Windows and run it on a cheap PC if you need to.

If linux is to get more of a market share, then linux needs to improve.

Linux already is getting more market share. If Microsoft wants to keep their market share, they need to improve at least as fast as Linux.

Re:What happened to Apple?

[Homology]

Actually, I more meant that perhaps they'd learn about proper security models and the command line when they where young, but I suppose the comment was phrased in rather typical-Slashdotter Linux-marketshare-is-good language.

This is small kids you are talking about, and I'm sure that they have more fun stuff to do than reading about systrace, pf.conf or isakmpd.conf for that matter. At least the kids are exposed to an OS that is secure and has very high quality docmentation in form of manual pages and User Guide

Btw, the OpenBSD developers abhors the Linux HOWTOS since they deprive the reader for increasing her understanding of the subject matter. The kids are supposed to learn to think for themselves, or ;-)

Re:What happened to Apple?

[i.r.id10t]

Cut my teeth on TRS-DOS and then MS DOS. Skipped Win until a brand-new P200mmx, but had used the first macs some while in high school. Got off windows, now prefer Linux, and still use command line for a lot of stuff.

So yeah, I'd say early computer experiences will lay a foundation of "comfort" as to how you should intereact with a computer. For some reason I don't understand, there are some people who think a blinking curson isn't a graphic :)

Re:What happened to Apple?

[sweetnjguy29]

Does the computer operating system a person uses as a child have any predictive value in forseeing what OS a person will use as an adult? [snip] What OS a person starts out with when young will have ZERO impact on what OS they stay with.

I disagree. There are very sophisticated marketing and advertising models out there that suggest the opposite of what you are saying. Why do you think Pepsi and Coca-cola fight to get their branded machines into schools? Why do you think that the Apple I-Pod was such a success with the under 25 market? I bet that it has something to do with the brand recognition Apple has, from being the dominant computer company in the educational market. (And lots of clever advertising.)

However, I also agree with you that for most people, what OS they use as a kid doesn't really matter. Why? Because the OS will be radically different by the time the child graduates from elementry school. And the OS the child uses in junior high will be obsolete when s/he gets to college. And so on.

But, if kids learn how to use EDUbuntu early on, they hopefully will get a basic grounding in how to use a UNIX type operating system that will well serve them into the future. The UNIX environment hasn't changed its basics that much over the past 25 or so years...

I also agree with you that an OS is like a tool, and that the more technical amoung us will see out the best tool for the job, regardless of the OS. However, the less computer savy amoung us will just follow the herd mentality, and get what ever is popular...or what they know. That was why my first computer was a MAC...because I used it in High School. And thats why after 3 years of seeing how the MAC sucked in comparison to my friend's PCs, I made the switch to Windows. I got into Linux gradually, because it was difficult for me to learn, but eventually, I got proficient and use it all the time. I loved using those SPARC stations on campus!

If I had been started off on a powerful UNIX type operating system, all of the mystique of using LINUX would not have been a barrier to entry. Right now, the learning curve of using Linux is preventing wider adoption. Ubuntu, MacOS X, and now EDUbuntu have made that barrier to entry into the UNIX world easier.

Re:What happened to Apple?

[westlake]

Linux already is getting more market share

OS Platform Stats October 2005:

Windows XP and Win.NET 72% Up 2% from September 05
Linux 3% Up 1% from March 03

This is how the world looks to a web developer. I'll leave it to your imagination where Microsoft stands in the home market.

you can pirate Windows and run it on a cheap PC if you need to

or you can buy a brand new Celeron PC with a 17" CRT, XP Home and Word Perfect from Dell for $250 plus shipping: Basic Desktops

Re:What happened to Apple?

[timeOday]

What OS a person starts out with when young will have ZERO impact on what OS they stay with.... OS'es are more like a tool, like a hammer.

Not at all. Do you give a child Legos in the hopes they'll still be playing with them as adults? Of course not, but it builds a different way of looking at things. It's not whether kids will use the exact same OS as an adult. It's whether they grow up thinking of the computer as a "product" - a black box that does certain things - or appreciating this powerful, complicated thing that has endless possibilities.

To you the computer is just a certain tool, like a hammer as you say. To me the computer is more like a milling machine; it can make hammers, but for that matter a hammer isn't even nearly the most interesting thing it can make.

Even guiding kids into computer science isn't really the point, the point is that kids should be around constructive learning environments where stuff can be taken apart and put back together - be it economics, politics, chemistry, or computers. Heck, forget the kids for a moment, that's the kind of environment interesting adults enjoy.

Re:What happened to Apple?

[molnarcs]

Hmmm:

Win* usage 2003 oct (overall: nt, 98, 2k, xp, etc) - 93,2 %
Win* usage 2005 oct - 90% - down more than 3% in two years... not much, I admit, but not bad either, considering the rate of development (and the state of desktop linux even two years ago...).

Where did that 3% go? Apparently 1-1 to Linux and Mac, and 1 to something other (in my case, I'm in other with FreeBSD).

Re:What happened to Apple?

[Liam Slider]

Browser statistics? You're using browser statistics to base your case on? It's based on browser detection and that's very easy to spoof (and heck, often necessary to get a site to accept you. As most of the time the only thing that makes a site that claims it "only works in IE" not work is that you're detecting as something else) and fairly commonly done by non-Windows users. It's incredibly unreliable at best.

Re:What happened to Apple?

[xs650]

If I had mod points today I would give you an insightful.

And, as long as the litle critters are being exposed to a non-mainstream operating system, it might as will be Linux. It's more hands on than Apple or Windows and lets the kids know that there is a lot more to computers than neatly packaged Apple or Windows environments. I's a much better "other" operating system for kids to be exposed to than Apple variants. If anything, Apple makes the computer more of a mystery box than even Windows does.

Re:What happened to Apple?

[dotwaffle]

Now that you mention it, after I had finished playing with Amigas, the first real computer I used was a Mac at school, and I started playing with Linux soon after I got a PC...

Don't you think it's weird how originally, computers were Unix based, then Windows and Mac came along, basically stealing crap from Xerox (a Unix-alike based initiative) and then we're slowly moving back to Unix with Linux and MacOSX?

Re:What happened to Apple?

[willie_wampus]

I think you guys are missing the point. I have never seen or heard of this os until now (even as a kubuntu user...out of the loop and proud of it!) It is my opinion that the developers of ubuntu did not write edubuntu with the intention of hooking children on linux. I'm sure that was a factor, but i would like to believe that the idea was to create on operating system that would aid in the education process. I am a technology assistant for a school system. All of our workstation run win 98 - 2k - xp. children don't get it. Our primary school students can't lauch games and other apps by themselves. Even after the teacher starts the app for them, it is difficult for the kids to use the app. I think an entire os designed for children is a wonderful idea.

Re:What happened to Apple?

[GotenXiao]

DOS. Might explain my tendency to like CLIs :P ...Of course, consistent and completely random bluescreens might have something to do with my pro Linux, anti MS stance ;)

Re:What happened to Apple?

[sweetnjguy29]

Now that I think about it somemore, the first computer I ever used was the Commodore 64 at my uncle's house. I remember it having neat games. And I remember doing some very simple programing in BASIC as an 8 or 9 year old on an Apple II at summer camp. I also remember my first Macintosh experience...with a mouse and a real GUI...I was impressed. And...I also remember my first horrific interaction with a Windows based computer in High School, at a friends house. It was not intuitive. And it was slow. And ugly. I avoided Windows 3.1 computers at college unless the Mac labs were full, and I wanted to check email. I made the switch to an IBM Gateway PC in 1998, as I graduated from college and went into Grad School. (Why? Because I knew and trusted Gateway...the university science labs were using them!) But I always knew that the serious machines were the Sun Solaris machines running UNIX. They were always intriging to me and I would always try to do stuff on the actual email server machines that we telneted to because they were so fast. Although I didn't really realize it at the time, I was learning UNIX commands when I created webpages and did stuff on the SPARC stations. If only if I had learned C instead of BASIC to start...lol.

Re:What happened to Apple?

[hzs202]

ATeamMrT (935933) wrote:
>
> Does the computer operating system a person uses as a child have any predictive value in
> forseeing what OS a person will use as an adult?

Thats just it... on some degree I think it does have a predictive value. But the value is in how the child is able to interact with technology, not necessarily forseeing what OS a person will use but providing the opportunity for the child to interact and manipulate the machine.

This will support and shape their minds through direct experience proving that human intellect is the origin of science and that without human intelligence technology would cease to exist.

In contrast, there is an upside to keeping young people in the dark about technology. For instance those of us who work in technology could profit greatly if your children become dull drones subject to background processes, GUI buttons and mouse clicks... "Long live intellectual property rights!"

> We knew the Apple II+ inside and out, we were 11-13 years old and were writing our own
> programs.

It makes a difference... there are 13 year olds right now who have no clue how the machine that serves them and their family functions even on a basic level. Puzzling their minds like man's first glimpse of fire. I'm sure those experiences shaped how you think about and interact with technology.

But I am only a student... what do I know!

Re:What happened to Apple?

[hzs202]

It is my opinion that the developers of ubuntu did not write edubuntu with the intention of hooking children on linux. I'm sure that was a factor, but i would like to believe that the idea was to create on operating system that would aid in the education process. I am a technology assistant for a school system.

I agree, i think that is exactly what they intended. Which is why (IMHO) they included the SchoolTool Calendar.

Re:What happened to Apple?

[value_added]

What OS a person starts out with when young will have ZERO impact on what OS they stay with. OS'es are not like McDonalds, we will not keep going to them into our 30's just because we had lunch there when 7 years old.

I started off with DOS (many years of Wordperfect included), and spent most of the successive years working almost exclusively Windows systems. Today, I spend all my time in a terminal window, and my documents are written with LaTeX.

OS'es are more like a tool, like a hammer. We will go and get the best one we can find for the job.

Took a few years, but I eventually discovered the fallacy of that argument. Computers are not hammers, or toasters, and despite the advances in GUI design to give the illusion of simplicity, they remain complicated beasts.

You might as well try and predict what wrist watch a person will wear at age 30 based on what watch they wear in the fourth grade. Or calculator. Or anything. It is just a tool.

True story. My first watch was an antique given to me by grandfather when I was about 12. Regrettably I lost it soon after I turned 18. Now (I'm over 30) I wear an even older but more expensive Patek Phillipe (I bought it because it looked similar) that doesn't tell time as accurately as all the digital watches I've owned, or is as maintenance free. I've also recently put aside the habit of buying safety razors with disposable blades and now use an old single blade, the kind I first started using. Why? Nostalgia is part of it, of course. The bigger reason is that with a bit of extra work, I get a better shave, and for less money. As for the watch, it reminds me that life is really analog.

If linux is to get more of a market share, then linux needs to improve. Just targeting kids to use linux will not make it more used later in life.

I'd suggest an alternate approach. Teach kids how what computers really are, how they work and give them a chance to learn some programming, even at a rudimentary level. That knowledge will take them farther, but more to the point, it will lead them in the opposite direction from Windows. Apple with Unixy goodness may offer a nice compromise with lots of feel good benefits for some, but for everyone else, especially for any kid interested in learning, the only viable option at present is Linux. And if preparing kids for a world where computers and technology play and increasingly imporant role is the motivating factor, I'd go so far as to suggest we have an obligation to see to it they start with an O/S that comes with a compiler, a standardised toolset, and variety of programming languages.

Re:What happened to Apple?

[zippthorne]

Wait they abhore a concise recipe for "how to do x" because it doesn't give much information on "why to do x"?

The howtos were a problem for me when I started using linux as well, but for the exact reason you put them down: there were way too many "ok then you use such and such" command line tool to set this up and then skipped a dozen steps that were probably trivial, but were nearly impossible for a newbie such as myself figure out.

Exercises for the reader belong in college courses not howto guides. I know they did that to make the howtos general enough to apply to as many distributions as possible, but i think it would be nice if they followed a two-column format: one side for exactly how to do it on some specific known system, say a fresh install of a popular distro, and the other side with the generalities.

If i just want to run a webserver to test out certain aspects of a personal web "site" that is only a few pages, I don't want to have to also learn a semester-course worth of material about apache.

Re:What happened to Apple?

[MartinB]

Something like this?

I think you've hit a nail on the head, btw

Re:What happened to Apple?

[Sky Cry]

Does the computer operating system a person uses as a child have any predictive value in forseeing what OS a person will use as an adult?

If they know alternatives, the job is done.
Ultimately, the choice is their.

Re:What happened to Apple?

[sweetnjguy29]

I lied. It was a Commodore 16. I also remember the not-so-pleasant experiece word processing a paper in the 8th grade on an Atari game system, that had a keyboard and a word processing cartridge because the school wouldn't let us use the computer lab. Bastards.

Re:What happened to Apple?

[pla]

Do you give a child Legos in the hopes they'll still be playing with them as adults? Of course not,

New to Slashdot, eh? ;-)


Overall, I agree with you completely (except not expecting adults to use Lego). Had I started my computer experience with Windows, I fully expect I would not currently work in IT/CS/SE/whatever. Not for the classic "Windowz sux" battlecry; but rather, because Windows doesn't challenge the user to improve themselves. The user has no motivation to learn how the underlying OS works, much less the hardware itself. Hell, at least DOS came with qbasic - XP doesn't come with any programming interface included with the core OS.

Compare that with my first computer - At school, a TRS-80, and at home, a Coleco Adam. They didn't come up to a friendly screen telling you exactly what to do... They came up to a BASIC interpreter prompt as the primary user interface. Learning to "use" the computer meant learning to program.

As much of an improvement as I saw upgrading to my first PC clone, I remember feeling cheated that I could choose between crappy resolution with 4 colors or slightly less crappy in black and white. And how do you make a simple 3-voice sound? You just couldn't, directly. So I learned how the machine actually generated sound, and that I would need to go a tad bit lower-level to get anything beyond single-voice square-wave sound (for graphics, I just had to wait for VGA, no way around it sucking with CGA).

But all that, while perhaps sounding like a nightmare to the typical "I just want to use Word" user, encouraged me rather than turning me off on the whole thing.


Hmm, I don't seem to have a point here... I suppose just that the more OSs and even hardware platforms we expose kids to, the less they'll mistake "Windows" and "computer" as synonymous terms.

You could use a dremel in a drill press and make really nice holes in just about anything. But you can do so much more with it freehand.

Re:What happened to Apple?

[jbolden]

on't you think it's weird how originally, computers were Unix based, then Windows and Mac came along, basically stealing crap from Xerox (a Unix-alike based initiative) and then we're slowly moving back to Unix with Linux and MacOSX?

That would be weird if that were actually what happened. In the 1970s dominant operating systems were capability not permissions based, heavily multiuser and administration friendly: VMS, MVS, Multics... Unix was a reaction against this whole design. Dos borrowed a few concepts from Unix so kids who grew up with Dos found Unix more natural. But the main point is that in the early 1980s: Dos ~ 5k computer, Unix ~ 50k computer, capability systems ~ 500k+ computer they just weren't competing with one another directly.

Re:What happened to Apple?

[level_headed_midwest]

The elementary school I went to from K-3 had nothing but Apple II's in it. (The computers were about ten years older than I was at the time!) We were taught how to run things off of disks, and for a few of us, we were taught very basic BASIC, such as "print," "plot," etc. My family had an IBM PS/1 80268 at home and even though it had a very rudimentary GUI, I used the command line to launch solitaire and Jeopardy. It also had a BASIC editor and I made little text-based games and such with it.

So that's where I "cut my teeth" and why I feel comfortable using a command line. Yes, I do like a good GUI, but I also like a command line to do certain things or to tweak things that the GUI tools might balk at.

Re:What happened to Apple?

[Anonymous Coward]

because Windows doesn't challenge the user to improve themselves.

I disagree. Since switching to Windows, I've become more aware of, & gained a greated appreciation of, online security threats.

Re:What happened to Apple?

[Hosiah]

If linux is to get more of a market share, then linux needs to improve.

I got so sick of LARTing this one that I wrote a whole general-purpose Linux mythbuster http://techn0manc3r.blogspot.com/2005/12/eight-lin ux-myths-that-are-ready-to-be.htmlhere

Re:10 years later...

[Anonymous Coward]

I hate to break it to you but coding on Windows isn't "wysiwyg-clicky-wizard type code autogeneration" any more than it is on Linux platforms. I've seen this so-called "wysiwyg-clicky-wizard type code autogeneration" on Linux, as a matter of fact.

If I want to teach my kid computer science, of course I'll give him a unix box, but at least get your own goddamned facts straight. Its embarassing to the movement.

Re:it looks like a penis

[CyricZ]

You're thinking of the wrong kind of cock. We're not talking about roosters; we are talking about male genitalia.

And Skolelinux?

[Moosbert]

How does this compare to Skolelinux, an existing Debian-derived distribution used in schools? Or is it just NIH?

Re:And Skolelinux?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think Skolelinux is more advanced with regard to administration, centrally controlled setup and controll overall.

Re:And Skolelinux?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a lot better than Skolelinux.

Re:And Skolelinux?

[Travy.b]

Yeah exactly, but skolelinux doesn't have the bloody "buntu' tag added onto to the end of it that so many many slashdotters bar up over. As a result, most people probably don't know of it.

Re:And Skolelinux?

[HermanAB]

Ubuntu is Linux for Africa, though it does work on white boxes too I believe.

Re:Nice icons.

[product byproduct]

I must say that I prefer the kids' Firefox icon (topleft) than the blue earth icon that the "serious" release uses.

http://www.edubuntu.org/images/tour/gnome-desktop. png

Wait, what?

[Anonymous Coward]

No half-nude children splash screen?!?

What a bummer.

I resent that!

[dbc]

Query returned 0 results, please try to broaden your search parameters.

I am *not* NULL!!!

(Note for humor challenged mods: I'm going for "funny" here, not "-1 cranky")

Linux is 14 years old

[lheal]

I'm a father of two, and a Linux/Unix sysadmin.

I put Linux (FC4 currently) on my kids' computers. They like it just fine, and neither of them are nerds.

Strange thing, they do fight over which is better, vi or that other editor.

Finally!

[slashname3]

Finally an operating system upper management can actually use! I guess I can retire their etch-a-sketchs. Now if I can just teach them not to stick stamps on the monitor when they send email.

Did you know ?

[this great guy]

Did you know that the core developers of Ubuntu Linux are employed by the Ubuntu Foundation, which was founded by Mark Shuttleworth (he provided an initial funding commitment of $10 million). He is also:

• a South African entrepreneur,
• the first African in space (he reportedly paid $20 million for his trip aboard the Soyuz and ISS spacecrafts)
• the guy who founded Thawte (digital certificates, etc) and sold it later to VeriSign.
• was a Debian developer in the 1990s

Re:Did you know ?

[puto]

Well kudos to him for all of his good work. But 20 million could have been spent a lot better in his home country on perhaps tools, food, education, and many other things africa needs.

As poor as I am currently I still manage to go to Colombia every year where my fathers family is from, and where he lives. On these trips I always bring clothes, books, educational materials, and anything any local orphanage or underprivliged school might need. I guess I drop about 2k personally, that would be comparable to his 20 mil. I could spend it on myself of course. Couldn't fly to the moon but I could sit my happy ass on the beach in the south of france, or rio, etc.

And doing this does give me a warm fuzzy when a see child's moms happy that her son has a few changes of clothes and a new pair of sneakers.

I do think he has done a lot. Thawte was good competition for Versign at the time. Course I remember when Verisign handed out free certs.

Puto

Re:Did you know ?

[Anonymous Coward]

As poor as I am currently I still manage to go to Colombia every year where my fathers family is from, and where he lives. On these trips I always bring clothes, books, educational materials, and anything any local orphanage or underprivliged school might need. I guess I drop about 2k personally, that would be comparable to his 20 mil. I could spend it on myself of course. Couldn't fly to the moon but I could sit my happy ass on the beach in the south of france, or rio, etc.

Boasting about your charitable works cheapens both you and your works, particularly when you're trying to show how much better you are than someone else. Basically, you've just disproved your point in one fell swoop. Nice job.

Re:Did you know ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes.

Re:Did you know ?

[demongp]

Haha - i wanted to say the same thing. It is quite old news, imho, and not worth being modded so high :\

Taking the "Education" out of "Edu"

[chefmonkey]

I'm deeply suspicious of a so-called "educational" distribution put together by people who can't seem to spell "calendar" correctly.

Re:Taking the "Education" out of "Edu"

[HeroreV]

At least it's not spelled "Kalender". KDE probably has a "Kalendar" though.

Re:Taking the "Education" out of "Edu"

[HermanAB]

Uhh, 'kalender' would be correct actually, in Afrikaans Nederlands that is...

5 kids

[r00t]

Microsoft Windows is not allowed to enter our home.

Re:5 kids

[destiney]

Word.

Re:5 kids

[chrj]

Excel.

Re:It's too bad they didn't base it off of Kubuntu

[linuxfanatic1024]

Yeah, I agree. We need Edkubuntu!!! I am a KDE user myself and prefer installing Kubuntu.

Re:it looks like a penis

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, I thought that your clever double-entendre was on purpose. You don't even claim it was on purpose after being told. You're much less smart that I thought.

My Kids love TuxPaint

[Anonymous Coward]

running on Suse 10 at the moment ... but I think I will check this out.
I am thinking of getting a second old PC so that they can have one each.

My 6 year old has just run a DOS attack on her grandmother.

First she used social engineering to obtain her password,
then she changed it. :-)

Re:My Kids love TuxPaint

[Neoncow]

My 6 year old has just run a DOS attack on her grandmother.

First she used social engineering to obtain her password, then she changed it. :-)

Hilarious! Have you educated your daughter about using her powers for Good? or for Awesome?

Re:Indoctrinate them while they're young?

[RandomPrecision]

I'd rather have my children lured into the cult of Linux by a penguin mascot than out on the streets, spray-painting the street gang logo of Microsoft on bridges and trains.

Edubuntu for *school* not home use

[MartinB]

Most of what makes Edubuntu different from *buntu isn't actually relevant for home use. To quote the Design Goals:

Centralized management of configuration, users, and processes, together with facilities for working collaboratively in a classroom setting.

...and the Application Selection criteria:

Target Market for applications - while applications for the learners are required, the main requirement now is for teacher tools, to enable teachers to create teaching content, worksheets, cross words, tests.

So if you ignore the child-friendly artwork (not that it's entirely insignificant), what you have (beyond standard *buntu) is:

1. An easy-install/control LDAP-based network environment
2. A Learning Management System
3. A bunch of pretty basic and standard educational applications - although the Timetabling app isn't to be sniffed at

Unless you're home-schooling (and ideally, homeschooling several families together), or your school is using Edubuntu and you want to standardise on it at home too, this isn't going to be much more helpful to you at home than any other *buntu.

Re:Edubuntu for *school* not home use

[jnelson4765]

Plus, a LTSP setup installed by default - getting a remote X environment set up can be a pain, even for an experienced admin, and having this thing auto-generate a system like that is very, very cool.

Re:Edubuntu for *school* not home use

[cojsl]

"this isn't going to be much more helpful to you at home than any other *buntu". Though your prior points are valid, I disagree with this generalization. I will be installing Edubuntu on an extra laptop for my children's home use precisely because it is "one stop shopping" for many educational apps I'd otherwise have to hunt around for, and would likely miss a few even then. Thank you Ubuntu for putting this together, I'll be showing in to my childrens' school's accountability commitee too.

*nix can be excellent for kids, but gnome is not..

[ericcantona]

I've got two kids (5 & 2.5 yr old). They love to use their computer.
I've tried ubuntu (and indeed have currently got it set up for my wife), but I dont think gnome (even stripped) is the best WM/desktop for young kids.
I don't want them to be able to middle-click, bring up a terminal and 'rm -Rf *'.
(how on earth is a 5 yr old gonna do that you may ask ? -- except you will only ask if you dont have a 5 yr old, if you have had one you will know it highly likely).
Infact I dont want them launching hardly any of the progs installed on any particular box.
For my little users GCompris and firefox with cbeebies as a homepage plus a paint prog is all I want.
I know edubuntu aims at a wider age range, that is not my point here
I think for young kids icewm is easier to strip and create a safe environment for them to play.
It wouldn't be interesting to 7+ yr olds, but then 7+ yr olds are very different. A one size catches all (which edubuntu aims for) is not, therefore, I think the best approach.
Just my 2c
[p.s. geez wierd sh*t man, I never thought I'd be posting here as a parent. Time flies ...]

Great Move

[TarrySingh]

Start with the kids! Screw the "dead ms/ word softies pushing 40 something's"

What's next?

[eyeball]

Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Edubuntu... I want Pornubuntu.

Re:What's next?

[rapidweather]

Pretty easy to do, really. My live-cd linux (see screenshots) has two applications that
1. set up a master copy on a linux hdd partition
2. Once you have added whatever you want, then the filesystem compression and iso creation is done.
These run automatically, and are easy to get going. You just have to know where you want the
master-copy placed.
Put all the images you want in /usr/share/wallpapers, and then in KDE set any of them as wallpaper. Or run 'em as a slideshow with Kuickshow. "photoshop" them with GIMP, copy one to
your home directory to do that. emelFM makes that easy.
Once you burn to CD, it's yours. Sorry I do not have screenshots up yet of these two apps, but they are there, and have menu items to start each one.

Re:What's next?

[thephotoman]

Then get with the MOTU and make the damn meta-packages. Make sure the porn you include by default is under a kosher license (CC Attribution Share-Alike should do the trick). It's not that hard to do. Just don't expect to get the porn packages into main.

Re:What's next?

[greg1104]

> Make sure the porn you include by default is under a kosher license

But what about people who aren't that fond of Jewish girls?

Re:What's next?

[thephotoman]

Okay, halal.

Or Free.

Re:What's next?

[cciRRus]

Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Edubuntu... I want Pornubuntu.

Riiiight... Pornubuntu - Linux For Horny Human Beings.

Re:What's next?

[Anonymous Coward]

>Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Edubuntu... I want Pornubuntu.

Uh no, what you're looking for is PAL (Porn Again Linux),
a distro put out by porn sites with porn themes, wallpapers,
and sounds targeted at the 18-60 male crowd. A guaranteed,
make money profitable distro.

--Johnny

Re:What's next?

[JThundley]

I wonder if anyone has ever suggested that Edubuntu block sites that you wouldn't want a kid to see. That could be a killer-app in itself. The geek's touch could be better than any commercial content-blocking. And do kids really need 4 virtual desktops?

parents who use linux

[chris_sawtell]

Yes and Yes!

But I have to get my granddaughter ( 3 ) suitably indoctrinated ( parents are 'dozey ).
Anybody know of a site / torrent to download a LiveCD of Edubuntu?

I Had To Do this

[Lehk228]

Are you LINUX USER?
Are you a PARENT?
Are you a LINUX USER PARENT?

If you answered "Yes" to all of the above questions, then LUPAA (LINUX USER PARENT ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA) might be exactly what you've been looking for!
Join LUPAA (LINUX USER PARENT ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA) today, and enjoy all the benefits of being a full-time LUPAA member.
LUPAA (LINUX USER PARENT ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA) is the fastest-growing LINUX USER PARENT community with THOUSANDS of members all over United States of America and the World! You, too, can be a part of LUPAA if you join today!

Why not? It's quick and easy - only 3 simple steps!

        * First, you have to obtain a copy of LINUXUSERPARENTS FROM OUTER SPACE THE MOVIE and watch it. You can download the movie (~130mb) using BitTorrent.
        * Second, you need to succeed in posting a LUPAA First Post on slashdot.org, a popular "news for trolls" website.
        * Third, you need to join the official LUPAA irc channel #LUPAA on irc.lupaa.us, and apply for membership.

Talk to one of the ops or any of the other members in the channel to sign up today! Upon submitting your application, you will be required to submit links to your successful First Post, and you will be tested on your knowledge of LINUX USERPARENTS FROM OUTER SPACE.

If you are having trouble locating #LUPAA, the official LINUX USER PARENT ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA irc channel, you might be on a wrong irc network. The correct network is PARENTNET, and you can connect to irc.lupaa.us as our official server. Follow this link if you are using an irc client such as mIRC.

If you have mod points and would like to support LUPAA, please moderate this post up.

Re:I Had To Do this

[ericcantona]

Ha. But no. First you have to spend 4 days getting mplayer to work so you can watch the movie you've downloaded (but dont worry this is an LUPAA entry requirement)

Re:I Had To Do this

[Beek]

LOLarious

In fact, it is hilarious enough that the trend may be copied and played out to the point where any posts in this style will be marked as a troll.

Hey, the kids who use the OS...

[Literaphile]

... can think of a better name! Edubuntu? Sheesh! As is Ubuntu isn't bad enough.

Re:Hey, the kids who use the OS...

[Literaphile]

"As if", of course, is what I meant (preview button = good).

Re:Hey, the kids who use the OS...

[HermanAB]

Be glad that Ubuntu runs on white box computers and doesn't kill -9 them...

Re:It's too bad they didn't base it off of Kubuntu

[wasabii]

What is superiour about KDE's localization? Just curious. I use GTK and as far as I can tell it's exceptional with that.

Some typing programs for Ubuntu

[linuxfanatic1024]

- KTouch
- TuxTyping
- Tipptrainer
- Typespeed

There are more, too.

AMD64?

[ghislain_leblanc]

Wow, I'm sure it's every kid's dream to have a Linux distro that supports AMD64!

sorry, kubuntu is NOT a 'distribution'

[ericcantona]

sorry. completely disagree in this specific case. kubuntu isn't (IMHO) in any meaningful sense a 'distribution'. I've tried it, I do know. It is == ubuntu with a couple of packages added and a mod'd gnome desktop. Thats it.
Now, I'm a complete *nix nut, and I love to see it promoted, and I think kubuntu is a worthy project, but I'm sorry I think it is complete nonsense to call it a distribution.
I (or any other half competent user) could take a vanilla ubuntu and with apt-get and vi in 5 mins produce 'kubuntu' for you
The people here who deserve credit are the program creators, e.g., of gcompris
[I also think you are wrong in the general sense w.r.t. distribution specialization. This is however a matter of non-rational belief (and one of the reasons I like freebsd). But that is another story]

Huh?

[Hosiah]

Wait a minute...the original Ubuntu *wasn't* just for kids 5-12? I'm confused.

Re:Huh?

[rapidweather]

Yes it was, by the time the system boots to the desktop, all questions answered, etc. they are adults. They could be old people by the time the graphic card problems are sorted out.
That was my observations when I tested the livecd version.

Re:Huh?

[Hosiah]

That was my observations when I tested the livecd version.

It's worse than that. While testing the live CD, I entered an Ubuntu chat and asked how the install CD differed. They asserted that the *only* difference was the addition of the installer program, nothing else on the live CD was touched. *shrug* Since the live CD only used 600 MBs of an 800 MB disk, I can't see this one. Oh well.

Join me for a round of, "We tell the truth about your lousy distro anyway, waste all the mod points you want!"

Re:Linux is 14 years old

[jbellows_20]

Strange thing, they do fight over which is better, vi or that other editor.

And you say they aren't nerds?

Re:It's too bad they didn't base it off of Kubuntu

[mkro]

Probably depends on where you are from, and how that translation team works :) Cyric sounds like he could be from Eastern Europe somewhere, I dunno. I usually select Norwegian as my default language after installing Ubuntu, but the mix of English and Norwegian in menus and preferences is an eyesore. It could be most of it is Ubuntu's -- not Gnome's -- fault, but when using KDE (Arch/Suse/Mandrake), lack of translations are hardly visible except for in special cases, like Amarok-SVN and Yast.

Re:*nix can be excellent for kids, but gnome is no

[thephotoman]

You can prevent that, you know, by restricting their access to gnome-terminal. Just set it so that your kids aren't in a group that can use it but you are. And for the love of GOD, make sure you teach them about logging in and out properly and do so yourself. And keep your pr0n stuff to when they're in bed.

Re:It's too bad they didn't base it off of Kubuntu

[molnarcs]

Good point, afterall, most of the packages aimed specifically for kids come from kde-edutainment (geography modul was added just recently, and is present in 3.5).

The article also reminded me of this blogI read sometimes ago. Its author (a kde dev) works for a company who provides linux solutions for - among other things - schools. The idea of an Office Suite aimed specifically at kids is very interesting, and you can see nice mockups of such a possibilities. Seeing the pictures commented Forget the children. Make this for my 58 year-old mother - and there is a part two where the developer further elaborates on the idea. Actually they are looking for volunteers to implement it:

And finally some words about the implementation. If you want this to become a reality, please volunteer your time and skill. The current engines of KWord and Karbon are great starting points, and both of these programs will probably be little more than new shells (skins if you like) on top of them.

If you volunteer to help with Kids Office, I can almost guarantee you your 15 minutes of fame. I have been approached by magazine editors who wondered if I was implementing it already and when it would be finished. So don't hesitate or be shy. You can mail me or Danny, and you could go into #koffice on irc where we hang out sometimes.

Perhaps the strong focus on education (the edutainment package has a very active developer community behind it) was one of the reasons why Mark Shuttleworth "promoted" KDE (or rather, Kubuntu) to a tier 1 status when the Novell thing happend a few weeks ago.

But what are the young being taught to value?

[jbn-o]

Will the young learn anything about software freedom? Will it be allowed to give GNU a share of the credit? If "Linux[sic] for Young Human Beings" and asking "Do you run Linux[sic]?" is the state of things, it would appear not. How sad that such effort is being put into misinformation by omission as well as aggrandization of a figure that is remarkably hostile to software freedom, and being done in the name of educating the young (precisely the audience that ought to be taught about software freedom, valuing such freedom for its own sake). How ironic that GNU is left out while we benefit so much from GNU licenses (the GNU GPL is the most popular free software license), GCC (still widely used to build a variety of FLOSS programs), and other GNU programs (which are widely distributed with most GNU/Linux distributions, including Ubuntu GNU/Linux derivatives).

Re:But what are the young being taught to value?

[angrykeyboarder]

Yo! Big Hairy Guy! uhh I mean, I mean, RMS, is that you?

I'm a linux user and a parent

[Anonymous Coward]

My wife saw the slashdot article and was very enthusiastic. The reasons are:

1. Kids mess up crapastic windows
2. She still needs windows for her applications
3. Dual boot to this educational distro is a perfect solution.

We just dloaded, burned and installed.

Re:*nix can be excellent for kids, but gnome is no

[ericcantona]

This is the nub of the matter. What is the easiest way to restrict access. My contention here is that rather than set elaborate group membership and permission schemes it is much simpler to have the kids in 'user' and operate a GUI with only 3 icons (gcompris, tuxpaint, firefox with cbeebies home page) on a simple menubar - and absolutely nothing, nothing else. This takes me about 2 min to do with icewm. It is robust and, most importantly, has to date proved to be kid-proof (the ultimate test!).
This is not the most elaborate *nix sys admin scheme (but at the end of the day I am not really a *nix sys admin, though I might pretent to be one from time to time on slashdot), but, having tried many alternatives, it has prooved robust in practice.
Restricting the kids net access is actually quite easy as at the moment I can satiate them by allowing them only to browse the bbc web site. This will not last long I realize. Then the real fun will start. As far as I know there are no really kidproof ways of keeping the p0rn away.

a good idea!

[digitallysick]

i think this is great, now parents can get linux full of apps for the kids. And hopefully at a young age they will learn how to navigate linux , since most of us grew up useing windows, the change was slightly difficult at first. If kids started with it, they should be pros by the time they are 20!

Re:*nix can be excellent for kids, but gnome is no

[thephotoman]

Don't worry about the pr0n. They'll only start looking for it when they're ready. Until then, they will instinctively hit the back button, as they're not interested.

I'd be more worried about their chat and IM access.

However, middle click does nothing on the desktop in Gnome 2.12.1 (on Ubuntu proper, though I do have the Edubuntu packages installed, to ensure that it works the same way). Right click does not give me a terminal either.

Re:what a joke

[Gadren]

Linux is about choice, and ideas about a unified distro run contrary to what it's all about.

Here's a good essay on why this is: http://www.psychocats.net/essays/unifiedlinux.php

Re:Linux is 14 years old

[Anonymous Coward]

Strange thing, they do fight over which is better, vi or that other editor.

Which other editor?

The other editor

[Urusai]

Clearly the other editor is edlin. vi users are not capable of envisioning software that can't be comfortably run over a 110 baud modem.

Possibly misguided?

[blahplusplus]

I really think this is misdirected, kids will find interesting and pursue what the *genuinely find* interesting. I think "Targetting" things for kids is kinda stupid, they will have a natural inclination towards figuring something out that the think is interesting or they wont.

NetNanny?

[pdjohe]

Just out of curiosity, does Edubuntu have any sort of application to limit what kids can find on the Internet?

One that I found after a google search was http://dansguardian.org/?page=whatisdg

I know the Slashdot crowd is generally against censorship, but would a children's Linux distribution be appropriate to have censorship as default.

Re:NetNanny?

[SamoVasGledamo]

I know the Slashdot crowd is generally against censorship, but would a children's Linux distribution be appropriate to have censorship as default. To be honest, censorship is one thing, and having your kid redirected to websites unfit to be mentioned in the classroom is another ... If this is to be used in a classroom full of 7year olds, maybe it wouldn't be such a bad idea to let the teacher filter out some of the pr0n, if at least for sanity's sake.

Re:NetNanny?

[miyako]

There are no sites censored by default, but there is a handy command in Edbuntu to help filter sites you don't want you kids to see, just drop to a shell and run
vi /etc/hosts
as root. :)

Re:NetNanny?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's not a solution. That's a techie cop out. Do you know why NetNanny exsists? So parents (myself and others) can simply subscribe to a service and get a weekly update of smut sites our kids don't really need to see. I'm not interested in rating smut and updating the host file, I just don't have that type of time. I try to spend my time with my kids, or for my family cooking or working around the house to make sure my wife isn't swamped.

If you think that sitting in front of that LCD for hours modifing edubuntu's host file will endear you to your wife or kids you would be dead wrong. You might as well start a more socially acceptable habit like raging alcoholism. At least it would make more sense to a judge in divorce court than farting around administrating the home PC.

Re:NetNanny?

[51mon]

It doesn't let you surf ".xxx" domain names ;)

Re:NetNanny?

[51mon]

For schools this is better done at the network level if it needs to be done at all.

Squid has been used extensively by schools as a proxy, and the Squid community has a number of projects to do this sort of thing.

I think home use is a harder thing to enforce (you could use similar tools if you knew how to), but I've never seen any tools do a good job at this.

Not least I think those who want to protect our children from certain types of contents often are just projecting there own hangups, and prejudices.

As regards explicit content, kids really aren't that interested until the hormones start raging, and they'll soon find some sort of outlet for these feelings at that point, computers probably being the least of a parent worries (computer don't get pregnant).

Re:Nice icons.

[oboreruhito]

Are you sure we should expose kids to a program named "The GIMP"?

THINK OF THE CHILDREN!

Re:It's too bad they didn't base it off of Kubuntu

[ambrosius27]

Both desktop environments appear to have very good internationalization.

For Gnome: http://www.gnome.org/start/2.12/notes/en/rni18.htm l and http://www.gnome.org/i18n/

For KDE: http://i18n.kde.org/stats/gui/stable/toplist.php

So, currently Gnome supports* 43 languages, and KDE supports 23 languages.**

It is not at all obvious to me how KDE's internationalization is so superior. If you could explain your rather blanket statement, I would appreciate it. Otherwise, it seems to me that both desktops have excellent internationalization. Kudos to both KDE and Gnome.

* "supports" defined as at least 80% of strings translated.
** Note: I'm sure KDE will support more languages as their 3.5.1 release comes out: the x.y.1 usually has a lot of attention devoted to translations.

Re:Linux is 14 years old

[Anonymous Coward]

The only real text editor for UNIX/Linux... Emacs, of course! Oh wait, no, it must be pico :)

Minimum hardware?

[nysus]

This is great. But does anyone know the min. hardware specs? I can't find it on their rather sparse site.

GNOME Based?

[Jameth]

I always wonder why so many distributions insist on being GNOME-based. In general, it results in things like the list of apps that edubuntu uses. In short, the list has 18 KDE-apps, 1 GNOME-app, and 6 apps that use GTK but no desktop specific libs, despite the fact that Ubuntu is nominally GNOME-based. It seems that GNOME offers little in the way of important libraries, or more groups already writing GTK software for Linux would bother to make them GNOME apps, and less people would go to KDE as a platform.

Now, don't get me wrong, GNOME has made some great backend stuff. Beagle and GStreamer in particular jump to mind, but the desktop as a whole just doesn't seem to offer all that much. It's not even that I necessarily think that GNOME is the wrong choice (although I personally wouldn't choose it), it's just that all the distros that choose it (including Ubuntu and most everything else) don't appear to give any strong argument for why, so I'm somewhat confused as to what they base their decisions on.

Re:GNOME Based?

[Dan Farina]

Gnome is nice, (reasonably) simple, and boring. KDE looks like the kitchen sink has been thrown into your screen, out of the box. To tell you the truth, I can't stand it.

Then again, I don't use my DE/WM for much. I've considered switching to .+box, if I ever get around to configuring the .rcs to the way I like them.

Re:GNOME Based?

[scharkalvin]

I used to use Gnome, but at some point (on Debian) it got broken and would not work (bad packages?) so I switched to KDE and havn't looked back. Actually BOTH have some features missing from the other, especially in the area of config apps. For example, Gnome has a real nice setup gui for Samba while KDE makes adding printers under cups a dream. I'd like to steal bits and pieces from both and get the best of both (blue curve?)

Re:GNOME Based?

[kopykat]

basically the gnome desktop it uses is a simplified version of any other gnome desktop from my own experience.. but what i can say one thing for ubuntu.. it is a work of genius.. . good for kids is right! education! true! the live cd in my own experience is extravagantly set up for simplicity and ease.. and the installation is an automated cd format but what kills the whole meaning of any kind of any real "open source potential" is that is all it has to offer.. if open source is going to create software for education create a whole new project.. don't add something that does't even effectively run unix unless your 10.. mentally challenged :-) or just not smart enough to use an operating systems that requires real posix composite programming.. such as a real shell and command line interaction.. the system comes equipped with a shell called dash.. and to install a c shell you have to go through every library on the cd. a work of genius yes.. but a real operating system NO..

Re:GNOME Based?

[kopykat]

BTW i don't even use the gnome desktop... the kde desktop has a few fancy features but i don't think i can misconstrue it with a real kde desktop.

Re:Indoctrinate them while they're young?

[oztiks]

I have to say that almost everything in the kids product world could be ridiculed this way like Fish Price and Cabbige Patch or even Barbie. _They_ all inadvertantly indoctrate kids in one way, realistically you cant stop children from developing influenced behaviour from using various products and the parent who attempt to stop these things influencing their kids because they believe that its "evil" usually produce children who function badly in society.

I hardly think that its an indoctranation using Linux, perhaps the biggest thing that will be impressed on the kids will be the cuddly penguin and perhaps increase stuffed penguin sales. It really seems like a great idea and hopefully Toy vendors actually see it in working action and actually plan the usage of their Toys around it.

Re:Linux is 14 years old

[chris_eineke]

vi or that other editor.

You mean taco?

Re:I'm not Human

[HermanAB]

Cool, were you born, or were you invented?

Re:10 years later...

[HermanAB]

Wow, MS is planning to include highlight and middle click in Windows? Maybe then Windows will finally be ready for the desktop.

I - heart - Ubuntu

[stavromueller]

I love those Ubuntu people, almost as much as Google. Good work guys!

Bill would be...

[Nolkyan]

A recent bulletin in Bill's inbox noted that Linux causes cancer in five states.

Re:Linux is 14 years old

[xsspd2004]

Vim?

--
Dave
http://www.davidearls.info/

Re:*nix can be excellent for kids, but gnome is no

[N3Roaster]

Wait... you don't want them to use `rm -Rf *'? Okay, they wipe out the contents of their home directory. Maybe they `cd /' first, but that's no big deal because they aren't running as root. Your five year old isn't root, right? This shouldn't be an issue.

I suppose the desktop environment I'd pick for a five year old would probably be something like Squeak. Educationally oriented, no clearing necessary, and would have been a lot more interesting to me as a five year old than something that was obviously crippled.

"first African in space"

[Anonymous Coward]

It's incorrect to call him an "African". You can accurately call him the "first South African" in space, but he is certainly not an African.

Re:Can Linux print photos? :)

[scharkalvin]

TROLL!

Re:*nix can be excellent for kids, but gnome is no

[weierstrass]

>I don't want them to be able to middle-click, bring up a terminal and 'rm -Rf *'.

Your five yr old has root access?

Dogma Quote

[Shawn is an Asshole]

Cardinal Glick: "Fill them pews, people, that's the key. Grab the little ones as well. Hook 'em while they're young."

Rufus: "Kind of like the tobacco industry?"

Cardinal Glick: "Oh, if only we had their numbers."

GPL makes life easier for derivative works

[weierstrass]

Like Debian, Gnome is completely free.
While the licensing of KDE / Qt tools of course doesn't stop you from building KDE into your own distro, with Gnome it's simply not something you ever have to worry about.

Re:GPL makes life easier for derivative works

[Jameth]

What makes it seem odd to me is that the only argument I hear for GNOME is the licensing argument. Yeah, GNOME means commercial apps don't have to pay a dime to use GTK+ and so-on and so-forth, while on KDE they need to pay a few thousand for Qt. But that's held against a wealth of other features KDE has that GNOME is lacking, and the commercial app that can't afford to pay a couple thousand bucks to use Qt is pretty well screwed to start with.

I just expect a choice to be based off of more than that one point, and I keep not seeing it. I mean, KDE and Qt are just about universally considered easier to program for than GTK and GNOME, so you know that will save more money than the licenses will, and KDE has a better developed set of libraries as best I can tell. As I said, I just don't see the reasoning.

Re:GPL makes life easier for derivative works

[Anonymous Coward]

so you know that will save more money than the licenses will, and KDE has a better developed set of libraries as best I can tell.

Hmm sound like M$ marketing.

Re:GPL makes life easier for derivative works

[Anonymous Coward]

What are you saying? KDE is pure GPL, while GNOME is LGPL.

Re:Linux is 14 years old

[zootm]

Strange thing, they do fight over which is better, vi or that other editor.

And you say they aren't nerds?

Must be speaking relatively...

Yes, first African in space

[Anonymous Coward]

Mark is a native of Africa (South Africa), therefore he is African (and South African). Go study geography ;-)

Re:Can Linux print photos? :)

[Mostly a lurker]

It depends on the availability of drivers for Linux. Are there printer drivers for Linux? I checked hp.com, canon.com and epson.com. NO DRIVERS FOR LINUX.

I am not sure about Canon, but I know for a fact that there are good Linux drivers for most HP and Epson devices. As basic drivers, they are often better than those available for Windows. Of course, if you actually like the bloatware that successfully destabalises half of the Windows setups I look at, the functional nature of the Linux drivers might disappoint you.

Doesn't do DHCP?

[coderpunk]

Tried installing it over a previous Ubuntu 5.04 and it asks for a static IP every time. Something's broken in the release available for download right now...

Re:Doesn't do DHCP?

[linuxbz]

This is somewhere in between a feature and a bug ;-)

The default installation sets up an Ubuntu vesion of Linux Terminal Server Project (LTSP). In that, the IP address of the server (assuming you are only using one network card) really needs to be known, which is why it is asking.

There was some discussion on the list that the next release needs to ask whether you have one network card or two, and allow the Internet card to use DHCP as you might expect.

Remember that Edubuntu is targeted for a classroom, especially in developing countries, where LTSP will be a huge asset. If you do NOT want to use this computer as an LTSP server, you would type "workstation" (without the quotes) at the CD prompt and the DHCP should work fine.

http://wiki.edubuntu.org/EdubuntuInstallNotes

Re:Linux is 14 years old

[thrillseeker]

Strange thing, they do fight over which is better, vi or that other editor.

You mean "cat > output.txt"?

Re:Linux is 14 years old

[destiney]

You mean "dd if=/dev/tty of=/dev/hda1"?
 

Re:*nix can be excellent for kids, but gnome is no

[skimitar]

I've got two kids (5 & 2.5 yr old).

Speaking as a parent, the 2.5 isn't geeky exactitude, those 0.5's matter. My daughter went from 7 to 7 and a quarter to 7 and a third etc... and woe betide me if I left off the fraction.

And that extra 0.5 gives you rank in the playground like you wouldn't believe (like running a 2.4 kernel vs a 2.6 in the kind of circle that gives a shit about that stuff).

He's hardly a "native"

[Anonymous Coward]

He's part of the white dominating force that has conquered Africa. He lived completely sheltered from how the real natives lived, in a whites-only enclave.

Re:He's hardly a "native"

[Anonymous Coward]

So according to you, in order to be African you MUST be black and dominated ? Do you have a little bit of respect for African people ?

And I am sorry but the color of Mark's skin does not allow you to say he his not African. According to the very definition of "native", Mark is native since he is born in Free State, a province of South Africa:

native
adj 1: being such by origin; "the native North American sugar
maple"; "many native artists studied abroad"
2: belonging to one by birth; "my native land"; "one's native
language"

Go read the dictionary next time ;-)

Re:He's hardly a "native"

[mattwarden]

And here all this time I thought I was an American because I lived in the US. Turns out I'm just part of the white dominating force that has conquered the US from the natives.

Re:He's hardly a "native"

[Anonymous Coward]

Correct, whitey.

I have been using this for some time

[droops]

I have given several older machines away with Edubuntu on them. The kids are playing with them in seconds. Show them that they put a cd in and then its ready to burn, then show them the menu and they are ready to go. Parents love it because its "Educational" kids love it because it has games, I love it because its linux and it can easily take the place of win 98 on an older second machine.

I like it so much I even wrote up a tfile for some help in getting the user interface set up like that other os and getting the apps compatible for school and whatnot.

http://www.infonomicon.org/text/edubuntu-for-kids. txt

No live CD?

[Anonymous Coward]

No live CD version of Edubuntu? Why? It would seem that a live CD would be THE reason for edubuntu. Teachers could use the live CD in their labs, setting up various (and alternating) Edubuntu computers for labwork. Just pop in a disc and VIOLA--hundreds of free educational programs and apps available without having to install on the computer (which may not be allowed by the school district, may not have enough install space, etc.).

Re:It's too bad they didn't base it off of Kubuntu

[bitfoo]

Mod parent up. These random statements based on absolutely no factual data at all do nothing to help anyone at all. Making up facts based purely on your own preferences does not prove one thing or another. And yes, GNOME has far better internationalization support. We also need to give a nod to the Ubuntu team, who's goal from day one has been support for a vast mulitude of languages, and integrating all these seamlessly.

Re:It's too bad they didn't base it off of Kubuntu

[Anonymous Coward]

You're comparing two differnt environments released at two different times. GNOME 2.12 has been out almost 3 months for the translators to work on (plus whatever time they had during the beta release phase, I'm not that familiar with GNOME's infrastructure). KDE 3.5 (what you are comparing it with) hasn't even been out a whole week yet (although translation teams work during the beta). KDE also has a lot more software that needs translation (some might call it bloat, but it still needs translation). I may be wrong, though. I'm not majorly involved in either project, although I do use KDE - I'm emerging 3.5 now).

Re:Linux is 14 years old

[dnoble]

has everyone forgotten...
"ed is the standard text editor"

FreeDuc was there first!!

[znmeb]

Yeah but ... FreeDuc got there first! FreeDuc is a Knoppix-based educational LiveCD. http://www.ofset.org/articles/29

Re:FreeDuc was there first!!

[51mon]

Freeduc is cool. I gave a demo to local LUG, and invited loads of teachers along (a few even came, in fact we hardly recognised any of the regulars in the crowd), gave out CDs, early 2003.

I even learnt stuff about the shepherding moons of Saturn whilst preparing my talk, some of the astronomy apps were really astounding (even if it did keep trying to predict the location of Mir and getting it way off!), it was even more amazing they were all piled on one LiveCD with the OS, Wordprocessor, Spreadsheet, and bucket loads of other software, and support for seven languages at the time.

Freeduc also has LTSP integrated. And Apache starts up to demonstrate some web based classroom software, including a very good maths quiz system with integrated reporting so the teachers could know who had done what exercises etc.

Of course this is where I first used "tuxpaint", which is an essential app for all distros aimed at small children (and the young at heart).

However I don't think my talk led to too many new converts to "GNU/Linux" desktops in schools. As such I don't think the success of GNU/Linux is really dependent on availability of distros, or LiveCDs.

Freeduc really demonstrated how much could be done for so little in the Educational sector, if only people would exercise some imagination. But how you sell this to the people that matter I don't know, take them for drinks on expensive yachts in warm climes I suspect.

Re:FreeDuc was there first!!

[znmeb]

Every year here in the USA we have something called "Take Your Child To Work Day". Of course, since I work at a computer company, I volunteered to run a session and used FreeDuc. And I gave each participant a copy of the CD and the manual. We had some left over, but the kids loved it! I was quite amazed with what was on the CD for "professional" users. It's almost as complete as the "grown-up" version, Quantian (http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/quantian). BTW, there is a FreeDuc 1.5 aimed at younger (primary school) students. I have not checked it out, though.

Re:Linux is 14 years old

[desmodromic]

damn. wish I had a mod point :)

Re:*nix can be excellent for kids, but gnome is no

[znmeb]

Yeah ... I posted up above about FreeDuc. FreeDuc uses the XFCE desktop -- much lighter than Gnome.

Misleading: $250..... after rebate

[MarkByers]

Oh and you forgot to mention the forced $79 extra subscription fee for 'Internet Security'. A service which is only required for Windows because it is too insecure to look after itself. So now we are looking at a $379 initial payment.

If you were an advertiser, you could be sued for misleading advertising.

Re:Linux is 14 years old

[mattmacf]

Strange thing, they do fight over which is better, vi or that other editor. They're nerds.

Interesting diversion

[Anonymous Coward]

So my child has to be 5 for me to install Linux on him/her? Look out world!

Mediabuntu

[chiok]

I'd love to see a *buntu with all the uncrippled media programs, sun java, and such. Something like the Unofficial Ubuntu 5.04 Add-On CD preinstalled.

Re:*nix can be excellent for kids, but gnome is no

[ericcantona]

Obviously not. So, no, they can't mash the system -- which is of course one of the beauties of using a *nix system. But still I dont want them to mess up their own files. Apart from the work it causes me (not great) there is sometimes stuff there I'd rather not loose, e.g., photo's that have been uploaded from the camera.
I think this is a general issue. There have got to be lots of circumstances where it would be better if users didn't scramble their own home dir. With slightly more mature users (wife, grandparents) it prob is okay to let them mess stuff up. Cos, in my admittedly limited experience, if somebody can muck up a system then they will.
Infact, thinking of this I think I'm going to go now and reset some bash commands to root only. Let my wife just move stuff to trash ('mv') and disable 'rm' for her. She does sorta know what she's doing but that doesnt stop "but I didnt want to do that" every now and again.

What happened to education?

[Anonymous Bullard]

What happened to education? It should be paramount that the first (6-9) years of education concentrate on teaching the kids how to learn, not how to master one or two specific workflow tools (which will inevitably be somewhat different anyway by the time the student enters the job market).

Later in secondary and tertiary education, when the kids have already learnt how to acquire new skills, it'll be easy to introduce them to more specific tools. Until then it'll be largely waste of education resources *and* the kids' appetite for learning to teach them how to make neat presentations and other fluff before they've even learnt to create, arrange and filter through actual content properly.

(Ed)ubuntu with its simplified and remotely manageable desktop is perfectly adequate for young students' needs and national education authorities should pool their resources together to build even better teaching tools and applications for their purposes while localizing tools and apps created by others. Perhaps the Edubuntu site could become a venue for such multinational collaboration effort? One area that could be an early priority is building a set of (multimedia?) tools for easy content-creation by teachers.

Awwww

[deaddrunk]

"Honey, junior said his first RTFM!"

Re:*nix can be excellent for kids, but gnome is no

[penguinoid]

1. You have separate user accounts, right? Use them.
2. If you are afraid they will wipe their own directory, make a copy (eg in your directory), doesn't need to be a serious backup.
3. Not sure if your system has this, but I can create a new login, without logging out. Applications --> System Tools --> New Login, on my Debian system. It will lock your screen and create a new login. You can switch between them with ctrl-alt-F7 and higher. If your kid does this, that's what the locked screen is for.
4. Your kid will not *randomly* type `rm -rf *`, though it is very likely they would hear about said command and try it. It'll be a good lesson. That's where the backup comes in.

Re:Linux is 14 years old

[1nhuman]

and neither of them are nerds. Strange thing, they do fight over which is better, vi or that other editor.

I don't want to offend you, I think nerds are cool, but euhm newsflash... they are nerds if they fight over vi being a better editor or not.

Re:10 years later...

[whowho]

Chill dude. My experience was seeing too many kids raised with VBstudio thinking the world revolves around that and its wizards. I have yet to see too many kids raised thinking the world revolves around Linux based IDEs.

poor children

[felaras]

omg, leave the children out of it...

Re:Can Linux print photos? :)

[Anonymous Coward]

Nice to know drivers available for HP and Epson!

I'm interested on any one of the following printers:
HP Photosmart 8700
Epson Stylus Photo R1800
Epson Stylus Photo R800

When I goto HP, this is what I see:
http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/softwareCategor y?product=426109&lc=en&cc=us&dlc=en&submit.y=7&sub mit.x=5&lang=en&cc=us

When I goto Epson, this is what I see:
http://www.epson.com/cgi-bin/Store/support/supDeta il.jsp?BV_UseBVCookie=yes&oid=14121&prodoid=535409 19&infoType=Downloads&platform=All

Do you see anything different than I see?

Could you post hear the location of the drivers for the above printers?

Re:Linux is 14 years old

[Thomas Miconi]

And you say they aren't nerds?

I think it depends on whether "that other editor" is Emacs or ed.

Thomas-

Re:*nix can be excellent for kids, but gnome is no

[ericcantona]

thanks. looks good. downloading iso now to see how it works in practice

Re:10 years later...

[protonman]

> I have yet to see too many kids raised thinking the world revolves around Linux
> based IDEs.

And when you'll see them, what then?

Who cares about non-English speakers?

[Anonymous Coward]

Silly foreigner.

should different apps = different distro?

[walterbyrd]

One linux distro includes apps A,B,C,D.

Another linux distro is exactly the same, but include apps A,B,C,E.

So we end up with hundreds of distros, many with very little difference between them.

To me, it seems idiotic, and has seemed idiotic for years. Distro makers often tout the applications they throw in as special features, as if it's something unique to their distro, you see OpenOffice in their feature list.

I like debian's 100mb base system download approach. I don't have to download a ton of cr@p I don't want, I don't have to sort through the lists of hundreds of apps selecting the apps I want.

No reason to fork the distro everytime you change the included applications.

Why not Debian Jr.?

[fernique]

Please, have a look at http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-jr/.

MOD PARENT DOWN serial Gnome v. KDE troll

[Anonymous Coward]

CyricZ makes a point of policy to turn every story he can find into a gnome vs. KDE flamewar. This can be observed here and here his point about KDE was a blanket generalisation intended only to insite argument in this relitively nice thread.

If you have mod points, please do not bring this troll any more attention than he already has. Thank you.

No offense, but...

[The Grassy Knoll]

> Are you a Linux user? Are you a parent?

Way to catch that tiny demographic! You go, Edubuntu!

.

Re:Can Linux print photos? :)

[Anonymous Coward]

You can go to http://www.linuxprinting.org/. They have all the information you need. You can check how well a particular printer works with linux there. AFAIK, the drivers are supplied as part of the foomatic package and then you have a bunch spoolers available. CUPS has been the most convenient for me.

Re:It's too bad they didn't base it off of Kubuntu

[ambrosius27]

You may be correct that KDE bundles more software in its release, thus making it harder to achieve the 80% "supported" category for each language. I'm not familiar enough with KDE to say one way or another.

I will point out, however, that the release notes for Gnome 2.12.0 says that Gnome has 43 supported languages. That is, 2.12.0 has 43 supported languages, whereas 3.5.0 has 23. So, in some sense, I am still comparing apples to apples.

All of that is besides the point, though. The point is that *both* desktops have very good internationalization. The claim that KDE's internationalization is vastly superior to Gnome's just seems very suspect, unless that poster can come up with more than a blanket statement without any evidence.

It's cute...but can it dance.

[Anonymous Coward]

I love ubuntu linux, but half of the things in this distro wouldn't attract any 5-12 year old I know, like my kids or the kids next door. The feedback rating from about ten kids, some of mine, some of the neighbours and the after school crowd that eats everything out of the fridge ranged from:

- "where's reader rabbit?"
- "Where is my pooh bear reading game?"
- "Where's Dora Explorer?"
- "This sucks."
- "Why is there no sound?" - fixed
- "This still sucks"
- "Need for speed won't run on this." - not fixed with WINE
- "ummmm...the screen saver is pretty."

Now why linux fails in the educational software department is because we as a community are extremely weak with anything creative external to our own niche universe of compiling distros. Most kids could give a damn about if it was open source or not. They want lots of flash, something that holds short attention spans for hours, that really isn't a suggestion it's a requirement.

It's too bad that we're all such geeks and have no tangible artistic ability otherwise we would objectively look at what kids play with today. Looking at this distro I would say it was made by those odd balls that homeschool their children and lock down every channel but PBS. While this distro may be excellent for those parents with societially differing interests, the rest of us have soccer, hockey practice, PS2, Reader rabbit, library books, lunches to make and kids wrangle.

Long story short, the flash cards with dora the explorer and the science fact held the kids attention longer than this distro did. You want to know why. It was interactive.

This proves why Linux folks dont get it.

[Anonymous Coward]

This is hilarious. its not that the idea is bad, but rather the humerous download page. Read the damn thing. Its obvious if your a linux user you'll see no problem.

http://wiki.edubuntu.org/EdubuntuInstallNotes

For the layman, child or non technical user, you've already lost them. Seriously linux folks, you need to get more education in human interaction and usability. That download page is far too technical for a parent or child or someone who ISNT familiar with computers in general. They should simply need to download the file, run an install and be done with it. Its ridiculous. If you want to keep promoting Linux to the same crowd of people (parents who use Linux) hey more power to you. But if your trying to do these things to expand your market, you're competely clueless.

And you all wonder how windows NT killed Novell and why windows dominates the desktop. And no, it isnt just because of marketing. Seriously, the linux community needs to evaluate itself in the area of "consumer" usage and marketing if it wants to dent the windows dominance on the desktop.

Re:*nix can be excellent for kids, but gnome is no

[level_headed_midwest]

You should set them up with their own user account and NOT let it into the admin group. That way, they will just get errors when they have NO sudo available. The very worst they could do is erase their own account. Then you can set it back up, no harm no foul.

Re:Can Linux print photos? :)

[level_headed_midwest]

There sure as heck are HP Linux printer drivers. HP has theirs for my printer (PSC 2110) on SourceForge's hpofficejet page. But they are usually built into the distro to begin with. Google HPAIO, HPLIP, or PTAL and you'll see.

Re:Can Linux print photos? :)

[Mostly a lurker]

HP Photosmart 8700

Epson Stylus Photo R800

Above two known to be good. The driver for the Epson Stylus Photo R1800 listed by linuxprinting.org appears to have a few issues, but works adequately. I expect I could find a better driver if I had a reason to.

Yet another shitty name

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously, wtf is Ubuntu? Warty Warthog? Edubuntu is just as bad. If the names weren't complete crap, I'd give them a try, but there is no fucking way I'd tell someone "Yeah, I'm running Breezy Badger Ubuntu on my desktop".

Re:Yet another shitty name

[knghtrider]

"Ubuntu" is an ancient African word, meaning "humanity to others". Ubuntu also means "I am what I am because of who we all are". The Ubuntu Linux distribution brings the spirit of Ubuntu to the software world.

Straight from the website..the very first thing you read is the above section. Personally, I like Ubuntu---I run Kubuntu and I enjoy the animal names they give to the releases (btw..next release will be v6.04--Dapper Drake.). IF you indeed had looked at Ubuntu, you would know this. Personally, I like how everything is neatly packaged up for you, it installs nicely, and to date, I haven't found any bugs that have kept me from being productive. Even the upgrade to KDE 3.5 is great.

So..if we read this correctly--EdUbuntu, would be 'Education to Humanity'. Sounds like a great idea. Thank you Mark Shuttlesworth.

Re:Yet another shitty name

[kopykat]

i use ubuntu just for the sake of exploring the OS itself.. other than what I have just heard about new linux for education of youngsters. i see no real potential in this operating system.. it just basically a gnome application desktop configured to look just that "ubuntu" and libraries added in there for upgrading or customizing all done in a non-posix unix rhetoric.. basically you use a gui interface pick out the lib functions you want and it does everything for you.. looks like a subtle linux version of windows policy integrated into a few fancy names and utilitiies grinded togeher effectively enough to sell by making kde the other thing you can do.. take it from me if you are already an effective unix user this operating system is a toy.. even though (and I stress even though) i myself gave a ubuntu hoary hedge hog distro package to my neighbors son as incentive to try out some of the open source software since he had just recieved his first computer for his eighteenth birthday (probably because it come packaged with a live cd).. but i also made sure to give him something he can use a "fedora core 2 package". i think in the long run he would benefit from the fedora alot more than the ubuntu.. linux for all maybe ?! "but i guess that depends on who all is!"

Re:Yet another shitty name

[angrykeyboarder]

"...but there is no fucking way I'd tell someone 'Yeah, I'm running Breezy Badger Ubuntu on my desktop'."

Uhhh..

You don't like Breezy Badger? Then say "5.10" instead....

http://releases.ubuntu.com/breezy/ is a/k/a:
http://releases.ubuntu.com/5.10/
(or is it the other way around?).

Also maybe a good massage is in order? You seem a bit uptight..... ;-)

Re:Yet another shitty name

[angrykeyboarder]

I've used Fedora core 3 and 4, Debian etch and Sid, Mandrake 7 and 8, RedHat 7, SuSE 7, 9.x and 10 and Ubuntu 5.04 and 5.10.

You can geek out all you want on any of these operating systems. Don't run X at all. Run just a plain old shell. And while you're at it, forget bash, install and run pdksh,tcsh or Zsh instead.

Coder? There is every imaginable package you could want available. Perl,Python,Ruby,GCC, QT, GTK and anything else you'd find in Debian right now.....

That's the thing about Ubuntu. It's Debian Improved. It's "pretty" on the outside but has the guts and the heart of Debian below.

The last time I checked there were over 17000 packages in the Ubuntu archives.

And that's one of my favorite things about Ubuntu when compared to Fedora. 1) They have more packages than Fedora and 2). The base install that gets you up and running is only on 1 CD. If you want or need more it's an apt-get away.....

Fedora is a FOUR CD distribution. And most of what you are downloading is stuff you'll never use.

So why download stuff you'll never use instead of stuff you will use?

Fedora could learn from Ubuntu, reduce it's base install to one CD and then suggest you "yum install..." anything else you want or need.

That's just what Ubuntu is doing right now.

As far as desktops go, I don't really see that much different between the two (save for color schemes). Fedora has "up-to-date", Ubuntu has "update manager".

They both follow freedesktop.org standards so the menus are pretty much the same.

I'm sorry, but I don't see how Fedora is any better.

Re:Linux is 14 years old

[IchBinEinPenguin]

Strange thing, they do fight over which is better, vi or that other editor.

This is exactly the kind of shoddy, one-sided, hate-mongering, flame-war-enciting parenting that turn perfectly sane children into gentoo users!

Re:10 years later...

[whowho]

Uh, I'll make sure I let you know so that we can savour the moment together. How about that?

my nrrd grrl digs it

[decompiler]

i installed edubuntu about a week ago, and my 6 year old is constantly on my server now... she digs the tuxpaint, gcompris education suite, four-in-a-row, and of course the potato guy in tux mode!

I respectfully disagree

[reptyle]

I disagree because the first computers I used when I was twelve, thirteen, etc, were an HP 3000 (at school -- time share accounts) amd an altos minicomputer, running CP/M.

What they shared, and the basis for my premise, were multi-user, multi-tasking command-line environments that demanded verbal agility and procedural thinking (here, I am *NOT* using procedural as the antonym of object-oriented; I am simply using it in a methodical, incremental context). Both paved the way for my comfort with linux a decade and a half later and predisposed me to prefer *nix operating systems.

It would be a logical fallacy for me to presume my experience and choices would be universal, or that one's childhood OS predetermines one's adult usage, but I think it's fair to say that what one learns at an impressionable age could REASONABLY presage one's choices of computing environment as an adult.

Fabuntu

[christefano]

I'm working with the MIT FabLab in Boston, Mass, on Fabuntu:

The Fabuntu Project is built ontop of the Ubuntu operating system and inherits the ideas enshrined in the Ubuntu Manifesto: that software should be available free of charge, that software tools should be usable by people in their local language, and that people should have the freedom to customize and alter their software in whatever way they need. We are in the process of altering the Ubuntu distribution to fit the needs of FabLabs throughout the world. Our aim is to put usability first. We believe that the tools should JUST WORK!