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

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,

And Skolelinux?

[Moosbert]

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

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: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.

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: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.