KDE Desktops For 52 Million Students In Brazil

An anonymous reader writes "Mauricio Piacentini writes about a deployment of systems running Linux and KDE in Brazil's schools; some 52 million students are to be served by this initiative. 'What is interesting about this project is that it not only provides infrastructure (computers and net connectivity) but also open content to students in public schools. The software installed on these systems is "Linux Educacional 2.0," a very clean Debian-based distribution, with KDE 3.5, KDE-Edu, KDE-Games, and some tools developed by the project.' The distro comes in Portuguese only at this time." quarterbuck notes that Linux is making other inroads in the BRIC economies (Brazil-Russia-India-China): India and China are getting a custom-designed Ubuntu laptop from Dell, and Russia is making their own Ubuntu laptop this year.

Comments

Re:Excellent!

[abigor]

Actually, it's only around 825 000 installs (55 000 labs * 15 "access points" per lab) serving several tens of millions of students. It's still a lot, but not as huge as one install per student.

Re:Building a new PC vs. switching

[Hadlock]

I've had really good luck with intel brand motherboards. Other than futzing about with an eithernet driver on a 7.x version of ubuntu (works in most recent version), intel has pretty good driver support, and the boards exceedingly rarely fail. Price/features are competitive with other name brand boards like Asus.

Re:Building a new PC vs. switching

[indifferent children]

I'd just like a $200-$300 laser printer on the network, from the printer compatibility lists I've found there isn't one.

I run a Brother 5250dn on my home network, with no problems printing from linux or Windows. My mother runs one of the cheap ($100) Brother lasers (no duplexing) on her home network, and prints from linux with no trouble. Even the setup was a breeze; the CUPS configuration GUI found the printer, and suggested the correct driver. I was shocked at how seamless this was.