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

KDE?

[xSacha]

One thing to note is that all these schools that take up linux use KDE as environment of choice. I've heard of a dozen schools and countries that use linux in the classroom now and every single one is KDE. Why not gnome? Why not something else?

I know KDE has Kiosk and some Brazilian educational software, but is that it? I think KDE tries to sell itself as an educational platform as well. But.. why not Gnome? Gnome has huge potential to be in classrooms if they make an educational suite. This would also boost linux adoption. So why not?

Half measures

[leandrod]

Go for Gnome for ease of use, and host-and-terminals for lower costs. Then I will believe.

Nothing against multihead per se, it is nice but only reaches its full potential when you have central processing in a host.

Re:M$ strikes back

[jaguth]

The time will come when a young Brazilian discovers X-Windows to crash during boot, giving a bash console. "Where do i click to open X-Windows?". Sigh, while KDE is fanciful, it doesn't do much good if X-Windows isn't configured properly and crashes during boot. I've had this happen with every linux flavor & version i've ever used. There better be enough linux technicians supporting this to deal with these issues. My advise to the little brazilian kid: "type rm -rf / , that will get you back into X-windows... heh heh heh"

I wonder why

[willyhill]

I have to thank all of you nutballs who have called me Twitter

That's funny, since you've been linking to his lame journal for a long time. Well, "long time" for an account with less than 300 posts.

Maybe it's the fact that you write exactly like twitter, right down to the same constant spelling and grammar mistakes. Maybe it's the fact that you show up in the epic sockpuppet threads. Or maybe it's things like these.

But maybe it's just the fact that you are twitter.

Re:I wonder what is MS going to do about it?

[synthespian]

Linux is already sold pre-installed on cheap hardware in Brazil. They sit right next to Vista boxen, with a pathetic resource-hungry KDE desktop, full of little click-on menus (mail, browser). Here's a photo: http://www.link.estadao.com.br/index.cfm?id_conteudo=12583

The first thing users do is remove Linux and install a pirate XP.

The type of user who buys this is someone who needs a computer but doesn't want to pay the more expensive MS product. He knows shit about Linux and would like to install MS Office (pirate) on it. His 10 year-old is all excited, thinking he now is gonna be able to play awsome video games and outcool the kids in the hood that have PS2. Heh. The cruely of it all.

There's absolutely nothing securing more future Microsoft mindshare than the Linux boxen being sold in Brazil.