Ubuntu Wiki

Dev Week -- How to help with Edubuntu -- JonathanCarter -- Fri, Jul 16th, 2010

(03:01:36 PM) highvoltage: Good morning / afternoon / evening depending on where you are!
(03:01:46 PM) highvoltage: This session is on Edubuntu, and how to get involved
(03:02:15 PM) highvoltage: It's not as interactive as mhall119's session from earlier, and not quite as well prepared as jcastro's session
(03:02:55 PM) highvoltage: I moved from South Africa to Canada about two weeks ago, and I'm in the process of moving to a new apartment so to say that I'm all over the place at the moment is a bit of an understatement :)
(03:03:21 PM) highvoltage: In this session, I hope to introduce you to the project and make it easy to get involved, I'll cover:
(03:03:27 PM) highvoltage: • What the Edubuntu project is,
(03:03:43 PM) highvoltage: • What we do
(03:03:50 PM) highvoltage: • Community structure
(03:03:55 PM) highvoltage: • and how you could get involved.
(03:04:48 PM) highvoltage: if there's any questions, feel free to ask at any time in #ubuntu-classroom-chat, if you append QUESTION to your question, the bot will notify my in a private message
(03:05:04 PM) highvoltage: (although at this stage in the developer week I'm sure everyone knows that by now ;) )
(03:05:36 PM) highvoltage: Let's start at the beginning, usually a very good place to start.
(03:05:57 PM) highvoltage: The Edubuntu project takes on a quite a few tasks
(03:06:34 PM) highvoltage: ons of the most important tasks is supporting, maintaining packages relating to education in Ubuntu
(03:06:39 PM) highvoltage: that also includes bug fixes
(03:07:11 PM) highvoltage: if you followed the session on adopt-an-upstream earlier, it's like the Edubuntu team adopted all of the educational packages in the Ubuntu repositories
(03:07:46 PM) highvoltage: not quite as formally though, but after that session we might actually do it :)
(03:08:35 PM) highvoltage: if you'd like to get involved with Edubuntu on a technical level, then bug fixes are a great place to start
(03:09:08 PM) highvoltage: you can find a list of current bugs in the packages that we track at the following URL:
(03:09:18 PM) highvoltage: https://bugs.launchpad.net/~edubuntu-bugs/+packagebugs
(03:09:58 PM) highvoltage: you'll notice that there are currently 356 open bugs being tracked
(03:10:40 PM) highvoltage: and that the packages range from educational software, to system management tools useful for classrooms and more
(03:11:13 PM) highvoltage: while Edubuntu tracks the bugs in these packages, most of these packages are also tracked by other teams
(03:11:25 PM) highvoltage: for example,
(03:12:18 PM) highvoltage: ltsp, ltspfs and ldm are all part of LTSP, which are maintained by the LTSP team (https://launchpad.net/ltsp)
(03:12:58 PM) highvoltage: and the kdeedu suite is also maintained by the Kubuntu team who does a great job of looking at Ubuntu's KDE packages
(03:13:35 PM) highvoltage: there are some packages which are maintained by us only
(03:13:48 PM) highvoltage: you could think of them as the packages for which we are upstream
(03:14:13 PM) highvoltage: these are usually the packages that I personally give most attention to since they're vital for being able to install an Edubuntu system
(03:14:37 PM) highvoltage: these package names typically begin with edubuntu- or ubuntu-edu
(03:14:44 PM) highvoltage: examples are:
(03:14:58 PM) highvoltage:  ∘ ubuntu-edu-preschool
(03:15:02 PM) highvoltage:  ∘ ubuntu-edu-primary
(03:15:05 PM) highvoltage:  ∘ ubuntu-edu-secondary
(03:15:09 PM) highvoltage:  ∘ ubuntu-edu-tertiary
(03:15:24 PM) highvoltage:  ∘ edubuntu-artwork
(03:15:31 PM) highvoltage:  ∘ edubuntu-live
(03:15:38 PM) highvoltage:  ∘ edubuntu-desktop
(03:16:10 PM) highvoltage: the ubuntu-edu-* packages are metapackages
(03:16:42 PM) highvoltage: metapackages are packages that don't contain any direct data, but contains information such as dependencies, so they end up just installing other software
(03:17:03 PM) highvoltage: ubuntu-edu-preschool will install an application bundle for really young kids
(03:17:31 PM) highvoltage: primary and secondary for school kids, and tertiary for post-secondary studends
(03:18:19 PM) highvoltage: we don't write any of the educational software ourselves
(03:18:47 PM) highvoltage: instead, we aim to put together the best of what the free software world has to offer together in an easily installable package
(03:19:22 PM) highvoltage: before I move on, I'd like to mention bug days
(03:20:02 PM) highvoltage: every now and again (and we should have one scheduled again soon) we have a bug day where the team joins in on #edubuntu, and we co-ordinate and fix a bunch of bugs
(03:20:30 PM) highvoltage: we like to do this before alpha and beta releases, this also provides a great opportunity to test the images that are generated
(03:21:00 PM) highvoltage: if you follow planet ubuntu (http://planet.ubuntu.com), you'll usually see a bunch of us blog about it
(03:21:23 PM) highvoltage: otherwise, joining the edubuntu development mailing list is probably the best way to keep up to date with events
(03:21:47 PM) highvoltage: I'll provide more details on that and how to get in touch a bit later
(03:22:11 PM) highvoltage: I'll already said quite a bit, any questions before we move on?
(03:23:19 PM) highvoltage: one of the more prominent Edubuntu projects is our Edubuntu installation disc
(03:23:43 PM) highvoltage: it takes all the meta-packages I mentioned earlier and installs it automatically as part of the installation process
(03:25:06 PM) highvoltage: this allows very easy installation of all the education packages. It's in part being obsoleted by the software center
(03:25:09 PM) highvoltage: or at least, so we thought :)
(03:25:43 PM) highvoltage: in previous releases, we made Edubuntu an add-on cd to Ubuntu, since the packages became really easy to install via the app installer. we had quite a few users which were outraged, a lot of people want something really simple and turn-key
(03:26:02 PM) highvoltage: that's also why we spend some energy on LTSP
(03:26:33 PM) highvoltage: LTSP is the Linux Terminal Server Project, it allows you to netboot a whole bunch of diskless machines from one machine without having to do a lot of setup work
(03:26:58 PM) highvoltage: for Edubuntu 10.04, we integrated a graphical LTSP installer as part of the installation process
(03:27:25 PM) highvoltage: it makes it really easy for even a relatively unexperienced user to install it
(03:27:41 PM) highvoltage: also, we've included an option to run LTSP live from the live CD
(03:28:09 PM) highvoltage: for improved performance, you can also use the startup disk creator to create a live USB disk to test ltsp
(03:28:30 PM) highvoltage: this is great for demoing the technology and also for users completely new to the concept to experiment with it
...