Ubuntu Wiki

Ubuntu Open Week -Edubuntu - Oliver Grawert - Wed, Apr 25, 2007

see also Saturday Session.

TZ UTC-4

(01:07:42 PM) ogra: soo, welcome everybody
(01:08:13 PM) ogra: i'm the edubuntu technical lead ... (cureently the only edubuntu dev so i can lead myself quite well *g*)
(01:09:05 PM) ogra: so i'm responsible for all the technical integration of educational software ..
(01:09:29 PM) ogra: specifically in edubuntu, but also in general in ubuntu in education
(01:10:06 PM) ogra: for the the people who dont know edubuntu yet, a short intro:
(01:10:35 PM) ogra: edubuntu is the educational version of ubuntu
(01:10:50 PM) ogra: it follows the ubuntu principles in every way ...
(01:11:24 PM) ogra: we have three variants of edubuntu, a classroom server, a workstation install and a liveCD
(01:11:47 PM) ogra: the classroom server deeply integrates the latest available thin client technology
(01:12:00 PM) ogra: and aims to do much more in the future ...
(01:12:17 PM) ogra: a workstation is a fine install for home use and the libeCD is great for testing
(01:12:54 PM) ogra: since edubuntu comes with so much educational software nd als doesnt really care about desktop environment restrictions (like running KDE apps in gnome)
(01:13:03 PM) ogra: we constantly had space problems ...
(01:13:22 PM) ogra: so since feisty we decided to ship edubuntu on two CDs
(01:13:55 PM) ogra: many of the space taking educational apps are now available on the serveraddon iso ...
(01:14:29 PM) ogra: additionally we followed a big request from the community and added all language packs to this CD
(01:15:46 PM) ogra: many of the typical edubuntu users are located in countries where you only get bad bandwith so this should help them to get edubuntu running in their native language
(01:16:37 PM) ogra: the setup is very imilar to a k12ltsp setup ... a well known edu distro
(01:16:59 PM) ogra: but with ubuntu underneath and indeed the newer tsp5 that was developed in ubuntu ...
(01:17:02 PM) ogra: *ltsp
(01:17:31 PM) ogra: any former k12ltsp users switched over and our community grows constantly since the first release we had with breezy
(01:18:16 PM) ogra: so i see some questions coming up in -chat

<Moniker42> question: what makes edubuntu better for educational networks/applications than regular flavour ubuntu or kubuntu?

• actually only the integration of apps and the dedicated community we have ... we try to drop the strict barriers between edubuntu and "ubuntu in education" a bit over time ... the plan is for example to move much of the ltp integration that happened in edubuntu over to ubuntu. edubuntu will include moodle in the next release in a default setup that offers you to start right away ... while moodle in ubuntu will inherit an updated package, the integration work will happen in edubuntu

<sampbar> QUESTION: what are your current plans for getting more UK schools and college's to adopt edubuntu as their operating system of choice

• sampbar, well that would be a better question for RichEd (richard weidemann) who manages the ubuntu educational team ... we have invited a lot of peope to the ubunru education summit and afaik also some uk people are among them. beyond that we had a booth at the last BETT conference ... edubuntu is also taking part in an EU project called edulinux but sadly the uk delegates jumped the boat recently

<McKinney> QUESTION: ogra, what would you guess how many people/schools are already running edubuntu?

• several thousands ... but thats only a very rough guess, i know we are very very popular in exotic regions of this world .... like vanuatu or curacao :). but i was also told that about a quater of ubuntu using FISL visitors were edubuntu users ... its hard t get exact numbers here

<sampbar> QUESTION: Do you have a team of staff or represenatives which could possibly give talks on the benefits of edubuntu?

• we'Re about to hire a second developer in case you want talks about technical stuff ... beyond that we have a decent educational team in ubuntu so dont hesitate to ask

<dee> QUESTION: Did you hear from the German Seminarix-CD (www.seminarix.org) and has compared it with Edubuntu?

• no, they didnt contact me yet ... i heard about the project yesterday the first time when someone pointed me to it. i would love to hear from them ... especially since i'm german so it should be easy to meet up and discuss collaboration

<Jack3132> QUESTION: How will you convince schools in the states that a free linux distro is better and easier to use at their school instead of things like Windows XP that the Gates foundation often donates to the schools?

• i hope time will do ... and our work on bug #1 but apart from that we have a good bunch of former k12ltsp users that roam around and promote their solutions on conferences etc and indeed te populartity of ubutu itself keeps us very much in the face of people

<Armagon> QUESTION: Does Edubuntu work on older Macintoshes (PowerPCs, I believe)?

• hmm, how old we support G4 in ay case with edgy and dapper ... i think G3 should work as well ... i never tried anything older than G3. apart from that we could need more ppc devs to care for the now community maintined powerpc port ... there are many iMacs in education i heard ...

<tsmithe> QUESTION: If I want to persuade my school to use Edubuntu over a Windows solution, I'll need a strong case. Is there anywhere I'd find a list of features that a secondary (high) school would be looking for; or should I look elsewhere? Why should my school use (Ed)ubuntu?

• we have some documents on www.edubuntu.org and there are flyers etc in preparation you can download and print out. apart from that there are indeed some quite obvoius advantages edubuntu has over windows ... like no viruses etc (the general stuff) but also the ease of centralized management of an ltsp server

<joebaker> QUESTION: For an office wanting to get the most out of LTSP might it be advisable to install Edubuntu rather than Ubuntu?

• heh, no. installing edubuntu s advisable if you want the least hassle to get a working ltsp environent ... but the work you would invest to debrand it and remove the edu apps to get back to a plain ubuntu wouldnt weight out the time you save ...

<Monika|K> QUESTION: How is Edubuntu different from Debian Skole Linux?

• well, it is based on ubuntu, apart from that we have y very good relationship to skolelinux ... i also work very close with one of the debian edu devs on ltsp. some of the debian edu/skole people will atted the ubuntu educational summit next week ... and i hope we can improve our relationship even more then https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UES-Sevilla/

<Armagon> QUESTION: If I want to help develop Edubuntu, do I need a machine dedicated to running an unstable release? Can I make clients connect to a "production/stable" machine or a "testing" machine fairly easily?

• it depends what you develop ... for plain package patching you surely will be fine with a chroot with an unstable development release inside ... if you wnt to develop ltsp or installer integration bits i'd go at least with a virtual machine ... it really depends on the task ... even bug triaging is developemnt you could do that from windows

<tuxmaniac> QUESTION: I see a lot of packages on Edubuntu targetting school children of ages around 10 - 15. Any plans of edubuntu becoming a Educational Ubuntu for Engineering/Science Graduate students? Or has it already have the softwares by default?

• YES ! absolutely. the spilt into two CDs will open us a lot of options we didnt have before. LaserJock has worked out an age driven menu mechanism we will ship eventually and i would like to see age driven tasks on the addon CD so you can just pick your app sets by age in the future. we tried to reflect that direction a bit by adding rasmol and qcad to the feisty release. we will revisit the selection of apps we ship at the educational summit i mentioned above

<sampbar> QUESTION: do you have any figures on how much an average school saves running edubuntu over running microsoft windows?

• lots, i suspect ... but no, i dont have numbers ... to sad will is gone for the day, i think if you ask willvdl in #edubuntu if he's around he can get you some ....

<harrisony> QUESTION: What are the best ways to help edubuntu (although i am not a coder)

• we had our first release of the edubuntu handbook with feisty ... we are constantly looking for authors to help out here (it took three releasest get what we have now ... its a very slow process, more people would help speeding that up). apart from that testing packages and finding bugs is always appreciated ... if you have some coding skills patches as well :). the biggest help is always people that step up to help iso testing during development

<deniz_ogut> ogra QUESTION: What can you say about the localization level/percent/need of the *applications* present in Edubuntu apart from general *buntu localizations?

• not much, i'm not up to date on the edubuntu specific packages (and i'm not sure you could filter them) all edubuntu packages are reflected in rosetta and in the language packages though ...and indeed we inherit most of the translations from ubuntu. i think the shipping of all available language packs is a good start to get edubuntu into specific places where we we'Rent before due to bandwith restrictions, so i hope that will gain us some more translations in return

<jrib> QUESTION: Are there any key applications that educators have asked for but are not available on edubuntu?

• many ... often educators know an app from the proprietary world where they dont find an equivalent for in the oss world ... sadly not everything is replaceable here as long as no project steps up to develop such tools. we try to get developers to do it throught things like googles summer of code though but you can't force volunteers

<sampbar> QUESTION: do you have any plans to work with educational pc distributors to provide edubuntu preloaded on pc's?

<Loic> QUESTION: Most public schools can only buy hw from big sellers (not from small companies) because of government rules, so they end up with windows pre-installed. Are there big companies offering edubuntu?

• i*d love to i think thats something to bring up at our OEM team ... beyond that we'll have intel attending the educational conf and presenting the classmate PC they develop ... who knows where that leads us

<fsman> QUESTION : I use edubuntu for my 5yr old daughters pc - love it, thanks. Only thing i really have on my wishlist is integrated parental controls. (Christian edition has it) it would be neat if edubuntu had it as a standard feature - especially as its aimed at kids. adding parental controls into e/ubuntu isn't straight forward for mr average. Whats your views on this being added to edubuntu?

• its one of the most important features imho .... but sadly also one of the features that have most imapct in the whole underlying system. it needs very deep desktop and system integration and thus a very good spec that covers all possibilities ... i suggested t have a a minimal parental control implementation through a summer of code project so we would have something to build on, but sadly no developer stepped up to do it. it is still on my list ... and i'd love to see someone stepping up to do it

<Monika|K> QUESTION: Is there a list of those requested programs anywhere?

<jrib> QUESTION: Is there a list of applications that edubuntu really needs but doesn't have so volunteers can look over it?

• we used to have one during the breezy and dapper cycles ... currently no such lists exists since we didnt have the space for new additions until the switch to two CDs. you can look through the edubuntu wiki for the old lists ....

(02:00:47 PM) ogra: no questions anymore ... feel free to ping me in #edubuntu :)
(02:01:16 PM) ogra: dont forget if you are near sevilla next week .... https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UES-Sevilla/
(02:01:17 PM) ogra: ;)
(02:01:22 PM) ogra: thanks all :)=
(02:01:44 PM) sabdfl: i was just answering a question from a newspaper about why free software is so important for education
(02:01:52 PM) sabdfl: so thanks to ogra for leading that work
(02:02:30 PM) ogra: sabdfl, thanks for letting me ;)