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."

Re:it looks like a penis

[CyricZ]

That's an airplane. Cocks don't have wings.

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 [skolelinux.org], 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 [wikipedia.org] (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:This is valuable, why?

[linuxfanatic1024]

Well, do you realize that you can just install a standard Ubuntu system and then install the edubuntu-desktop package? The Ubuntu systems can be converted by installing the ubuntu-desktop, kubuntu-desktop, edubuntu-desktop, and/or xubuntu-desktop packages. It does not matter which one's CD you used to install the OS. Edubuntu makes it easier to pick kid-friendly packages.

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 [edubuntu.org]:

Centralized management of configuration, users, and processes, together with facilities for working collaboratively in a classroom setting.

...and the Application Selection criteria [edubuntu.org]:

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 [edubuntu.org]
2. A Learning Management System [moodle.org]
3. A bunch [edubuntu.org] of pretty basic and standard educational applications - although the Timetabling app [homelinux.org] 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

[wasabii]

What is superiour about KDE's localization? Just curious. I use GTK and as far as I can tell it's exceptional with that.

Some typing programs for Ubuntu

[linuxfanatic1024]

- KTouch
- TuxTyping
- Tipptrainer
- Typespeed

There are more, too.

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 [gnome.org] and http://www.gnome.org/i18n/ [gnome.org]

For KDE: http://i18n.kde.org/stats/gui/stable/toplist.php [kde.org]

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.

Re:What happened to Apple?

[hzs202]

It is my opinion that the developers of ubuntu did not write edubuntu with the intention of hooking children on linux. I'm sure that was a factor, but i would like to believe that the idea was to create on operating system that would aid in the education process. I am a technology assistant for a school system.

I agree, i think that is exactly what they intended. Which is why (IMHO) they included the SchoolTool Calendar [schooltool.org].

Re:*nix can be excellent for kids, but gnome is no

[skimitar]

I've got two kids (5 & 2.5 yr old).

Speaking as a parent, the 2.5 isn't geeky exactitude, those 0.5's matter. My daughter went from 7 to 7 and a quarter to 7 and a third etc... and woe betide me if I left off the fraction.

And that extra 0.5 gives you rank in the playground like you wouldn't believe (like running a 2.4 kernel vs a 2.6 in the kind of circle that gives a shit about that stuff).

Re:Excellent

[robsmama]

Actually, he hasen't written anything that I can see. If you actually check the project you'll see absolutly no downloads, no cvs commits, and only a two line description of what he *hopes* to build. My guess is he's just going to join all the thousands of other sf projects that are created and never have even a single commit. Very telling of the open source community in general, I think.

MOM

Re:It's too bad they didn't base it off of Kubuntu

[Anonymous Coward]

You're comparing two differnt environments released at two different times. GNOME 2.12 has been out almost 3 months for the translators to work on (plus whatever time they had during the beta release phase, I'm not that familiar with GNOME's infrastructure). KDE 3.5 (what you are comparing it with) hasn't even been out a whole week yet (although translation teams work during the beta). KDE also has a lot more software that needs translation (some might call it bloat, but it still needs translation). I may be wrong, though. I'm not majorly involved in either project, although I do use KDE - I'm emerging 3.5 now).

Re:Doesn't do DHCP?

[linuxbz]

This is somewhere in between a feature and a bug ;-)

The default installation sets up an Ubuntu vesion of Linux Terminal Server Project (LTSP). In that, the IP address of the server (assuming you are only using one network card) really needs to be known, which is why it is asking.

There was some discussion on the list that the next release needs to ask whether you have one network card or two, and allow the Internet card to use DHCP as you might expect.

Remember that Edubuntu is targeted for a classroom, especially in developing countries, where LTSP will be a huge asset. If you do NOT want to use this computer as an LTSP server, you would type "workstation" (without the quotes) at the CD prompt and the DHCP should work fine.

http://wiki.edubuntu.org/EdubuntuInstallNotes