DebianEdu Announced

Bill Kendrick writes "There's been an announcement on debian-devel-announce about a new subproject, DebianEdu, which "aims to make Debian the best distribution available for educational use." As a developer with some stuff in Debian Jr., I'm happy to see some focus on an honest-to-goodness education project!"

Nice!

[sethadam1]

I hope more projects are started with the aim to put Linux in the hands of college students - they're usually BUYING their first computer and they have the time, energy, and friends who understand computers to be adventurous.

It's about time

[frascone]

It seems like the educational market has been forgotten lately. I remember when I was in school, Boreland was offering Turbo C, Turbo Pascal, or the newest thing, Turbo C++ for $69-$99. This was when Microsoft C was around $500.

Everyone I knew had a Turbo compiler. Microsoft lost major ground. And, since the students were most comfortable with Boreland, that was, of course, what they recommended to their future employeers.

But, for some reason, companies have recently been neglecting the educational market. Kudos to Debian for re-starting the trend.

What *kind* of education use?

[Anonymous Coward]

Desktop? School server? Programming tutition? Educational settop box? Internet box? University level or under 10year olds?
'Education' can mean so many different things... I don't mean this as a troll, but I hope they realise that mere mortals can not use Debian as it is. It'll have to be made alot easier before it can be used in non-techy educational environments. Maybe something like http://www.bluelinux.org [bluelinux.org].

Re:Mandrake all over again?

[Peter Harris]

Mandrake is a company, Debian is a community.

That's not to disparage the community of Mandrake users and developers, but Mandrake as a company have to do things that make money. A sub-project of Debian will succeed or fail depending only on the level of enthusiasm and interest in it.

Re:It's about time

[capt.Hij]

Kudos to Debian for re-starting the trend.

Dude!

Redhat has been doing ed stuff for a long time. They even have a K-12 [redhat.com] program. Here at our university we went to Redhat several years ago. We get good support and have been happy. Debian is a bit too late. They will have to be extremely aggressive if they would want folks like us to switch over.

Re:It's about time

[Derwen]

Debian is a bit too late. They will have to be extremely aggressive if they would want folks like us to switch over.

Debian, aggressive?
ROTFL :-)))

Debian GNU/Linux got to be the one true distro (TM), and the most popular with admins, simply by being the best :-)
That's the only strategy Debian has ever had (backed up, of course, by its social contract [debian.org] and the Debian Free Software Guidelines (DFSG) [debian.org]) - and that seems to have worked just fine ;-)

In all seriousness, it's great that Debian are doing this - and great that Red Hat do something similar. When every child has access to a Free *nix at school (or even access to a school - never mind a computer) will be the time to start bickering about which GNU/Linux distro has the biggest dick in the edu world ;-)
- Derwen

Re:Was it so hard?

[Chris Canfield]

With Woody, the Debian people concentrated quite a bit on the install procedure. Except for being exhorbitantly long, (and not mentioning that agpgart is required for X to run... Jerks!), it installed without too much trouble.

The problem is that Debian isn't intended for the person who is replacing windows, but as a tool for the admin who needs to setup a server every few days and who knows exactly what he / she wants and what they are doing. Apt is a powerful way to remotely install software over a shell, without having to be present at the machine to search for FTP sites, etc. And it can keep you *reasonably* up-to-date with security patches.

Yes, that doesn't preclude having an easy installer... and by all accounts they should work on that. But if they have limited funding (which they do), they should use it in the way that is best for the people who use their system every day. They should keep their software updated, they should work on auto-detect routines, and they need less babysitting in the apt and installer procedures. They also could use a simple way of handling kernel modules. Debian is not about being 3133t, it's about doing your job as an admin as well as you can without having to be on site. If you know exactly how to use it, it's great. And if you kind of know what you are doing, Woody is great too.

And if you haven't touched Linux before, there is no reason not to instal Mandrake or Red Hat. I know a lot of sysadmins who put Mandrake on their desktops because it is just bloody easy. Why waste the time if you aren't going to use Apt? And why not with Mandrake's new Apt-clone?

-Chris

P.S. There is only one excuse for Gentoo: it is a very young distro. It is not intended for you, it is not intended for me. It is intended to show that software and computers can be faster if people take advantage of open sources and compile all of their software for their chosen platform. It is a proof-of-concept. At some point, it will probably be easy enough for anyone to use, or the concepts behind it will be integrated into other distros. In the meantime, not all distros are intended for you or me. Some of them don't fit our needs. I'm impressed when someone can install Gentoo, or for that matter linux from scratch, but there is no reason for me to want to.