Large educational Linux deployment for Brazil

Numbers like 52 million are attention grabbers, especially when they refer to students getting access to Linux. That's the number of Brazilian public school students who will have access to Linux-based educational computers in some 53,000 labs spread throughout the country. As reported on Mauricio Piacentini's weblog, the Brazilian government already has 17,000 of the labs up and running and plan to be fully rolled out by the end of 2009.

The project, called ProInfo, is run by the Ministry of Education (MEC) for Brazil. Piacentini heard about it at the recent Fórum Internacional Software Livre (FISL) conference, which is held annually in Porto Alegre, Brazil. He noted that the project is not only providing computers and infrastructure, but also a "Linux Educacional" distribution with free educational and entertainment software along with other "open content".

The distribution is Debian-based using KDE 3.5 as its desktop. Packages from the KDE Education Project (KDE-Edu) and KDE Games Center (KDEGames) were included. The project customized the interface, adding a quick navigation bar at the top (seen at left). This is the second version of the distribution incorporating feedback from installations of the previous version. The distribution ISOs, open content, and some documentation (all in Portuguese) can be found at the MEC ProInfo website.

There are various different lab configurations that ProInfo has devised that depend on the nature of the location of the school. Urban labs have equipment for up to fifteen students whereas rural installations have power-friendly hardware that can support up to five users. There is also a configuration targeted at schools for people with special needs that has a large display and accessibility tools added to the distribution. ProInfo also has a project that sounds much like OLPC, except in Portuguese: Um Computador por Aluno ("One computer per student") that plans to bring 150,000 laptops (possibly Intel Classmate PCs) to students over the next year or so.

Some have quibbled about the number of students estimated, but even if it is overestimated by a factor of two or three—which seems unlikely—it is still an enormous project that will impact a huge number of students. Free software is perfect for these kinds of projects, because it can reduce the hardware requirements significantly, eliminate licensing nightmares, and provide a look "under the hood" for students who are interested. Computer skills are largely portable if some of those students end up using other operating systems in the future, but because they are using free software now, any documents, pictures, music, and other data files will be able to move with them.

Folks from the KDE project are justifiably proud of this deployment. It uses KDE 3.5, but plans are afoot to work with MEC to explore using KDE4 down the road according to KDE hackers Piacentini and Aaron Seigo. Many have been concerned about the future of KDE 3.5, but the project has always maintained that it will be around for a long time. As Seigo says:

Proponents of the other desktops or distributions should be cheering this deployment as well. There will probably be lots of lessons learned that can apply to other projects in Brazil or elsewhere that standardize on a different set of software components. This is an exciting project for the free software community. But even more importantly, it is great to see so many of these tools become available to those who have not yet been exposed to them.