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Roundup of Educational Linux Distributions

[This article was contributed by Ladislav Bodnar]

A noteworthy trend that seems to have emerged in recent months are increasing Linux-related activities in educational and government institutions around the world. Many schools, colleges, universities and government departments are now building their own custom Linux distributions. While few of them can be classified as original projects, it is still interesting to see how Linux is slowly infiltrating all levels of our societies. Let's take a brief tour of these projects, listed here in alphabetical order.

The ADIOS project has been created by the Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia. Perhaps not the most inspiring name for a Linux distribution, ADIOS is an acronym for "Automated Download and Installation of Operating Systems". While the project's main goal is to provide students with an operating system where they have administrative privileges in a laboratory environment, it has also released a Red Hat-based bootable live CD for general home use.

CollegeLinux is a product of Robert Kennedy College in Delémont, Switzerland. The idea was to create an easy-to-use desktop Linux distribution for use by students. The college has identified Linux as a phenomenon playing an increasingly important role in IT, so what better way to teach it than to involve students in building their own Linux distribution? Based on Slackware, CollegeLinux has produced several releases and it has succeeded in creating a substantial user community. Interesting information about the distribution's philosophy can be read in this Interview with Professor David Costa of CollegeLinux by OSNews.

EduLinux (web site in French) is a project of Sherbrooke University in Quebec, Canada. It is a Mandrake-based distribution designed for use in French-speaking educational and governmental organizations. The developers have focused on providing a system which would allow painless migration of tasks from Microsoft-based systems to Linux.

Edunix (web site in Czech) is a Czech Linux-for-schools project. It is unclear from the web site who is behind the initiative, but the idea has been evolving for several months and a first beta edition, based on K12LTSP, has recently been released.

The Freeduc CD is a live Linux CD built by the Organization for Free Software in Education and Teaching (Ofset). Ofset is a legal entity based in Paris, France, with the goal to promote the development of free software in education. Freeduc is a modified Knoppix, excluding some of the memory intensive applications and including useful educational software. The removed applications have been replaced by less resource-hungry alternatives as the CD is designed to power low-end computers, often found in schools. The CD boots straight into a graphical environment, which is managed by intuitive and light-weight XFce windowing system. Besides French and English, Freeduc also supports a number of European languages.

LinEx is one of the most successful efforts in converting government offices and educational establishments to free software. Developed by the regional government of Extremadura in Spain, this Debian-based distribution is frequently given away with newspapers, magazines and in government offices around the region. Governments in other areas of Spain have started catching up and both Andalucía and Aragón have recently announced Linux initiatives (both links in Spanish).

Lorma Linux is another new project initiated by a small group of Linux enthusiasts at Lorma Colleges in San Fernando City, La Union, Philippines. This distribution is a modified Red Hat Linux - it has been scaled down to fit on one CD, KDE has been set as the default desktop environment and all applications have been recompiled for the i686 architecture.

K12LTSP (K12 Linux Terminal Server Project) is possibly the best-known and most successful Linux implementation for use in schools. The Red Hat-based distribution is designed to be installed as a web, file and application server and accessed by low-cost diskless workstations or terminals, also known as thin clients. These thin clients have no software or hard drives - perfect for schools as they are easy to install and require little maintenance. They are reliable and immune to malicious tampering and viruses. The project has excellent community resources and highly active mailing lists. LinuxPlanet has published a K12LTSP tutorial and report.

kmLinux (web site in German) is a distribution sponsored by the Government of Schleswig-Holstein in Germany. It is a single CD, SuSE-based distribution supplying the usual range of educational software for use in schools.

Quantian is a new project, a Knoppix-based variant tailored to numerical and quantitative analysis. Some applications from the original Knoppix were removed to make space for several quantitative, numerical and scientific programs, including R, Octave, Maxima, GSL, QuantLib, OpenDX, Mayavi, TeXmacs and many others.

Skolelinux (web site mostly in Norwegian, parts in English) is a Norwegian project to replace Windows with Linux in schools around Norway. "Our school saves at least 128,000 Norwegian kroner a year, and we are able to use new software on old computers", says Bjarne Hugo Hansen, principal of Hole primary and secondary school. Thanks to the Debian-based Skolelinux, all local languages of Bokmål, Nynorsk and Sami are receiving full attention, something that wasn't always the case with proprietary systems. This project is in active development and changes are frequently implemented based on feedback from schools.

SULIX (web site in Hungarian) is a distribution, developed by a small group of teachers at the University of Szeged, Hungary. Based on the Knoppix live CD, its main features are usability, Hungarian language support and inclusion of educational software packages. It is routinely handed out to students for individual practicing at home. While the distribution's main language is Hungarian, other languages are also supported.

We probably missed a few projects, so if you happen to know about some that belong in this category, please tell us by posting a comment below.

[Ed. note: see also the Education section of the LWN Distribution List, recently link-checked and edited (although some are looking a bit historical), where you'll find some of the distributions mentioned above, and a few that are not.]

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Distribution News

Debian GNU/Linux

The Debian Weekly News for June 3, 2003 is out. This week Petter Reinholdtsen announced a new Skolelinux CD image a while ago that fixes many bugs and uses the debian-installer already. Mario Lang urgently needs help fixing bugs in the speakup kernel packages, otherwise the package will be abandoned. All that and more in this week's edition.

Look for the Debian Project at conferences in Austria and Brazil. June 5th to 7th - 2nd LinuxWochen - Vienna, Austria and June 5th to 7th - International Free Software Convention - Porto Alegre, Brazil.

The DDTP team and the Debian-BR project have announced the second public release of APT featuring support for translated package descriptions.

Branden Robinson reports that Debian's XFree86 packages are becoming team-maintained. "In practice they have always been to some extent, thanks to contributions large and small from many people (grep the xfree86 package changelog for "thanks" sometime)."

Jason Boxman has written a detailed HOWTO for configuring Exim and Courier IMAP under Debian GNU/Linux. Found on DebianPlanet.

Also from DebianPlanet, we found orth's kde cvs debian packages. "If you think you noticed a difference between KDE 3.0 and 3.1, you'll find the same exponential improvement in these packages."

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Gentoo Weekly Newsletter -- Volume 2, Issue 22

The Gentoo Weekly Newsletter for the week of June 2, 2003 is available. This week's issue covers new mirror sites in North America, the CFLAGS/cpuinfo collection project, and an upcoming infrastructure change.

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Slackware Linux

Slackware Linux has updates to slackware-current including a new version of procps. See the slackware-current changelog for details.

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Yellow Dog Linux

Yellow Dog has an enhancement announcement for a new compat-gcc package. "The compat-gcc package provides a compatibility compiler that is compatible with Yellow Dog Linux 2.3. The version of compat-gcc that comes with Yellow Dog Linux 3.0 is missing a compatibility version of the g77 fortran compiler."

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LSB Certifications

SuSE Linux AG has registered SuSE Linux Desktop 1.0 as conforming to the LSB Runtime Environment for IA32 version 1.3 product standard.

ThizLinux Laboratory has registered ThizLinux Desktop 7.0 as conforming to the LSB Runtime Environment for IA32 version 1.3 product standard.

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"Absolute OpenBSD" from No Starch Press

For OpenBSD users and security conscious people everywhere, No Starch Press has announced the publication of "Absolute OpenBSD", by Michael W. Lucas.

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New Distributions

ClusterKnoppix

DebianPlanet reports on ClusterKnoppix, a modified version of Knoppix with the openMosix kernel extensions. Bittorrent: clusterKNOPPIX_V3.2-2003-05-20-EN-cl1.iso was released May 28, 2003.

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Quantian: A Knoppix remastering for Scientific Computing

A new distribution called "Quantian" has been launched. This one is a rework of Knoppix (and is thus Debian-based) which turns a PC into a scientific workstation. To that end, a long list of numeric and scientific packages have been added to the mix. All the nice features of Knoppix have been retained, of course.

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Minor distribution updates

2-Disk Xwindow embedded Linux

2-Disk Xwindow embedded Linux has released v1.0.8 (Source code) with major feature enhancements. "Changes: linux-lite kernel source was added, enabling a kernel image of ~47kb. Boot loader methods have been changed to reduce size. The build script has been cleaned up. Issues with ibiblio searches have been fixed (it may take some time for downloads to propagate out from incoming). There are changes to the info regs system."

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Astaro Security Linux

Astaro Security Linux has released v4.007 with minor bugfixes. "Changes: This Up2Date fixes a small bug in the VPN IPSec section of the WebAdmin."

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Slackware Live CD

Slackware Live CD has released v2.9.0.15 with major feature enhancements. "Changes: The ISO image fits the 190MB CD-RW medium now. There are new mouse cursors for Xwindows. KDE 3.1.2 , Kopete 0.6.2 (a lot of bugs fixed), a flag for international keyboard support under KDE, the ability to run something automatically after booting (autoexec), and the Quanta HTML and PHP WYSIWYG editor have been added. The ramdisk takes 22 MB now to raise free ramdisk space. Mplayer has been recompiled for CPU autodetection. Some 75dpi international fonts have been removed, as has emacs."

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Distribution reviews

Tux goes to college (NewsForge)

NewsForge reviews College Linux 2.3, a Slackware-based distribution from Robert Kennedy College in Delémont, Switzerland. "CollegeLinux comes with some software you might expect, like a 2.4.20 kernel, OpenOffice.org software suite, KOffice, nfs, Samba, and openssh. It also comes with a few things you might not expect. For example, while Wine is considered an option on many other Linux distributions, it is included here. I guess many students have a Windows partition on their machines. Having Wine installed means that many Windows programs (the ones that don't choke under Wine, that is) will be available under CollegeLinux. Good idea."

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A Beginner's Guide to Choosing a Linux Distribution (DistroWatch)

DistroWatch has updated the "Beginner's Guide to Choosing a Linux Distribution". Those new to Linux are often overwhelmed by the choices available to them. This handy resource helps reduce some of the confusion by looking at several distributions that could be good for beginners. "The bewildering choice and ever increasing number of Linux distributions can be confusing for those of you who are new to Linux. This is why this page was created. It lists 10 distributions, which are generally considered as most widely used by Linux users around the world. There are no figures to back it up and there are many other distributions that might suit your particular purpose better, but as a general rule, all of these are popular and have very active forums or mailing lists where you can ask questions if you get stuck."

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Page editor: Rebecca Sobol
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