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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.] (Log in to post comments)
MIT athena Posted Jun 5, 2003 3:09 UTC (Thu) by djao (subscriber, #4263) [Link] 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.Who could forget MIT's Athena linux, the granddaddy of them all. Not in the Linux sense, but in the Unix sense: things like the X Windowing System, athena widgets, AFS, Motif, etc. were originally written at MIT. To see them being ported back to linux at MIT truly completes the circle. Incidentally, the MIT Athena workstations now run GNOME. Even there, there is an MIT connection, as Nat Friedman of Ximian is a graduate of MIT.
MIT athena Posted Sep 2, 2003 12:17 UTC (Tue) by otto (guest, #14721) [Link] Tried to follow a project from a Colorado school districtcalled something like "Epik" or "Project Theosus" supposed to have been a small linux project. Wonder what became of it? Otto
University Linux List Posted Jun 5, 2003 3:59 UTC (Thu) by mattdm (subscriber, #18) [Link] Seth Vidal of Duke has a University Linux mailing list. There's almost zero traffic right now, but I encourage other people interested in running Linux in university enviroments to join and maybe get some discussion started.PS: BU Linux 3.0 (just released last month) is currently only available via restricted-to-campus servers, but as soon as I get a chance to set it up properly, we'll have off-campus access as well.
Re: Roundup of Educational Linux Distributions Posted Jun 5, 2003 16:18 UTC (Thu) by X-Nc (guest, #1661) [Link] Some historical background on Linux distributions might be interesting here. The very first ever Linux distribution was MCC Interim Linux out of Manchester Collage. This "distro" was very similar to Coherent (if anyone remember that flavor of UNIX). Close on the heals of MCC was TAMU out of Texas A&M University. This was the first "distro" that had X and all that GUI stuff. Shortly after this saw the emergence of Yggdrasil and SLS followed by Slackware & Red Hat and all the other distros we all know and love today. IMO, it isn't surprising that Linux has strong roots in education.Joe P.S. Prior to all of the above was the very first Linux you could run on your own system; HJ Lu's Boot/Root floppies. P.P.S. In between HJ and MCC, a little document was written by a very cool (and quite cute) guy on how to get Linux installed and booted from your HD. It required editing the boot sector and all kind of nasty-yet-fun things but it was one of, if not the, very first HOW-TOs. This very cool and cute fellow is Erik "The" Ratcliffe (who will probably have numerous hit men on my trail shortly after reading this).
Roundup of Educational Linux Distributions Posted Jun 12, 2003 17:17 UTC (Thu) by haraldt (guest, #961) [Link] On the Skolelinux project: Skolelinux is meant to ease installation and setup by providing a set of roll-out profiles. Get some boxen, wire up the network. Boot the CD, choose installation profile, default language and some other (very few) options. Repeat once per box, and voila! You got it up and running. You can customize and pluck from the whole Debian distribution if you want to, but plan is to avoid that time-consuming fickling and make it part of the distribution instead. The default installation profiles also gives the user easy access to advanced technology. Login and user profiles through LDAP database. Shared file/printer access throught the whole network. Customizing the application menu by user groups. Standard setup of LTSP (Linux Terminal Server Project) and of course, install-and-run network setup.
Internationalization of the project has begun. English, French and Dutch is supported on the distribution but english docamentation and web pages is rare so far. Most focus is on stabilizing the forthcoming 1.0 version. More information can be had from the english-speakers developer list https://init.linpro.no/mailman/skolelinux.no/listinfo/devel or you can ask at the open mailing list info at skolelinux dot no.
Roundup of Educational Linux Distributions Posted Jun 12, 2003 18:31 UTC (Thu) by haraldt (guest, #961) [Link] Forgot to mention the less unique properties:
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