jonathan carter

Edubuntu Maverick News

// September 27th, 2010 // 7 Comments » // Education, Free Software

Close to the end of the Lucid release cycle, I posted an update of what’s been happening in the Edubuntu project. Now seems like a good time to do it again! This release wasn’t as big shake-up as the last one, but it’s still a very good release for Edubuntu that builds on the work we did in the previous release.

New Website

A few weeks ago we silently launched a new website. It’s not that great yet, but it’s already a big improvement over our old one. We also now have Facebook, Identica and Twitter profiles, as well as a YouTube channel. The next step is to get lots of user stories, photos and videos on the site. In particular, we’ll try to include informative videos on how people used Ubuntu in their institution to deliver education.

Better LTSP and Netbook installers

For Lucid we moved completely to a graphical installation. After installation a user could choose from the Live CD to install LTSP and the Ubuntu Netbook Remix interface. It worked great but it wasn’t very intuitive. Many users who meant to install LTSP didn’t quite know about it and hit the reboot button at the end of the installation and completely missed it. We decided to do it properly for Maverick and have it integrated right there in the installer. Below are links to Glade mockups I made earlier. Unfortunately there just wasn’t time to implement everything, especially with a lot going on in my personal life and work in the first half of the release cycle.

About two weeks ago I told Stéphane that I don’t feel up to getting the Ubiquity changes all done in time and that I’m going to revert back to how we did it in Lucid, and defer the installation improvements for Maverick. Within a day or two he had it already working properly:

It’s now the easiest LTSP installation ever. You literally just choose that you want to install it, and which interface it should run on.

Gnome Nanny

Gnome Nanny is a relatively new addition in the Gnome family of tools. I came across it in this Tectonic article and thought that it would be a great addition to Edubuntu. It works good for home or small classroom use, but it doesn’t support groups yet so it’s not particularly useful for large deployments yet. It has some good potential though and I hope it will just keep on getting better!

New Wallpapers Collection

The default wallpaper stayed pretty much the same, but we added some more wallpapers to make things a bit more exciting. Some of them are especially nice, you can get them directly from the Edubuntu website if you don’t want to install the edubuntu-artwork package. For Natty we’ll most likely split the wallpapers off in an edubuntu-wallpapers package.

Documentation

Documentation can be somewhat of a challenge. There’s been several projects before to write a complete big Edubuntu handbook that explains the A-Z of everything you need to know about using Ubuntu in educational environments. That approach didn’t quite work.  For Maverick we basically just link to all the upstream versions of the documentation and wrote documentation for the Edubuntu specific parts that don’t exist yet. We’re currently also working on the Edubuntu 10.10 installation guide that’s currently still very much work in progress, but viewable. For Natty I hope that we’ll be able to properly revitalize our documentation efforts and also work closer with the Ubuntu documentation team.

Easter Eggs

Ubuntu 10.10 will be released on (20/)10/10/10. The date was chosen because 101010 is 42 in binary, which happened to be the answer to Life, the Universe and Everything in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (HHGTTG) series, which happens to be quite popular amongst Ubuntu folk. An easter egg is a hidden feature in a program, quite often a joke that is meant to be accidentally or sometimes even never to be discovered. The vim text editor has a HHGTTG easter egg that you can access by typing “:help 42″

I guess no one would ever notice it if I don’t point it out, but the background of the Edubuntu Ubiquity Slideshow happens to be #424242. There are at least 2 other HHGTTG easter eggs planted in Edubuntu, but I’d be a spoil sport if I revealed them now already

Edubuntu Bug Day

// April 1st, 2010 // 1 Comment » // Education, Free Software

Ben Crisford is hosting an Edubuntu bug day on Tuesday, 6 April on #edubuntu and #ubuntu-bugs on freenode. The plan is to triage and squash some of the 330 or so bugs assigned to packages that we include in Edubuntu so that we can give Edubuntu some final polish before the release at the end of the month.

If you can drop by during the day for even just a few hours or minutes, please do so! And if you could even give one bug a little attention, that would be great.

Happy bug squashing!

Edubuntu Wiki Hug Day

// January 18th, 2010 // No Comments » // Education, Free Software

As Scott posted before, the Edubuntu Bug day went quite well last week. This coming Thursday (21 January) we’re doing a Wiki Hug Day to to focus our efforts on fixing things in the Edubuntu wiki namespace, it includes:

• Fixing broken links
• Removing horribly obsolete or broken pages
• Moving pages which are in the wrong place
• Prettifying pages
• Mark pages that may need to be on the Edubuntu website instead
• Any other improvements we can think of

We’ll officially be starting the wiki hug day from around 12:00 UTC to accommodate the time-zones of our current contributors. It will be co-ordinated in #edubuntu on the freenode network. If you’re familiar with Edubuntu and know a thing or two about wikis, feel free to join in and get involved!

Edubuntu Project 2.0 Status Update

// December 23rd, 2009 // 2 Comments » // Education, Free Software

Edubuntu 2.0

I should really blog about Edubuntu more. The Edubuntu project initially kicked off nicely, but with time as things changed things ended getting somewhat stale. Earlier this year we decided to rebootstrap the project. Edubuntu Project 2.0 is real and we’re getting some really good momentum going. We now have a new Edubuntu Council voted in, of which I’m really happy to be part of again. Revolution Linux also gives me and Stéphane some time to work on Edubuntu related things which is really awesome!

Tonight we had quite a good meeting, I posted a dump of the notes to the edubuntu-devel list.

What’s happening for Lucid

• Scott Balneaves is working on parental control features that will be included in upstream Gnome (he is now an upstream Gnome developer as well)
• Stéphane and myself will be the release contacts for Lucid
• Live LTSP session for the Live DVD, if this works in time for Lucid then many packages can be dropped from the alternate installation
• Menu editor based on groups
• We’ll attempt at revamping the artwork for Lucid, if we can’t get nice artwork in time we’ll fall back on Ubuntu artwork rather than have outdated Edubuntu specific artwork
• Sabayon is now in a really good state, Scott has done lots of work on it and it’s teachers should now find it very useful
• Nanny has been uploaded to the archives in the last week, it will be used to implement parental controls in Lucid
• With the Ubuntu archive reorganization, there will be an edubuntu-dev group with upload rights for the appropriate packages. We’ll sort out most of this after the holiday season
• Netbook edition: We’d like the option of installing a netbook edition from the Ubiquity, which basically entails installing a few UNR packages such as maximus and the netbook launcher. I’ll write a spec for this in the coming week

Community

We’re planning some hug days! More details and announcements will follow on the Fridge, etc. For now write these dates in your diary:

• 12 January 2009: Edubuntu Bugs Hug Day
• 21 January 2009: Edubuntu Wiki Hug Day

We’ll spend some time specifically for documentation as well, most likely in February some time.

We want to extend to other projects more. Currently Stéphane is working with the Guadalinex-edu people. I’m going to be working with the Qimo project to get their packages in Ubuntu. Scott  is working to become a Skolelinux/Debian-Edu developer and David van Assche is an OpenSuse-EDU developer so we’re making some progress with our relationships to other projects. We need someone to liaise with the Sugar project, so if anyone is willing to get involved with that please give us a shout!

Our next Edubuntu meeting is on 29 December at 19:00 UTC in #ubuntu-meeting on the freenode network so if you’re interested in getting involved you’re welcome to join in. If you can’t make it, meetings times will be made available on the Ubuntu Fridge.

Happy holidays!

Edubuntu 9.10 is Here

// October 29th, 2009 // 7 Comments » // Education, Free Software

The Return of Edubuntu

Edubuntu 9.10 has landed! For the past few releases, it has been an add-on CD to Ubuntu. Our users have have made overwhelming requests for a full-blown installation CD again and we have listened. Edubuntu 9.10 is now a DVD that contains a full Ubuntu installation plus the Edubuntu packages and the LTSP Server packages. Read the Release Announcement to find out how you can get Edubuntu!

The move to a DVD also forms part of larger plans so that we can fit more content and software on the system, and looking forward to Lucid (10.04) we may also be shipping a Live LTSP system which has been in high demand recently.

A Big Thank You to Jordan Mantha (LaserJock)

Without Jordan, the past few releases wouldn’t have been possible. He has resigned from Edubuntu recently effective as todays release. He has been involved in every aspect of Edubuntu and has done great mentoring work to many people that has been involved (including me).  Jordan has resigned to pursue his career that has been demanding more attention recently. We’ll be having Edubuntu Council elections soon, we’ll announce the details through the usual channels (The Fridge, UWN, etc) so please stay tuned as Edubuntu Project 2.0 continues to evolve. We’re always looking for new contributors and growing our community will be a focus over the next 6 months. Feel free to join in and get involved!

Edubuntu Karmic Alpha 6 is Real

// September 18th, 2009 // No Comments » // Education, Free Software

Yes, it’s true! There is indeed an alpha 6 image for Edubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala)! This is the first ever working installation DVD image for Edubuntu. In the beginning, Edubuntu was released on a single CD that shared 95%+ of its content with the Ubuntu CD image. To make more space available for educational packages, it was later changed to an add-on CD that simply installed on top of your choice of Ubuntu. Our users hated it, so we’ve now changed over to a DVD that should offer the best of both worlds. The only drawbacks will be a larger download, and a requirement for a DVD writer drive- not such a big deal these days.

I did testing for the i386 Alpha release yesterday, you can find the results here: https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/edubuntu-devel/2009-September/003057.html

Unfortunately, I couldn’t download the AMD64 daily build in time, so there’s no Edubuntu Karmic Alpha 6 AMD64 image. I’m not sure if this means that we won’t be able to have an AMD64 release for Karmic at all, but I’ll be syncing my daily builds automatically from now on so I’ll be able to test builds quicker from now on. We’ll certainly need testers again soon for the beta release (testing 1 October) and release candidate release (testing 25 October). If you’re interested in helping out, please join our mailing list and introduce yourself.

Some Updates

// August 21st, 2009 // 3 Comments » // Education, Free Software, Jonathan

• Had flu the last month or so, finally been getting over it this week, starting to feel human again. I thought I had H1N1, but I had it checked and it turns out it was just a nasty flu. My concentration was just gone the last month so I ended up watching a lot of old Star Trek Voyager and Third Rock From the Sun episodes.
• Kind of bummed that the rest of the world gets to see District 9 already, and in South Africa, where the story actually plays off, we only get to see it in a week from now on the 28th of August.
• Attended the Obstreperous Olive Geekdinner at the Pasta Factory. Staff was very friendly, food could have been better for the price. Talks were a bit too markety and “done”, as a result I’m volunteering for a more geeky talk next month. Overall it was very good and I got to catch up with a few people I haven’t seen in way too long.
• I got my first few packages in Ubuntu, I’ve been working on LTSP cluster (packages.ubuntu.com seems to have some trouble currently) packaging and 5 out of the 6 packages are currently in the archives. ltsp-cluster-pxeconfig is next, it’s in REVU at the moment, it should make it in before feature freeze next week. Thank you to Stéphane Graber who has been mentoring me on this, he’s also the upstream for LTSP Cluster and sponsoring my packages. Also thanks to Jordan, Oliver and Anthony for reviewing my packages on REVU.
• Ubuntu-ZA is having monthly meetings now, I was kind of dazed at the last one due to flu and medicine, but it’s refreshing to see the energy and enthusiasm, we’ll have the first of our monthly reports ready within the next week or so.
• Edubuntu is in a bit of a squeeze. The good news is that a DVD install disc and enabling universe packages for the builds have been approved, unfortunately the Edubuntu seeds need work and need to be finalised within the next week or so, and our two core-devs have had other urgent issues to tend to. If there’s a core-dev available to give some guidance and sponsorship over the next week, it would be much appreciated.
• Some other nice things in my feed reader from the Ubuntu world:
  • 100 Paper cuts is at round 7, I think David Siegel is really cool for taking it on and sticking in there with it.
  • Daniel Holbach blogged about the Ubuntu Global Jam, some of us in CLUG considered doing a package jam for a CLUG talk, but due to time limitations and the recent threads on the CLUG lists where users are requesting more intro-level talks, I’m wondering whether we should have a kind of tips-and-tricks jam, where a bunch of us show how we use Ubuntu to be more productive.
  • Ubuntu Developer Week is kicking off in a bit more than a week, be sure to be there if you’re interested in contributing to Ubuntu!

• 
• Free Ubuntu Books for approved loco teams, also a copy of Art of Community. Ubuntu-ZA applied for the first 2 books that will be hosted at AIMS in Cape Town and available for anyone who wants to drop by and read it. We’ll probably keep the Art of Community book in Johannesburg somewhere under a similar arrangement.