First, A little background.

Edubuntu was initially created based on discussions that took place at the first Edubuntu Summit that took place in London in July 2005. The first release of Edubuntu aimed to be a turn-key solution that provided an LTSP computer lab with the best educational applications that were currently packaged in Ubuntu. It was to Ubuntu what the K12LTSP project was to Fedora, and schools around the world took advantage of the benefits that Edubuntu offered.

As time progressed, there were 3 full-time Canonical staff working on Edubuntu and Education withing Ubuntu. There was even a full time Ubuntu Education Manager. A technical problem that plagued Edubuntu since the very start was the amount of free disc space on the CD’s that were distributed. Often, funcionality or language packs had to be removed that would otherwise be in Ubuntu to make space for the programs and libraries that was shipped with Edubuntu. LTSP had become incredibly easy to install on Ubuntu, to the point that it was just an installation option from the installation CD, which impacted on the need for the turn-keyability of Edubuntu. Since the Edubuntu and the Ubuntu disc already shared about 90% of the same data, it made sense to make Edubuntu an add-on CD to Ubuntu. That way, there’s much more free space available on the installation disc, and the ease of installation of an LTSP lab wasn’t really compromised, all that was required after an Ubuntu LTSP installation was to insert the Edubuntu disc and install the required packages. Edubuntu was also adapted to Intel Classmate PC‘s and other netbooks used in education and is installable via a USB flash drive.

Current Status

Thanks to the hard work and dedication of Jordan Mantha, who has been juggling his work and his dissertation with Edubuntu work, there has been an Edubuntu release with this release of Ubuntu (Jaunty) and the previous one (Intrepid). If it wasn’t for Jordan, these releases simply wouldn’t have existed. The Canonical staff that were involved full-time either moved to other projects where they were more needed, or moved on from Canonical alltogether. Edubuntu is currently completely a community driven project with the backing of Canonical in the form of hosting, build services, bug trackers, etc, similar to the Xubuntu project. If there’s no community, there’s simply no Edubuntu at the moment. This isn’t necessarily a problem, back when we had 3 full time Canonical staffers working on the project, it certainly had an effect on the growth of our community. When there are people who are paid to do the work, then everyone assumes it will be done and they get less involved. When the involvement of the Canonical Education team was the highest in Edubuntu was when community participation dived to its lowest. Unfortunately, community participation hasn’t recovered yet. I do think however that one full-time staff member in Edubuntu would be beneficial.

From now forward

With the last few releases, I’ve been asking myself whether I really want to continue being part of Edubuntu. I haven’t been contributing, and I didn’t want to be in it half-hartedly. Yesterday I got a notification from Launchpad that my Edubuntu membership is about to expire, and I considered just deactivating my account, and then I realised that I really do want to be part of this, but it has to be pretty much all or nothing.

I believe that the Edubuntu project is neccessary and that it will add value to the education world, but in order to make it grow again we need to fix its vision and goals, and get people involved that care about the project and who wants to make Ubuntu the killer system for educational environments.

I think we need to answer the following:

• Who are our users and potential users? What do they want from us?
• What does Canonical want and expect from the Edubuntu project?
• How can we align the above with the available amount of resources, as well as find ways to increase current participation?

I’m sure that Canonical had certain goals in mind when Edubuntu was founded, and I also don’t think that the project has quite become what they have hoped it would be. I think it’s important to satisfy the needs of the users of the project as well as the sponsors.

Some people suggested that it’s better to contribute to the upstream educational projects rather than Edubuntu directly. I think fixing upstream bugs and adding features is awesome, but having a pre-packaged solution for teachers is equally cool and just as important.

I’m sending a link of this entry to the edubuntu-devel list, where I hope that Canonical will provide some answers on the future of Edubuntu. Feel free to follow and get involved in the discussions there.

I initially wanted to write “Death” in the title in full-caps, but that’s a bit melodramatic, even for me.

Error messages are often scary and frightning. Sometimes, they’re even amusing. I use a screensaver called BSOD (named after the Windows Blue Screen of Death) that displays error messages from various systems. Even though I know it’s just a screensaver, I’ve gotten a fright a few times too, since it uses my actual hostname and computer details in the screensaver. The screensaver also has a very nice feature that might not be intended, and that’s when people see it on my computer, they don’t touch it, since they think that it’s already broken. Awesome.

Here’s a list of “supported” systems:

The BSOD screensaver is available for XScreensaver and you can install it on Debian or Ubuntu by installing the xscreensaver-data-extra package.

The Contenders

Today is the national and provincial elections in South Africa. I just made my vote, and it’s the first time I ever voted. It was supposed to be the second time I voted. I didn’t vote last time, not because of apathy so much as that I knew it wouldn’t have made so much of a difference who I voted for.

This year it’s quite different, the ruling ANC party has a break-away faction called COPE, and it’s quite possible that the ANC might not get a majority (2/3rds) vote. The DA has also gained lots of momentum since the last elections, and it’s quite possible that they may win the provincial elections in the Western Cape province. If you haven’t picked up on it yet, I’m not a fan of the ANC. While they have done a lot for our country that I will always be grateful for, I am also disgusted at what it has become and how it is run. Their leader, who will most probably be our president, is immoral and corrupt, and I won’t support him or his party. The question I’ve been wondering about the last 6 months or so is who will I vote for? Our parties are mostly lame and petty. The reasons they give in their campaigns to vote for them are things like “Vote for us so that we can win!” and “Vote for us so that the other parties won’t win!” or “A brighter future for all!”. All vague and boring, they mostly haven’t really provided any good reasons to vote for them.

My Choice

I considered voting COPE for a while, being fresh and new and being low baggage. The problem is that I couldn’t really find enough supporting reasons to vote for them, so I looked at the ID. ID actually looks ok, and I like Patricia de Lille (even though she can be a bit of a freedom hater at times). I like her passion and she seems to really care for the poor people in our country. The problem is that it more or less ends there, the ID’s mission seems mostly to give free shit like medicine and schooling to poor people. Not bad at all, but we need a bigger plan than that for our country. I ended up not voting for them, but if they do some more work and planning into what they’ll do for our country (whether elected or not), I might end up voting for them in the future. I came across the NOPE website which isn’t really a political party, but if they were I’d probably vote for them. I didn’t want to vote for the DA because there’s this general stigma that if you’re black you vote ANC and if you’re white you vote DA. I also can’t relate to Helen Zille much at all, I think she needs to do more to reach out to the youth. I’m also apposed to all the religious parties, religion and politics shouldn’t be mixed.

I did end up voting DA for the following reasons:

• They promise not to form a coalition with the ANC or other ANC coalitions, so when you vote DA, you know your vote stays there
• Hellen Zille (the leader of the D.A) have been running Cape Town very well, and I think the DA will do a much better job of running the Western Cape province if they win the provincial elections.
• The DA is pretty much the only party that has a chance of beating the ANC in the Western Cape, I absolutely HATE the notion of voting for someone just because they have the best chance of winning, but in this case I do think that it makes sense to do so

CLUG Discussions

On the CLUG IRC channel and last night at the commitee meeting we’ve been talking about what the different parties run as web servers, content management systems, etc. I thought I’d post a summary, according to what Netcraft says.

Most parties also require you to add a www. to their subdomain, someone should point them to no-www.

ANC

• Web Server: Apache/2.2.9 (Ubuntu) PHP/5.2.6-2ubuntu4.1 with Suhosin-Patch mod_ssl/2.2.9 OpenSSL/0.9.8g.
• CMS: Custom/static PHP.
• Requires WWW: Yes.

COPE

• Web Server: Microsoft-IIS/6.0
• CMS: Custom/static ASP.
• Requries WWW: Yes.

DA

• Web Server: Apache/1.3.34 (Debian) mod_auth_pam/1.1.1 mod_gzip/1.3.26.1a PHP/4.4.4-8+etch6 mod_ssl/2.8.25 OpenSSL/0.9.8c mod_perl/1.29 mod_jk/1.2.18 AuthMySQL/4.3.9-2 FrontPage/5.0.2.2635
• CMS: Custom/static HTML.
• Requries WWW:No, but it redirects you to the www. subdomain.

ID

• Web Server: Zope/(Zope 2.9.7-final, python 2.4.4, linux2) ZServer/1.1
• CMS: Plone
• Requries WWW:No.

Stefano pointed out last night that most of the parties are outsourcing their web work. I still think it’s interesting to see what they are running. If it counted for anything then the ID would probably win.

Leaving the Country?

Some people have said that they’re leaving the country if Zuma becomes president and if the ANC wins in the Western Cape and if the ANC gains majority rule. I think South Africa is a great country, and I don’t have plans to leave any time soon. You do have to ask yourself at some point though “How bad to things need to get before I should leave?”. I’ve been spending lots of time in Gauteng over the last year. If things get as bad in the Western Cape as it is in Gauteng at the moment, then I will consider leaving. Not a clue where too though, I can’t think of anywhere else I’d rather want to live.

Starting a political party?

I’ve been thinking of starting a political party for years now (since I was 17 or so). Back then I thought of going into politics when I’m 50 years old or older. When the last elections came and gone, I started thinking of starting my own political party a bit earlier, maybe closer to 30. I’ll be doing some research and if I actually do decide to start something for the next elections, I’ll start doing something about it in the first 6 months of next year. I was talking to an old friend at the voting stations this morning and he was asking me how I’d pay for the start-up and compaign fees. Previous years I thought that I’d save up the money and pay for as much of it as I can, but now I think that if I can’t even gather enough people to raise some funds for running the campaign, then I probably shouldn’t go into politics in the first place.

A few weeks ago, it was common knowledge that IBM was going to aquire Sun Microsystems. That deal has subsequently been canceled and today, Sun Microsystems anounced that they will now be bought out by Oracle.

Oracle is a large proprietary software company that specialises in large database applications. Sun Microsystems is responsible for lots of software we encounter often in the free software world, such as OpenOffice.org, MySQL, OpenSolaris, Java and projects such as the ZFS filesystem.

I was much more comfortable when IBM were buying Sun, either way, when large companies buy over other large companies, entire projects can be trashed or morphed to the point where they don’t provide the value to the larger ecosystem they they did before, especially when the technologies they buy compete with their existing technologies.

Fun times, I think it will be interesting to see how this plays out.

I heard it about 2 weeks ago via the grapevine, but just read it on Tectonic, Aslam Raffee is leaving the Department of Science and Technology (DST) to go work for Sun Microsystems.

He did a great job at promoting open source within the DST and in the South African government, and I’m sure he’ll be sorely missed by many. One of his most notable achievements was the creation of the Minimal InterOpability Standard (MIOS) which set the government standards for working in a cross-platform friendly way.

Good luck to Aslam and I hope we’ll hear much more from him in the future.

Easter time! I’m going to spend the next few days off-line attending some music festivals (KKNK, KoDV, Cokefest, etc). I kept a list of all the easter eggs I’ve gathered in Ubuntu since the last time I blogged about Ubuntu Easter Eggs, enjoy!

Robots

Type about:robots in the Firefox address bar. You’ll get this message:

Require Quarter

In GDM, the Ubuntu login screen, type “Require Quarter” and press enter. It will return back to the login prompt as if you haven’t typed anything at all. When the next user comes to log in, the system will display a prompt that says “Insert 25 cents to continue…”

Zenity Dress Up

Zenity is a tool that you can use to add some GUI functionality to your scripts. If you execute zenity –about, and type “zen” into the about dialog, then you will get to play dress-up Mr Potato style. This doesn’t seem to work on Jaunty anymore.

StarCalc Team

In OpenOffice.org Calc, type “=STARCALCTEAM()” into any of the cells. A picture will be displayed of the original Star Office Calc team.

GEGL Eggs in Gnome

Right-click on an open space on the gnome-panel and click on properties.Right-click 3 times on any of the tabs. A GEGL cow will fly by waving at you.

You can also play the gegls from outer space game. Press ALT+F2, then typs “gegls from outer space”

The Answer in VIM

Type :help 42 in the command field, and you will get the following message:

Sources:

• http://russelljohn.info/journal/index.php?itemid=202
• http://fosswire.com/2008/06/28/easter-egg-hunt/
• http://www.arsgeek.com/2007/06/25/two-gnome-easter-eggs/#comment-21046
• http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/articles/free_software_easter_eggs?page=0%2C1
• http://www.outflux.net/blog/archives/2008/06/27/another-gnome-easter-egg/