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Edubuntu Swimming with the ducks

Discussed:

• Introduced Edubuntu and it’s current status
• Went through the current Edubuntu Strategy Doc on Gobby, and explained why we have what we do in there and why we purposely kept it so simple
• Real-life problems that the Guadalinex Edu team is facing currently. They currently have to add dpkg-diverts to 43 different packages to implement the menu system required by the local education department.
• Installation media: Assumptions can’t really be made, there will always be schools who don’t have either an optical drive, support for USB booting or even a local area network.
• Briefly touched on the roadmap and goals that we can consider for Karmic and Karmic+1, but then we ran out of time.

Planning LTSP for Karmic

Discussed:

• dhclient is big and clunky, ipconfig is small but doesn’t really work to well. Microdhcp could be a good option, it supplies the details as environment variables and then you could do with it what you want. The foundations team will be contacted for a resolution on this.
• LTSP could probably not work for EC2 since EC2 doesn’t provide layer 2 network layer support so DHCP woudln’t work. Besides that LTSP clients could be completely virtualised. Local apps could work for server-type services.
• Ogra is still waiting for someone to implement a call-center out of the box based on LTSP
• Revolution Linux is currently running 50 LTSP servers with 5000 clients using LTSP Cluster, adding another 500 machines soon.
• Further improvements for local-apps: mime-types, gconf (gconf writes at the same time on the home directory on the server and on the client, messing up some XML files). Oliver suggests a more proper implementation of dbus, he discussed it with Scott, but there’s no proper way to implement that with dbus currently. Oli also suggested taking a look at gabriel, which allows you to run gconf over ssh.
• Checking for Compiz on LTSP currently is currently a hack and a better way should be found to enable compiz by default for Karmic.
• Scanning on LTSP for Karmic can be solved by adding xsane as a dependency for the LTSP chroot.
• Functionality to let users choose their security level might be useful, ie. switching between ssh encryption and not.
• Oliver said that the new union mount infrastructure, it’s possible that it will be quite slower than than the current unionfs tools.

Helping Ubuntu With NGOs

This session was a nice surprise. I joined it without knowing much what it was about or where it came from. It’s about what we can do as the Ubuntu community to help NGO’s get started with running Ubuntu. The idea of an Ubuntu users showcase / Behind Ubuntu users came up again. There will probably be a follow-up meeting in about a month or so, Daniel Holbach will announce in about 2 weeks or so.