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• 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.

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.

The sessions are quite short, most of them just under an hour which works quite well, most sessions have follow-up sessions planned. Refer to http://summit.ubuntu.com/uds-karmic/ for further details.

Improving LoCo Team Events

This was the first session I attended today. We discussed package and bug jams and how it could be improved. Also the possibility of introducing marketing jams where users would get together to produce local marketing content such as posters, CD covers, etc in local languages. A requirement was identified for a Facebook-like events engine. Currently loco-teams are finding Facebook a handy tool for this, and something similar may be included in Launchpad for all Ubuntu related events based on the current sprints scheduler. The community directory is 98% complete, Jono will provide us with more details soon when it’s just about complete.

Refocusing The Ubuntu Spirit

This was mostly a discussion that went into various different directions. The Ubuntu Code of Conduct came up and it was discussed how new users sometimes are a bit too diligent trying to enforce it on everyone else in the community. It was agreed that the CoC is a guideline on how people should conduct themselves and that it shouldn’t be used to through books at people, so to speak. Keeping users and developers motivated was also discussed, and the possibility of some kind of showcase of success stories from users around the world.

Free Culture in Ubuntu

Getting free culture on the Ubuntu discs is hard due to the lack of free space. Free culture could be provided in Ubuntu via links and default subscriptions in Firefox, Liferea, Miro etc.

Tutorial on Upstart and How to Convert to it

Scott James Remnant did an introduction on Upstart. Upstart replaces Init on Ubuntu and migration for all init scripts to Upstart is planned for Karmic. Upstart is quite nifty and replaces lots of duplicate and error-prone work that package maintainers had to implement in init before. You can specify environment variables or put entire scripts into the sections before, during and after a process is started. Upstart also keeps an eye on the list of PID’s that it spawned and won’t break when a user does something like execute “apache2ctl stop”.

Meet Your Users

This was a workshop/discussion about personas, archetypes and stereotypes and how personas are used to define the edges of our user universe. We wrote down who we think our users are and they were posted up the board and sorted in to different groups. I think this was the first BoF I’ve ever attended that was led by a women. Speaking of which, there are much more women attending this UDS than previously. One of the results seem to be that there’s some more attention given to some of the more softer issues in Ubuntu. Hopefully it also means that our community has built a good reputation of being welcomming and mature.

Edubuntu Session Tomorrow

Tomorrow at 9:00 UTC (11:00 in Barcelona) we’re having the Edubuntu session where we’ll discuss the Edubuntu stategy document, it’s been in draft for a while and we will hopefully have it finilized very soon (maube even tomorrow if we’re lucky). Some people couldn’t make it, so we’ll try to keep #edubuntu in sync with discussions if the Internet holds up.

Renewed Enthusiasm

Recently I’ve been wondering if I really want to be involved with Edubuntu or not, I blogged about it, and have been talking to Jordan Mantha about a lot of the issues we have had. I also booked a ticket to Barcelona for the Ubuntu Developers Summit, so that we could get a few people together to figure out how we can make Edubuntu a good choice for educators and something that people will be happy and proud to contribute for. I was very pleased when I applied for accomodation sponsorship and Canonical said they’d pay for accomodation and my flight tickets (thanks Canonical, it’s very much appreciated), but I think I’m even more excited about the renewed energy in the Edubuntu community. In just the last two weeks we’ve had a surge in enthusiasm and new people dropping by being *very* eager to participate and contribute. It creates a problem where we have too many ideas and some people who are new who want to get something into Edubuntu but who don’t quite understand how Ubuntu’s processes work yet, but I’m not complaining, I think it’s great that people care about Edubuntu again, and we have ideas on how to get around those problems.

Ideas

I thought I’d jump right in and mention some of the things that we’ve been discussing recently. Currently, Edubuntu has just been an add-on CD with packages for an Ubuntu installation. There’s plenty of good reasons for this, such as the amount of space available on a CD (Ubuntu already fills a disc so you have to remove things in order to add anything else), being desktop agnostic, etc. However, the feedback that we received suggests that most people prefer a full distro installation.

We’re not sure how it’s going to happen yet, but we’re probably going to have full releases again that can be installed via DVD or USB disk. Plenty of people have stressed how important it is to be able to demo Edubuntu properly. We’re also going to be looking at getting an LTSP instance in the live environment, which will be a challenge doing it right but will also aid in demo’ing LTSP.

We also want to work better with upstream projects. It’s been stressed in Ubuntu and upstream projects how beneficial a good relationship between Edubuntu and the upstream projects can be. Edubuntu will aim to make Ubuntu (and hence the Edubuntu system) a great distribution for running KDE Edu, Sugar, Moodle an easy to use school LAMP stack and more.

We also want to integrate better with all the desktop environments. Gnome has great usability features, which makes it a good option in educational environments, but it consumes resources relatively heavily compared to Xfce which offers fairly good usability as well. Besides that, there are even lighter environments such as LXDE which runs very well on very old hardware. The improvements since KDE 4 can’t be ignored either, plasmoids for example has lots of potential in education, and considering that KDE-Edu uses KDE and QT libraries, it makes good sense to use KDE in an educational environment . We want Edubuntu to be able to easily integrate with the major desktop environments, even the Ubuntu netbook remix. Whatever the user’s choice of desktop is, we want to integrate the best that the free software world has to offer in terms of education for that environment on Ubuntu.

Also in big demand is ease of use. People keep requesting that things are easier, and that Edubuntu, Ubuntu and LTSP is in need of better documentation. We’ll keep this in mind with the changes and plans we introduce over the next few releases, and do our best to make sure that what is put out there is as supportable and intuitive as it could be.

How we see this happening

What’s mentioned above is certainly not going to happen in one release, and some of the things may take many releases to get just right. We’re considering keeping the Edubuntu distro releases as only LTS, and not releasing any other releases inbetween. This way we have to worry less about constantly testing discs and focussing more what’s on there. Perhaps add-on discs will still ocur for every release, there’s some detail there we still need to flesh out.

The plan is also to have various PPA archives available in the edubuntu-dev PPA, some for experimental or hacky code that might not be quite ready for Edubuntu, as well as stable updates for Edubuntu  that can be installed with confidence by users. We’re mostly going with PPA’s initially since we only have one core-dev. Hopefully that will change over time but for now the PPA’s should work as a good interim solution. There might also be community spins for very specialised installations, but we don’t want to dilute Edubuntu too much so it’s something we still have to consider.

Everybody’s Welcome

Bringing the best of education and education-related technologies to Ubuntu means that we have to extend out to others doing similar work, whether it’s K12-LTSP, Skolelinux, Guidalinux-EDU, Debian-edu, OpenSuse-edu,  etc. In my opinion we can learn a lot from them, and if they are having any kind of problem that we have dealt with already, then we should give them a hand as well.

Actually, I can’t say it better than Jordan Erickson, read his message sent to edubuntu-devel earlier here.

It is our goal to make Edubuntu easy and worth while to contribute to. If you’re interested in becoming involved, you are absolutely more than welcome to introduce yourself on the edubuntu-devel mailing list or joining us on the #edubuntu IRC channel.

PS: I haven’t slept much the last 2 days, so if things don’t make sense, I’ll try to clear it up later!

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.

13 000 Fedora Core desktops and 10 000 Ubuntu desktops will be rolled out in Filipino schools. The 10 000 Ubuntu machines will run a mixture of Edubuntu and Kubuntu, and will form part of the next phase of the roll-out.

For more on this story, read the Computerworld article, which contains some very weird quotes.

I’m quite interested in how they will use these computers to deliver education, what kind of content will be shipped to all the schools and what kind of connectivity they will have. I just hope they make an effort to learn from other deployments like these, and that they contribute their lessons back to the rest of the free software / free education community.

I’m quite saddened and disgusted to read this open letter to “Steve” (I would guess Ballmer) from François Bancilhon from Mandriva. The Nigerian government made a deal with Mandriva to supply a localised version of their system for 17000 classmate PC’s that have been ordered for local schools.

Unfortunately, Microsoft got to the government, and those classmate PC’s will now be running Microsoft Windows instead of Mandriva. How utterly disgusting. I can’t believe that a government could make such a bad decision. I wonder if the Nigerians are actually paying for the software, it wouldn’t surprise me if they provided the software for free, simply to undercut Mandriva. And if the Nigerians did pay for licenses, they should be ashamed of sending more money out of the continent on something that’s such a big waste.

From a technical perspective, those machines are very nice. However, they are heavily underpowered for running current versions of Windows. Does this mean that those machines will be running the quickly aging Windows XP? What an injustice to the poor kids who will be using those laptops, especially after effort has been put in to give them an optimised, localised system for the machines. Support for the current versions of Windows XP ends on 14 April 2009, which means that the operating systems on those machines will have an even SHORTER lifecycle than a short-term-support Ubuntu release. Do anyone want to place bets whether Microsoft will care enough to upgrade 17000 machines in Nigeria by then? My bet is that they won’t.

If you’re in Nigeria, please write to your local government and express how you feel about this (write to your vice president, his name is Goodluck Jonathan, so he must be good for something!). Send a copy of your appeals to Mandriva too, maybe they could set up a “wall” page where all these letters are posted. I don’t think the people of Nigeria should simply accept this. Nigeria deserves better. Africa deserves better.

Classmate PC running Edubuntu