Edubuntu - A real life experiment - Linux and a 9 year old

04 Dec, 2006

Edubuntu - A real life experiment - Linux and a 9 year old

Posted by: Jason Burns In: Computing

With a Dell Celeron, 256MB Ram and basic integrated graphics, Dawn and I struggled with what to do for Andy’s computer. After deciding Vista was not an option, and that it just wasn’t a good investment to throw $100 worth of ram into a $250 computer, we decided to look to Linux. Dawn and I have both been playing with Linux quite a bit lately, so we felt comfortable giving it a go.

Looking at the easiest distributions, I steered Firefox towards Ubuntu. Ubuntu has a distribution geared towards education called Edubuntu. Edubuntu comes bundled with some really interesting software for learning at a fantastic price. FREE!

The suite includes:

A complete office suite
Desktop Publishing Software
Graphics Packages
Teaching and Learning Applications
Junior School Resources and more.

There are over 14,000 packages in the Edubuntu repository for you to install.

Edubuntu is based on the Dapper Drake version of Ubuntu and has a really great group of people developing the distribution.

There are already several school systems already using the Edubuntu package.

The Edubuntu Manifesto is:

Edubuntu will always be free of charge, and there is no extra fee for the enterprise edition. We make our very best work available to everyone on the same free terms.
Edubuntu includes the very best in translations and accessibility infrastructure that the Free Software community has to offer, to make Edubuntu usable by as many people as possible.
Edubuntu is released regularly and predictably; a new release is made every six months. You can use the current stable release or the current development release. Each release is supported with security updates for at least 18 months.
Edubuntu is entirely committed to the principles of free and open source software development; we encourage people to use free and open source software, improve it, and pass it on.

View the Edubuntu FAQ Here.

I am going to make this topic a column and keep you up to date with he acclimates to it, what it’s capable of, and how we like maintaining it for him. I hope you will provide insightful comments and tips as we go along to make it easier for parents to provide real, useful and functional computer systems for children to use at low cost.

The One Laptop Per Child initiative is great for the 3rd world countries. Let’s see what it would take to turn all of our older desktops into great educational computing environments for children here at home.