There is a Linux distro for any possible need and CollegeLinux is geared towards students and schools! Today, we interview Prof. David Costa of the Robert Kennedy College in Delémont, Switzerland regarding their initiative behind CollegeLinux.1. What was the initial need to create a distribution specifically for students?
Prof. David Costa: This is actually a great question. I read some students saying ” do we
really need this ? We have slackware, debian redhat and many others
which are perfect for students!” Actually this is a myth. Many of the
students I know never heard of linux. I am talking about students in
management, law or any other non computing subject. Initally we used in
our computer lab Mandrake 8.1 and to my delusion many of the things i
would and our student would expect where no there.
Flash and java plugins to name the browsing related ones. Network
sharing with Windows computers to name another major concern. Not
talking about movie player and excellent multimedia support. After all
student life it’s not just about assignments!
2. What kind of applications your distro includes that are particular to students?
Prof. David Costa: We added the complete Openoffice suite, browsers plug-in’s all
preconfigured, network sharing pre configured, windows emulator, many
financial calculators/math tools, project management suite and
practically everything you need for an easy move from windows to linux
without having to give up on the convenience we are used to. Every
students on CollegeLinux should not regret his choice.
Before the release we tested CollegeLinux with real students. They where
expected not to need windows for the testing period, meaning the should
have managed to do everything they did with windows on collegelinux.
They did and, they are still using collegelinux.
3. Do you have any plans on ‘feeding’ your students in your College with laptops that run your distro? Some colleges and schools in USA have just started this initiative (reference here).
Prof. David Costa: We are mainly a career college, our student population is diverse but we
are mainly dealing with adults. It’s easier to change your habits when
you are young, so while I am convinced that linux is the best enviroment
to learn I do respect the views of students and faculty members who
might disagree with me. What we will do is starting some classed on a
dual major diploma programme: management and linux computing. Then our
distribution will be the base of the computing component.
Another think I don’t like is try to push a distribution or OS with the
pre-installed “trick”. Afterall the installation is part of the linux
learning process. I learned a lot during failed installs, you can tell
4. Who is actually doing the work on packaging and putting the distro together? How big is the dev team?
Prof. David Costa: We are currently 4. The lead developer is Mihai Secasiu, other developers are Manoj Apte and Lalita Godbole. Todd Kulesza (from
dropline system, the father of dropline gnome) might soon join us for the integration of dropline gnome and a collegelinux robot/auto upated in the next release scheduled for May.
I know it’s a small team but we do pay (not that well but) our
developers. This a not for profit project fully sponsored by the Robert
Kennedy College. Many linux developers are working free of charge (e.g.
Debian) but with a small paid team we can better control the development
and its timelines.
5. What are your future plans for College Linux?
Prof. David Costa: The next release will bring some interesting surprises.
While dropline gnome is already working fine on CollegeLinux 2.1. The
Jedi, we are trying to go a mile further with a perfect integration
which will allow our users to keep their packages constantly updated. In
this way students will benefit from a stable and complete OS constantly
updated with a click.
We are also fixing some of the problems with the installer (which was
created from scratch) and we take into serious account all the
installation problems reported by collegelinux users.
We will add more plugins (RealMedia) to the
browsers and must important we will constanctly updated our distribution
to allow its installation in a great number of configurations.
6. Why Slackware was picked as the “mother” distribution for College Linux, instead of say… Debian or Red Hat?
Prof. David Costa: First of all Slackware is a great learning enviroment.Its base allows
the more experienced users to customize the system as the want. Red Hat
and Debian are excellent distributions but we didn’t want to bring
another clone to the world. I have seen many of the over 50 Red Hat
based distributions. They all use the same installer and system..so I
ask myself, why should someone get a clone of the original and not the
real Red Hat ? Some of these distribution are certainly justified (e.g.
RedFlag linux with the Chinese language support) but many others are
just personal experiments.
Slackware is one of the oldest distribution well know for its stability
and the simple but great package system.We didn’t want to bring the rpm
dependencies nightmare to our users. Slackware It’s probably one the
best distributions, the only thing missing (and attention, not because
they didn’t care about it..is just the way it is to leave more feedom to
the experienced user) is a better configured desktop tailored version.
It was a challenge, but there are already desktop distributions based on Debian (one I like particularly is Knoppix) and they do their job greatly.
An interesting read. If I find time some day I’ll try CollegeLinux. Making a Linux distribution for students makes much sense. Over here in the Netherlands the organization which supplies software for student only sells a modified Debian version/Mandrake CD set. It would be nice to see a really good student oriented disto deliverd through such channels. Making Gnome2 the default desktop doesn’t make much sense to me, many students still have 64MB machines.
Basing a distro on Slackware makes very much sense, aside from its speed and leanless it is very easy to make customized versions of Slackware for specific situations. The installation is just a bunch of shell scripts which are using the dialog program. Adding packages is also very easy, just altering the maketag and tagfiles will do.
I’ve always wondered why so few distros, if any, include flash, java, etc. by default. It didn’t used to be very easy to set up, either!
Let the downloads begin!
I like the overall idea of this distro: cushy enough to be usable by newbies, yet not get in the way of those who want to dig in to the guts.
That said, this distro is still rough and raw in some places:
The part of the installer that handles LILO is obtuse, which is something that will probably be fixed in whatever CollegeLinux release is upcoming.
The other annoyance was that the packagers don’t seem to understand the point of the .desktop files used by KDE and GNOME. I remember uninstalling some app (IIRC, xmms) and finding that an entry for XMMS was still on the K menu! Turns out that the .desktop file for XMMS, instead of being packaged with XMMS, was packaged in some package called kdelinks, which contained a whole bunch of .desktop files — totally negating the point of using .desktop files in the first place. When I pointed this out, it appeared that the resident CollegeLinux guru thought that syncing the menu entries with the apps to which they pointed was an RPM thing, and that Slackware-style .tgz files weren’t packages. Huh?
These guys aren’t idiots, but they are just learning the Linux landscape, and it shows in some of the mistakes that they make.
“Making Gnome2 the default desktop doesn’t make much sense to me, many students still have 64MB machines.”
The current CollegeLinux 2.1 has both blackbox and XFCE as alternatives to KDE, so that would take care of the only have 64MB crowd.
BTW, as far as I know, CollegeLinux uses KDE as its default desktop, not GNOME. I don’t think their working with the Dropline stuff is going to change that (but I could be wrong).
“BTW, as far as I know, CollegeLinux uses KDE as its default desktop, not GNOME. I don’t think their working with the Dropline stuff is going to change that (but I could be wrong). ”
I haven’t looked at it yet, so I might have got the wrong impression
.
“The other annoyance was that the packagers don’t seem to understand the point of the .desktop files used by KDE and GNOME. I remember uninstalling some app (IIRC, xmms) and finding that an entry for XMMS was still on the K menu! Turns out that the .desktop file for XMMS, instead of being packaged with XMMS, was packaged in some package called kdelinks, which contained a whole bunch of .desktop files — totally negating the point of using .desktop files in the first place. When I pointed this out, it appeared that the resident CollegeLinux guru thought that syncing the menu entries with the apps to which they pointed was an RPM thing, and that Slackware-style .tgz files weren’t packages. Huh?”
Hi there,
well let’s the the whole story. First of all the discussion was related to CollegeLinux 1.0.
You started posting one message a day (or more) on the tone “why this is not as I want it? …you should include this because etc. etc. add_my_wish here” of course in certain cases you did provided a valuable feedback, thank you.
Eventually you posted your very last innuendo saying that in fact you are pretty happy and used with redhat (and there is nothing wrong with that) and your interest in collegelinux was marginal.
Then I mentioned rpm and alike for a comparison purpose only.
Our Installer works perfectly with lilo. Perhaps is not explained as it should (and we will fix this) but every user who pay attention to the instructions and keep an eye on our forum and reviews can install collegelinux easily.
“These guys aren’t idiots, but they are just learning the Linux landscape”
May be. We don’t claim to be God’s gift to mankind. We are just a group of people doing the very best to contribute to the diffusion of linux among students and why not, non students.
Just one final note: trust me, creating from slackware a distribution for desktop users isn’t as easy as it seems.
Don’t take it personal, but if you post a wanna-be-flame on a public forum at least report the facts correctly. Some people might get the impression that we are just a group of exalted people, and we are not.
David Costa
P.S. glad to learn in the linux landscape everywhere. You are very lucky if you know everything on linux without learning something new every day.
After reading the interview I am excited. I must be candid in saying that the aim of your distro seems very refreashing. I have used many distros and am looking forward to giving CollegeLinux a whirl. I am not a guru by any means, just your average user. So, in this sense, I am intrigued by the aim of CollegeLinux. It will be nice not to have to configure everything. It’s just what I’ve been looking for.
Charles
I’m pretty sure that most plugins, codecs and addons for proprietary file formats comes whith rather restrictive licenses, that among other things takes away your freedom to redistribute. How have college linux handled those questions.
http://www.macromedia.com/support/shockwave/info/licensing/main_2.h…
This links to Macromedia’s Flash plugin redistribution form… thing.
As linux isn’t mentioned it would be one of the non “Authorized Operating Systems” (last sentence) and therefore
not covered by the redistribution licence.
(c) “Macromedia Software” or “Software” means the object code versions of the Macromedia FlashTM Player and/or the Macromedia Shockwave(R) Player and/or the Macromedia Authorware(R) Player and associated XtrasTM and any updates and upgrades thereto, released by Macromedia during the Term for the Windows Desktop PC (including desktop PC versions of Windows 95, 98, 2000, NT, ME, and Win XP (Home & Professional)), Macintosh desktop operating systems (collectively, the “Authorized Operating Systems”). For avoidance of doubt, no embedded or device versions of the above operating systems, or any other operating systems, are included as Authorized Operating Systems.
I’ve been looking for a Linux prog to keep all of my notes in. Does Linux have something like Treepad available?
http://www.treepad.com/treepadplus/
If so, this would be a great app to include in CollegeLinux
I just noticed that there is a Linux version of Treepad. It doesn’t seem to be quite on par with the Windows version, but it’s a start
From the interview:
“Initally we used in our computer lab Mandrake 8.1 and to my delusion many of the things i would and our student would expect where no there.”
Does this justify another distribution? I think it would be much more constructive and efficient to provide packages on top of an existing and popular distribution instead of creating another distribution.
Something like what freshrpms.net does on top of Redhat.
If anyone wants to try slackware but have put off by its perceived ‘difficulty’, give CL a try. You may be pleasantly surprised. I use linux strictly as a home destop and most of I need is included. I added dl-gnome and tweaked a bit and now my desktop is faster, more responsive and sharper looking than RH9. CL inherits all the good points of Slackware 8.1 as well as the not so good. All 8.1 packages I have tried work fine and those I compiled myself also work well. I have installed slack before on my PC and it took me while to find, install and configure all the apps I like to use. What I ended up with is 90% of what CL installs by default.
“You started posting one message a day (or more) on the tone “why this is not as I want it? …you should include this because etc. etc. add_my_wish here” of course in certain cases you did provided a valuable feedback, thank you.”
“Eventually you posted your very last innuendo saying that in fact you are pretty happy and used with redhat (and there is nothing wrong with that) and your interest in collegelinux was marginal.”
Fair enough. I was being a jerk vacillating between geek fatigue and curiosity. The Red Hat stuff was mostly the geek fatigue talking, which doesn’t justify it, of course. My mouth runneth over. Mea culpa.
That said, the ‘kdelinks’ package really does need to go. A .desktop file is supposed to be bundled with the application package, so that menu entries appear and disappear as apps are installed and uninstalled. That’s why each menu entry is stored in a separate file instead of having the menu entries all in one config file as most plain window managers do.
From the interview:
“Initally we used in our computer lab Mandrake 8.1 and to my delusion many of the things i would and our student would expect where no there.”
Does this justify another distribution? I think it would be much more constructive and efficient to provide packages on top of an existing and popular distribution instead of creating another distribution.
Something like what freshrpms.net does on top of Redhat.
If all CollegeLinux was about was packages, then you might have a point. I think the idea, though, is providing a distro with the malleability of Slackware but all the needed packages and tools already on board, which is a whole other matter entirely.
Sorry but I still don’t get it. Why these packages and tools cannot be provide as add-on to Slackware? For example with a CD that will provide additional tools and drivers, and a “setup” to install everything on top of an existing installation of Slackware 9.
Over time Slackware will evolve. Will CollegeLinux follow that evolution or completely diverge, creating yet another obscure distribution that is barely compatible with anything else.
“Sorry but I still don’t get it. Why these packages and tools cannot be provide as add-on to Slackware? For example with a CD that will provide additional tools and drivers, and a “setup” to install everything on top of an existing installation of Slackware 9.”
But you still don’t have automatic hardware detection as part of the install. (Yes, Slackware 9 does *some* hardware detection but not as complete as, say, Red Hat’s Kudzu, which is part of CollegeLinux.) Nor would you have X configuration as an automatic part of first boot-up.
While, IMHO, CollegeLinux’s implementation needs work, I don’t think it’s a bad idea, and I don’t think it’s as simple as adding packages onto an existing distro.
“Sorry but I still don’t get it. Why these packages and tools cannot be provide as add-on to Slackware? For example with a CD that will provide additional tools and drivers, and a “setup” to install everything on top of an existing installation of Slackware 9.”
Face it. Slackware is our base so we like it. On the other hand is not the desktop distribution for the average user. How can you put in a separate CD a new installer ? Wow great idea. After you install slackware you put in our cd with another installer, another desktop manager…other packages..removing server packages..
wait. Isn’t this a different distro ? I mean a new installer builded from scratch (sure not perfect yet, but at least we didn’t copy and pasted some other code) a totally different set of packages etc.
Furthermore linux it’s about options. ‘As Linus Torvalds stated in a TV interview the reason he started Linux is to make the OS market as varied as the car manufacturing market…’
“Over time Slackware will evolve. Will CollegeLinux follow that evolution or completely diverge, creating yet another obscure distribution that is barely compatible with anything else.”
CL is fully compatible with slackware. We are a very active project as you can see in our forum. I appreciate this might not be a sufficient guarantee for you, but so far, with over 10,000 downloads in 2 weeks and some positive feedback we are happy.
There are a lot of distributions out there (www.distrowatch.com) why you are so negative about new distributions?
If you are happy with your current distribution why bother?
Why Mandrake is a different project and they didn’t provided additional packages for redhat? afterall mandrake is based on redhat?
I haven’t tried it myself, but there is another application called TuxCards that may be what you’re looking for.
Here’s the URL: http://www.tuxcards.de/
I think there needs to be at least as many distos, as there are users. And each disto needs at least a dozen GUI environments.
That is what will make Linux mainstream.
how to install CL Jedi across drives I would. As I don’t have one drive quite big enough for the Jedi edition…
I tried both versions.. Jedi was by far the best. They fixed the lilo bug.
To semi-quote J.J. “These guys aren’t idiots, but they are just learning the Linux landscape” … well, I’m a linux idiot and I had no problem with it. Although I’m not a college student I really enjoyed the time I had with the distro, until I moved on to many, many other distros. At present I have ALT Junior running on a K-6 333. Another nice distro.
Note: David Costa, I used to belong to your site but when you changed over to your new style web page, you “lost” my login name and password.
J. J. Ramsey wrote: “turns out that the .desktop file for XMMS, instead of being packaged with XMMS, was packaged in some package called kdelinks, which contained a whole bunch of .desktop files”
Actually, I think that’s Slackware’s fault. It includes the kdelinks package, which includes links for many non-KDE apps that would be installed during a full installation. It’s basically a time saver so that the user who doesn’t know about kappfinder won’t have to edit the menu for several dozen apps. I suspect CollegeLinux merely copied over the package.
“I tried both versions.. Jedi was by far the best. They fixed the lilo bug.”
The LILO “bug” was a UI issue introduced into Jedi. It will probably disappear in the next release, as several others found the LILO config UI confusing. It will be interesting to see what the next release of CollegeLinux is like.
To semi-quote J.J. “These guys aren’t idiots, but they are just learning the Linux landscape”
… well, I’m a linux idiot and I had no problem with it.
I won’t go so far as to say that I’m not a Linux idiot myself. I just tend to notice little details. I’m a very good nitpicker. I also had the bad luck of having an older CD-ROM. Actually, that was more of an issue of dealing with the PC landscape than the Linux landscape.
By default, the installer would assume that ATAPI devices actually followed the ATAPI standard and thus could handle DMA. Red Hat8, FreeBSD, and probably some of the other “bigger” free Unices left disabled DMA for ATAPI devices, because historically, they have not handled DMA well. Slackware and CollegeLinux, however, do not do this “traditional” workaroung and are bug-incompatible with older ATAPI stuff. This is less of an issue today, but I had the bad luck of having an older ATAPI CD-ROM drive that I cannibalized from another machine to replace a faster, more recent CD-ROM that failed.
As a result of this bug-incompatibility, the CollegeLinux installation flopped badly, leaving me with a botched install that wouldn’t boot. It took me several days, a comparision with Slackware and Red Hat installs, and deciphering Slackware’s Bourne shell install scripts to figure out what was going on. Yet after tracking down the problem, the CollegeLinux developers reported that they would not introduce the “traditional” DMA workaround into CollegeLinux on the grounds that it would only benefit a minority at the expense of a performance hit to the majority. I thought that was a bad design decision not only on the grounds that the workaround was common practice, but that the workaround helped those who had an older CD-ROM drive — but did not know about the DMA problem — to avoid mysterious catastrophic failure of the CollegeLinux install, at the cost of a performance hit that would probably be unnoticed. Spending several days to track down a problem only to have the effort largely wasted did not exactly make be feel all warm and fuzzy.
That is the beauty of Linux, expertise and time notwithstanding, anyone can roll their own Linux Distro.
The Idea of a distro which addresses a particular group, with particular needs, is great.
The fact that this particular distro adresses college students will be a big help towards pushing Linux on the desktop. As these students (that learn and use Linux) graduate, they will go into the workforce, and inquire upon the IT staff on having a Linux desktop. Some will start their own companies, and what will they have on their company desktops? Linux!
This is a project that all of us should tip our hat to and try to support in some way, if nothing else, moral support (shame on the post-er who felt the need to ridicule, next time educate, not sneer).
I see this project as yet another developing fire that a certain proprietary software vendor will try to snuff out. I hope this becomes a wildfire, recklessly out of control.
Students everywhere using Linux, and developing Linux. An idea whose time has come.
I installed College Linux a couple of weeks ago and went back to Mandrake 9.0 (now opgraded to 9.1) because of problems gitting my printer to work properly. (had the same problems with Vector Linux and Slackware itself) Also the installer is not as intuative as it could be (needs some work).
The problem with providing the plugins such as java and flash are legal reasons. If you read java’s licence youll find that unless you pay a largish fee you CANNOT distribute it yourself. same goes with flash
Has anyone found any links with a review of the distro actualy running and being used for everyday stuff?
Although I’m not sure, how will be the non-GPL licenses for some plugins handled and I prefer 100% GPL packages, I’ll try the CL. I use Debian for now and I score very high its commitment with GNU/GPL. This is the way to avoid commercial destruction of GNU and Linux world -keep the GPL. I’ll try CL because of proclaimed well-configured environment. But please, You Developement Team, stuck as much as possible with original Slackware and when possible, try to improve existing projects in Slackware (and whole GNU/Linux), and try not to create bunch of totally new CL-only packages. I don’t like such movement in Linux world. Every commercial distro is selling something they haven’t created, just the installer, configurator and maybe desktop theme is diferent for RedHat, Mandrake, SuSE etc etc. They should better improve one existing hw detector, configurator etc, together, and not create 777 hw detectors, 548 configuration tools, none of them working good enough. They’re not improving GNU/Linux. If they worked together on ONE_REALLY_GOOD hw detector and ONE_REALLY_GOOD configuration tool etc, I wouldn’t say so, but they don’t. Thank You.