In an era when mature Linux distributions abound, do you need a special one just for college? Robert Kennedy College in Delémont, Switzerland, thinks so. The school’s CollegeLinux 2.3 , a single-CD Linux distribution, is a power tool for educational organizations. Read the review at NewsForge and our recent interview with professor David Costa here.
Tux Goes to College
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSAlert.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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i have heard about this distro but never tried it. Has anyone here? Pretty cool that a university would offer a free linux to its students like that.
“We are developing a Linux distribution for schools. It will be simple to install and maintain, and will be based on local languages. In Norway’s case, this means that all bundled applications will be available in Bokmal and Nynorsk.”
http://developer.skolelinux.no/arkitektur/arkitektur
This is a distro made on Debian. Petter Reinholdsen from Debian started the project. He is now the most active developer on the new installer for the next major release of Debian.
Tollef Fog Heen is also a part of the Skolelinux community. Tollef is the Debian leader for the new installer and the organisator of the Debian gathering this summer.
I have installed the distribution on several schools my self. We used about 2 hours when installing a new network with 70 clients, two servers and a firewall. We used thin clients without hardisk, floppy and cdrom. They boot with pxe and we use the preconfigured LTSP (Linux Terminal Server) in Skolelinux.
Skolelinux has mainly been developed by volunters in Norway, but more and more intrested people has started to contribute from Germany, Latvia, Denmark, Sweeden, and other nations.
http://developer.skolelinux.no/arkitektur/arkitektur describes the architecture.
I know of at least one University in the U.S. that has its own distribution for students. I am sure there are plenty more schools that do the same.
That review was awful. I could get the same information about a distribution from the back of the box. What about the isntallatin/hardware detection? Installing packages? NTFS support?
That review was awful. I could get the same information about a distribution from the back of the box.
Ahem . . .
What about the isntallatin/hardware detection?
Newsforge review: “Upon first reboot, you enter the configuration phase. During this phase the sound card, the network, XFree86, and other devices are set up. Notable here is the use of Red Hat’s old sndconfig program to set up the sound card. As with the installation, none of the configuration dialogue uses the X Window System. When the time came to configure XFree86 4.3.0, I chose the easy (rather than expert) configuration to see how it would handle my Matrox SVGA card and old Dell monitor. It didn’t skip a beat as it configured it for 1024×768 without any help from me.”
Installing packages?
Newsforge review: “CollegeLinux is based on Slackware, which means you need to do things the Slackware way. Forget about downloading RPMs; start grabbing tarballs instead if you want to add software. Yes, the rpm utility is present on the system, but it isn’t the Slackware way. It is technically usable, provided you manually insure that all the dependencies will be met (I’ve tried it), but you’re better off learning to love pkgtool.”
I suggest rereading the review.
I know of at least one University in the U.S. that has its own distribution for students. I am sure there are plenty more schools that do the same.
I think most that use *nix would at least mirror a recommended distro locally for their students. That was pretty much how the CS department handled it where I went to my first year of college. That way students in the networked dorms could get it fairly quickly, the speed for dial-up wasn’t too bad (though in reality getting on the faster 28.8 line (as opposed to the 14.4 line) was nearly impossible because the first group of people that got on never disconnected), and they didn’t have almost half the school clogging the outgoing line just to download the school-recommended OS.
“Pretty cool that a university would offer a free linux to its students like that.”
That and the free oxygen student can breath on the campus, it makes for a hell of a generous university !