On Sun, 30 Jul 2006 18:46:17 +0100 Gavin McCullagh wrote: > On Sat, 29 Jul 2006, Knut Yrvin wrote: > > Thats totally true. In Norway the company InOut that sells > > Skolelinux installations with server(s) and a lot of client's, they > > does small adjustments to the menu, and removes and installs the > > software the schools expect: > > Which is backwards and time-consuming. I really think it's important > to choose one and stick with it by default. Those who have different > requirements should then be able to add extra packages. When you > remove the default packages, meta packages go with them and upgrades > become more problematic as I'm not really running debian-edu any > more. Equally if you use backports and unofficial packages you also > deviate from the supported norm. Excellent put, Gavin. I fully agree! > > It's more a pedagogical reason I believe. > > > > A lot of teachers in 1-5 grade in primary school perceive > > OpenOffice.org to be an uninteresting and to complicated > > application to use for teaching. > > You are probably right about this. This may be where our needs > differ from those of other schools. We're using our thin clients > more for teachers than students. Students are taught ms office apps > in windows (not my decision). We need to give teachers best > interoperability with others which to me means OpenOffice. My > decision is obviously based on our needs not those of schools in > general. This might not therefore be a good data point for a general > decision. Quite relevant conflict there: Is Debian-edu aimed at... * Kids at primary school, 1-5 grade * Kids at primary school, 6-10 grade * Students at secondary and higher education * School staff * All of the above If the answer is the last option, then please reread the first quote above: Aiming at multiple targets makes a fuzzy result. > > I've tried to promote the need for easy adjustable profiles for > > different grade levels a couple of year now. Luckily the new user > > admin system for Skolelinux will have a plug-in that give the > > teacher or the schools system admin the possibility to tailor the > > menu for pupils in different grades: > > Do you really think hiding things from the menu is the answer to > this? Do many schools really want to use two Office suites? So much > that you would install both by default? The more sane approach, I believe, is install multiple complete systems, each optimized for a single target group. I offer - from a single server - multiple lessdisks chroots each optimized differently. One "adult-friendly" Windows-like environment (gnome +Ooo), another "children-friendly" fast playground (Xfce+abiword +games), and so on... That's Debian, not debian-edu. But might be useful inspiration... :-) > > Skolelinux based on Sarge is good enough on the desktop after an > > update of OpenOffice.org to the backported 2.0.3 version, and new > > Firefox with all the necessary media plug-in and Java installed. > > as well as the desktop clean-up done by InOut? Or put differently: Do Debian-edu support such setup? Also upgrades from such (fuzzy!) setup to next official release? If not, then I strongly recommend not advertising it as a solution! Or explicitly advertise InOut and other consultants: You are right that 3rd-party consultants can deal with surprises of mixing package sources. I just honestly believe that Debian-edu cannot! > > We have also encountered some memory problems: > > > > -- Edubuntu expects 128 MB RAM on every thin client > > -- Skolelinux supported thin clients with 32 MB RAM in version 1.0 > > That's odd. Edubuntu advertise 48MB minimum. > > https://help.ubuntu.com/community/HowToCookEdubuntu/Chapters/HardwareRequirements > > Minimal specs > 233MHz with 48MB ram. 2MB video ram. > Recommended specs > 400Mhz with 128MB ram and PXE boot capabilities. Well, it seems simply that Knut does not imply "expects" = "requires", but instead "expects" = "recommends" :-) > At install time the desktop meta-package selection could be separated > into "basic" (one program for each common function) and "kitchen > sink" which would give you the current situation (KOffice & > OpenOffice, Konqueror & Firefox, etc). This would allow one to > maintain a standard debian-edu system without all the redundant > packages if one wished. Excellent suggestion! > Properly cleaned up menus. The _standard_ program menu should have > two levels only: a set of categories and the programs within that > category directly underneath. There should be no "debian" menus. I > imagine this is not easily done though as it's really a debian issue, > not debian-edu as such. This one really the dilemma of how to mix integrated application suites (like KDE and Gnome, and to some extend Ooo and Mozilla too) with non-suite (and alien-suite) applications. Debian approach is to include non-suite stuff only as "second class citizens" within suite environments. The opposite (merging non-suite stuff more transparently into the suite environments) is possible too, but requires more work. The long-term approach is the ongoing work at http://www.freedesktop.org/ - a short-term approach could be to add hooks to the Debian menu system which generate the wanted menu items directly in the suite menus, and hack the menu system to suppress the "second-class citizen" submenus completely. I dislike this approach, however. There's a reason some applications are grouped together, and I'd rather pay closer attention to such grouping when composing the meta packages, and if it really makes sense for an application to show up within some suite, then convince the Debian package maintainer by filing a bugreport against that package. - Jonas -- * Jonas Smedegaard - idealist og Internet-arkitekt * Tlf.: +45 40843136 Website: http://dr.jones.dk/ - Enden er nær: http://www.shibumi.org/eoti.htm
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