Edubuntu: some observations

[Mauricio Hernandez Z.]

On Mon, 2006-01-09 at 07:20 +0000, raj kumar sarkar wrote:
> Hi friends,
> 
> I run an NGO (www.krittibas.org) which works in rural education sector
> in India. We have established small IT setup with four donated PCs for
> the rural students in a village named Fulia. 

I am trying to start a NGO too here in Chile, with similar goals.

> Here are some of the highlights:
> 1. We could not do an LTSP installation because of financial
> constraints and lack of technical expertise. Instead we did wrok
> station installation separately in the four PCs.
> 
> 2. Two of these four machines are very old. 300 mz, 128 RAM. The hard
> drives are also very slow it seems. From the beginning we have faced
> many problems with these two machines. First of all the serial mouses
> were not detected. We had to dig our head to make it operational since
> none of us are linux experts. 
> 

Hmm, interesting. I have tested old hardware but over 400 MHz and 96
RAM. So far, XFCE and WindowMaker have been very successful, esp. the
latter.

> After a week or so both these machines turn so slow that it becomes
> virtually impossible to run any application. So we do a fresh
> installation, but then again the problem repeats. 

Gnome is a very 'expensive' desktop, I would not recommend it for such
hardware you mention.

> 3. We do not have any internet connection and there is no possibility
> of having fast internet connection in near future in the areas we have
> been working. Under such circumstances its next to impossible to run
> any other application like wine.

WINE is also extremely expensive in terms of HW, afaik.

> 4. We have found Edubuntu to be very useful for kids between the age
> group of 6 to 10. But for students of higher agegroup except
> OpenOffice there are hardly any other applications included in
> Edubuntu. Even we can't do any programming. I think the compilers are
> not installed, nor any specific editor. Pls forgive my ignorance if I
> am wrong. 

For older kids, you can run Keduca, KBruch, Kpercentage, Kig, Kmplot,
Kverbos, Kvoctrain, Kstars, Kalzium, Ktouch, Kwordquiz, among some
others.

> We feel that Edubuntu has a very promising future, especially in a
> country like India. But then we must also take into consideration the
> ground realities like no internet connection, tremendous lack of
> technical knowledge and of course easy workstation installation to old
> machines.  

I started to test 'alternative' desktops to GNOME because both GNOME and
KDE are too expensive for old hardware. I bet fot WindowMaker because of
its simplicity but Oliver and others have pointed that this desktop does
not consider the FreeDesktop.org standards, and so XFCE has been the
desktop for me to test. I have been told IceWM is also very light but I
have not tested it deeply yet.

I can tell you that both WindowMaker and XFCE have worked very well with
Edubuntu applications.

Edubuntu for old hardware is one of my goals but I have not had the time
nor the 'ideal' machines to test well in a LTSP environment.
I hope soon enough I'll have better conditions to do so.

Nevertheless, I do agree that a Light-Edubuntu is a very important need,
with no 'expensive' dependencies. So far, I have tested the DSS live
project CD and it worked very well in a 500 MHz and 128 MB of ram. Both
Xubuntu and DSS have similar approach regarding 'no-gnome' dependencies
and yet are very different on some Tech aspects, but both based on
Ubuntu.

<SNIP>

> Thanks and regards,
> 
Thanks to you for the feedback.

-- 
Cordialmente,

Mauricio Hernandez Z.
(56+8)7496071
(56+2)3129513

Edubuntu Chile
www.tecnocimiento.cl/EdubuntuChile
irc.freenode.net | #edubuntu #edubuntu-es

ID #287183
http://counter.li.org

[I dream of things that never were and say 'Why Not?']

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