Is it just me, or is LTSP a mess? -- A new user intro

[Bud Roth]

Jordon:

Well put.  I'd like to contribute.  I'm a lawyer by trade, but have been
hacking around with computers since IBM sold the first PC.  I've got
decent PHP/HTML skills and rusty C programming skills.  I've been using
various Linux distros and FreeBSD since 1994.  I write well and could
assist with documentation.  

I've tried to volunteer for a few Ubuntu mentored projects, but never
gotten any response from the mentor.  I'd be willing to try something
along those lines with edubuntu.

Thanks for your efforts.  Edubuntu is clearly a welcome addition to
Ubuntu.  It has current value as well as future potential, but as you
point out, it must continue to attract participants in order to stay
current, and to grow.  

Bud

On Wed, 2008-09-10 at 09:37 -0700, Jordan Mantha wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 10, 2008 at 8:58 AM, R. Scott Belford <scott at hosef.org> wrote:
> > On Tue, Sep 9, 2008 at 11:05 PM, David Van Assche <dvanassche at gmail.com>
> > wrote:
> <snip>
> > I find it hard to believe that any devs with any power or will to improve
> > Edu/Ubu Buntu actually read this list and take the time to test fixes.  What
> > is your relationship with Canonical and your depth of experience setting up,
> > deploying, supporting, and advocting on behalf of Thin Client setups, David?
> 
> I've been reading this thread carefully and really thinking hard about
> the overall issues here. I can't talk specifically about LTSP because
> I don't use it and I'm not in a position of expertise there. I am
> however, and Edubuntu and Ubuntu developer and am very much interested
> in making both work for educators, students, and educational
> institutions. There are a lot of people using Edubuntu successfully,
> but I personally take user complaints very seriously.
> 
> I've been involved with the Ubuntu community and distro development
> for 3 years now and we've seen our share of issues. I think we need to
> get this thread steered a bit back on course towards constructive
> dialog about problems people are facing and possible solutions we can
> try to implement. We all need to vent sometimes, but let's try to keep
> it civil and constructive as much ass possible.
> 
> I get the impression at times that people think there are a myriad of
> people paid to work on these issues. The reality is that there has
> only ever been 1 person paid to work on Edubuntu/LTSP, and in fact
> that person has been moved to another project for his paid time and is
> now volunteering like the rest of us to work on Edubuntu. We had a
> period of time where the primary developers of Edubuntu were basically
> inactive due to real life situations. I know I personally feel like
> I've let the community down by not being around for Hardy, but I have
> real life obligations I can't just shirk to work on software. These
> are the times when we need people from the user community to step up
> and maybe try to contribute a bit here and there. I'm somewhat
> frantically trying to get Intrepid ready for release and Scott
> Balneaves sounds like he's able to help out more with LTSP bugs. We're
> planning on having an LTSP Bug Day next week (looks like Wednesday) in
> #edubuntu and could use all the help we can get (testing, triage,
> patches, etc.).
> 
> I usually don't like talking about development issues on the -users
> list as I don't want to burden users with these issues, but I think
> perhaps it's useful for people to see. Here are the things I'm getting
> from the thread so far (please correct/add):
> 
> 1) lack of feedback from development team on "pain points"
> 2) lack of vision/purpose/goals for Edubuntu
> 3) trend towards "fix via documentation" rather than fixing code to
> just "do the right thing"
> 4) fixes not being backported to the stable release
> 
> I think we can work on all of these areas, but of course we need help.
> We need help testing, help writing documentation, help triaging bugs,
> help in terms of advice from educators. I firmly believe that Edubuntu
> has huge potential to affect the lives of children and students around
> the world, but it doesn't happen on it's own. People have to step up
> to contribute to turn that potential into reality. I'm willing to help
> as much as I'm able to train people, to advise and mentor
> contributors, and to work towards making Edubuntu the best educational
> distro we can. I, and the rest of the current team, can't do it alone
> so please do hop on #edubuntu on irc.freenode.net or send an email to
> edubuntu-devel introducing yourself.
> 
> -Jordan
> 
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