Edubuntu for academic use?

[Roberto Rosselli Del Turco]

Hi all,
some time ago I proposed a version of Ubuntu, on the Ubuntu dev ml,
aimed at people studying and working at Universities: students,
researchers, professors. I'm reporting my original message below.

In short, I was kindly pointed to Edubuntu, and indeed I read in its
wiki that academic users are targeted for later releases. I'd be
interested in working towards this goal, I'm especially interested in
XML related stuff, but not only. I also like the idea of using
meta-packages to build customized educational distributions out of the
standard Ubuntu releases, is this the plan for Edubuntu as well? This
way one could pick and choose the sets of software packages most
suitable to his needs, instead of etching in stone the Edubuntu
features.

Thanks in advance, looking forward to hearing from people interested in
this idea.

Ciao

-------------------------------8<-------------------------------

Hi all Ubuntu devs,
I am a long time Gnome user who also happens to work at a University in
Italy. I've been working in the Humanities Computing field during the
last few years, and together with other people we've founded a site
called Digital Medievalist (http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/).

Lately I've been working (well, started working...) on a customized
Ubuntu Live CD especially designed for scholars: XML editors, TEI
(http://www.tei-c.org/) DTDs and documentation, image processing
software, office applications and the like. This got me thinking: has
anyone considered an Acabuntu (= Ubuntu for academics) version of Ubuntu
Linux? It would be a boon for more advanced users (those already aware
of Linux: I can claim at least one convert to Ubuntu :) and a good
showcase for those using/tempted by Macs. Open source makes a lot of
sense for academics, we often tend to work and organize research in a
very similar way. It would be very nice to have a specialized distro for
people like me.

I know about an Edubuntu project, which is similar albeit with a
different focus. If anyone is willing to start working on Acabuntu,
please contact me, I'd like to work on such a project!

-------------------------------8<-------------------------------

-- 
 
Roberto Rosselli Del Turco      roberto.rossellidelturco at unito.it
Dipartimento di Scienze         rosselli at ling.unipi.it
del Linguaggio                  Then spoke the thunder  DA
Universita' di Torino           Datta: what have we given?  (TSE)
 
  Hige sceal the heardra,     heorte the cenre,
  mod sceal the mare,       the ure maegen litlath.  (Maldon 312-3)