Edubuntu GUI

[Jonathan Carter]

Hi Mathewson

Mathewson wrote:
> I have mentioned quite a few times that I am not a great
> one for consensus rule - this gave us Hitler and Russian
> Communism. What I have presented is my opinion based on my
> needs analysis for my situation.

Neither am I :)

> It is already clear that there is a multiplicity of needs
> in the education sector.
> 
> If Edubuntu is to be "stuffed" with eye-candy, themes, and
> so forth I do think:
> 
> 1. These should be optional; with a plain vanilla variety
> as an alternative for those with nut allergies.

I think most people agree on the conservative default.

> 2. The GUI should be lockable by the lab administrator:

Can you elaborate more on exactly why? I think it's terrible that
administrators lock down desktops, that's the hitler way ;)

In Edubuntu, you can create a user for each person that will use the
workstations, if someone changes their wallpaper, it will only affect
them. When other people use the same workstation, they will get the
default wallpaper again, unless they change it themselves. I think it's
extremely important for users to "feel at home" when using a computer. I
don't think we can justify locking desktops too far.

> I worked for 2 years as a language lab administrator in St
> Andrews in Scotland (Macintosh), and 4 years as the same in
> the United Arab Emirates (both Macintosh and Windows 98).
> The lack of "lock down" meant a number of rather difficult
> things:
> 
> In the UAE the 'men' at the boys' campus had great fun
> putting naked ladies on the desktop. The 'women' at the
> girls' campus spent an awful lot of time putting artistic
> love messages to both the male and femal teachers on the
> desktops. The 'men' were also rather good at flicking the
> 110/230 volt switch on the back and blowing brand-new
> computers.

The nakies ladies can be fixed by just using different users. That's
something that's easier fixed on policy level though, if someone abuses
the lab, they should not be granted access, or a suitable means of
punishment can be found. About the 110/230 volt switches, not much you
can do about that on the software side :(

> In Scotland the Chinese, Japanese and Korean students
> delighted in repeatedly reinstalling MSN messenger and
> various chat clients, as well as changing the system script
> system to their respective writing systems.

Chat clients are important in education. It can be a valueble tool to
teach young people to communicate. If the school wants to prevent the
users from using IRC or Jabber or MSN at all, the appropriate ports
could be blocked on the server, although, in South Africa, we would give
anything to provide internet to the local schools here, and allow the
kids from different schools to communicate. From our perspective, it's
almost a sin to deny it to those who could have that luxury.

> Ultimately, in Scotland, we went for a netboot from a
> preconfigured disc image - if this were possible with
> Edubuntu things would be super.

The LTSP environment makes things easier, it mounts a read-only
filesystem from the server, and a student will either need the admin
password or physical access to the server to change it. Even locally
installed Edubunt can be locked down quite a bit, just by making sure
you can't boot from external media, having a grub password and having a
strong password for the admin account.

I must say, it's very interesting hearing about other perspectives, I've
gotten used to people who have gotten used to working with Linux in
schools. What kind of workstations did you mostly use in these projects,
windows 98?

-Jonathan