Edubuntu: some observations

raj kumar sarkar rajsarkar at rediffmail.com
Mon Jan 9 07:20:51 UTC 2006


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. 

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. 

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. 

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.

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. 

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.   

Say for example, we have been thinking to install XFCE for the older machines as we had managed the ubuntuaddon cd. But we even don't know whether it would work in edubuntu or not.

I hope my feedback would be useful for the developers. 

Thanks and regards,

Raj Sarkar


 

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