Initial experiences with edubuntu

[Gary Cziko]

Dear Edubuntu Community:

I am a Linux newbie and just starting playing with edubuntu a few days ago.

I must say that I am quite impressed by edubuntu, the programs it contains,
its ease of use and the ease of adding programs using Add Programs or
Synaptic. I am trying to get faculty and students of my College of Education
at the Univesity of Illinois knowledgeable about Edubuntu and we now have a
rolling cart with eight laptops with WiFi set up with Edubuntu for demo
purposes.

I can see myself eventually migrating from Windows XP and Mac OS X to Linux.
And I  can certainly appreciate the potential of edubuntu for education. But
there are still some issues I need to work out.  They deal mostly with
multimedia, such as being able to to view Windows Media Player and
RealPlayer audio and video as Firefox plug-ins and being to hear and view
MP3 and DVD videos.

For some reason, the Totem Player refuses to play anything (MP3s or DVDs)
and I cannot get RealPlayer to run either after having installed it. I also
installed VLC media player, and I can't get that to play DVDs either.

So if anyone has recommendations about how the easiest way to give edubuntu
the most multimedia capability, I would appreciate hearing about it.

A final question is using a laptop with WiFi.  It was easy to use the
Network tool to get edubuntu to connect with my home WiFi system.  But
that's because I knew the name (SSID?) of the network.  But what about free
public access WiFi hotspots? Can edubuntu sniff these out so I can connect
when I don't know what networks may be available.

--Gary
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