My ideas for Ubuntu 10.10 (maverick)

[Jonathan Carter (highvoltage)]

Hi

Last meeting we started talking about how we're going to plan for 
maverick. I suggested that we note our current ideas and merge them 
together in a gobby session that we can add to a wiki page and discuss 
during the UDS period.

Here are my ideas so far, they might not all be good for the next or 
even any release, but it's what I have in my list so far:

1. Plymouth text-fallbacks

Currently, when there is no KMS available for the current video setup, 
Plymouth will fall back to a text plugin that currently displays 
"Ubuntu" on an aubergine background. There wasn't any time in the lucid 
cycle to create a text-fallback Edubuntu plugin, but we should do so for 
the maverick release.

2. Edubuntu remote network installer

For Lucid, we currently ship all the tools required to launch a remote 
live cd session that can also be used to do a remote install (or even 
run a diskless LTSP server, as weird as that sounds). It shouldn't take 
much work to implement and should be useful for demos and installing 
Edubuntu on machines that don't have optical drives (such as netbooks).

3. Quiet down PXELinux

Ubuntu has a very clean boot-up process, although after the netboot 
firmware has loaded and pxelinux initiates, it spews out quite a lot of 
data which is of no interest to a typical user and of little interest to 
most administrators. If PXELinux could be patched so that administrators 
could set verbosity levels to "silent" (no output), "normal" (prints 
typical information that might be useful during diagnostics) or 
"verbose" (pretty much how it is now, perhaps even some more) then I 
think it would be a lot better than it is now. I checked the source 
package a few weeks ago and it seems to be done in assembly. I'm not 
sure how difficult this would be to actually implement.

4. Split LTSP packages so that scripts is not in main package

This is a packaging task that would allow for more fine-grained control 
on where you want to build ltsp environments (specifically, on the build 
machines and in live environments)

5. Split edubuntu-artwork package to edubuntu-art, edubuntu-livecd and 
edubuntu-settings

The edubuntu-artwork package currently contains all artwork, settings 
and livecd parts. A little disk space is wasted in keeping livecd data 
after installation, and updates are bigger than necessary since an 
entire artwork package will have to be downloaded when any setting has 
been updated. For maverick, edubuntu-artwork will be split into 3 
packages, edubuntu-artwork, edubuntu-livecd and edubuntu-settings.

6. Remove less fonts at end of the installation (takes quite long currently)

At the end of the installation process, "Running dpkg..." takes a long 
time, making our relatively quick installation a lot longer than it 
could be. We should check whether all the fonts that are on the disc are 
actually necessary for language support and if they are all useful, or 
just not remove them at the end. This will need some further 
investigation and guidance before we will make any kind of decision.

7. Sugar

Sugar is currently in Ubuntu, but not all packages are up to date. We 
should assist the Sugar team where necessary to get all the remaining 
packages up to date and include it on the Edubuntu disc for wider testing.

8. Schooltool

Schooltool depends on a wide variety of Zope packages that didn't make 
it all into Lucid. When they're in maverick, we should try to get 
Schooltool back in the archives and possibly part of an edubuntu-server 
metapackage.

9. Pyjunior

http://www.jonobacon.org/2010/04/08/making-programming-easier-for-kids-with-pyjunior 
is a simple IDE designed for kids that can be used for Python tuition. 
In addition to including this in Edubuntu, it may also be useful to 
include Acire (http://www.jonobacon.org/2010/01/12/acire-0-2-released/) 
which contains Python snippets on which a user can experiment on.

10. Migrate Edubuntu packages to bzr branches

I first used bzr with packaging with the ltsp packages that Stephane 
mentored me on, it makes it easier to work on packages and package data 
collaboratively, I think we should have at least all the 
edubuntu-specific packages in bzr.

11. OpenLDAP(+kerberos?)

There's been quite a few failed attempts at getting turn-key 
authentication services in Ubuntu/Edubuntu. There are some renewed 
efforts into this and we could probably include some scripts in the 
edubuntu scripts branch if it isn't packagable.

12. Moodle

Moodle's maintenance isn't currently that great, imho we should probably 
catch up on what's been going on in Debian and merge efforts there.

13. x2go

x2go is a free x server and client that works well over low-speed 
connections similar to nx. It's free software and might be useful for 
educational institutions so that users can access their desktops 
remotely. It's not in the Ubuntu archives yet although they do have 
packages up on their site, I haven't checked how standards compliant the 
packaging is but at least there's something to start from.


The list above is in no specific order and not necessarilly an 
indication of what we'll ship with maverick, they're just a bunch of 
ideas currently. Please send yours as well. I think as a project a lot 
of us feel that we should be moving to more education-focused-goals 
rather than technical/sysadmin tasks. I tend to give some focus on the 
sysadmin stuff especially since I've worked with a lot of schools who 
simply have no linux (or even computer) skills available and have to get 
by on something that's incredibly intuitive and simple to support. So if 
you have any education or classroom specific ideas then they are more 
than welcome!

-Jonathan