Indeed it seems like a new era, a time when the edubuntu distro will be taken seriously as not just an add on cd, but rightfully, and hopefully the best educational distribution available for schools, universities and anyone educationally inclined. That said, we have a lot of catching up in to do in multiple areas. The distro that is really kicking everyone's ass is opensuse 11.2, and what they have in store for 11.3 will be even more earth shattering. So its really worth taking a look at it, for those of you who have not seen it, because by all accounts, if you were a teacher, educational advistor, dean, or tech responsible for choosing the distro of choice, I bet you'd be highly tempted by opensuse 11.2. Especially in mixed environment, and environments that have legacy implementations where LDAP, NIS or some such is used, its very attractive. But that doesnt mean its perfect. Its still far harder to launch than ed/ubuntu, and lacks the simplicity of reliance on a monolith package (yast) I certainly dont have the answers, but I believe we need to really analyse opensuse 11.2 and see what they got right... I hope to be able to work on a xmpp based login system that would not require login/password, making the jump from something like windows easier. Also... like the integration of messenger into other apps, something similar xmpp based would help us have a common user profile system that would allow for the slow growth of everything from messaging systems to collaborative apps. In other words a user profile that is remote control, can manage remote dbus sessions, remote desktops, and all of it without firewalls even hinting as being problems. Its all possible today, wih telepathy... it just needs to be coded... and sinc this stuff tends to be fun, I'm sure there will be lots of takers. Finally, it would give an edge on all ofher distros making them wonder what the hell happened... pass yout profile from ure mobile to your desktop top your laptop, and manage them all at the same time... thats is the future my friends.... I see an endless barrage of applications that willl utilise this telepathy framework... I hope I'm not alone with this vision. Sugar kinda had it right... but we want it in Gnome... and in many cases its just following existing code, since there are already several apps that use the telepathy framework, the most famous being empathy, though its currently just a fancy chat program, and could be so much more... though I have a slight feeling we'll see some pretty awsome additions to it soon enough. The other area is expanding our app collection... that should be easy enouugh, and just requires someone going over them and making sure they really are up to scratch and worth the salt...Time passes fast, and we're a good year and a half behind the times... there are some pretty awsome apps out there that need to be included asap... for Lynx if possible... kind regards, Davif Van Assche Long live the edubuntu council... <div class="gmail_quote">On Mon, Dec 21, 2009 at 8:05 PM, Richard JOHNSON <<a href="mailto:nixternal@ubuntu.com">nixternal@ubuntu.com</a>> wrote: <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">Hey everyone! First off, congratulations to the new Edubuntu Council. I look forward to working with each and everyone of you in making Edubuntu the greatest educational distribution available. A quick intro about myself for those of you who may not be familiar with me. I have been a member of the Ubuntu community since 2005. I have mainly focused my work on Kubuntu development as well as community development. I have helped a little here-and-there with Edubuntu in the past, mainly with documentation as well as authoring the Edubuntu chapter in the Official Ubuntu Book. In addition to the Edubuntu Council, I am also a member of the Community Council, MOTU Council, and the Regional Membership boards. I am a MOTU and Core Developer. So with my background in the Ubuntu world, I hope that I am able to reach any and all goals that the wonderful Edubuntu team creates! So now, Edubuntu and beyond. One thing I would like to set as a goal is to make Edubuntu as popular as Kubuntu has become. This would of course be a short-term goal, as I would like Edubuntu and Kubuntu to be #1, along side of Ubuntu. One thing I feel I helped Kubuntu with is getting it out there and making people want to develop the future of it, and I hope to do the same with Edubuntu. As many of us know, Edubuntu has been a fairly large project with a relatively small community of developers and contributors. I would love to help change this, and look forward to any ideas you all may have. I have recently gone through the <a href="http://wiki.ubuntu.com/Edubuntu" target="_blank">wiki.ubuntu.com/Edubuntu</a> and noticed that it is a bit incomplete as well as a bit out-of-date. Maybe one thing we can look at is a "Edubuntu Docs/Wiki Day" where we can hopefully get some people from inside and outside of the Edubuntu community contributing. One thing I would definitely like to see is a Edubuntu/Todo page for Lucid to track work which can also be tracked by the Desktop Team [1]. We can borrow the layout from Kubuntu/Todo/Lucid, and I would be happy to get that going if everyone agrees on it. I know I may reference Kubuntu quite a bit, and hopefully many of you don't hold that against me :p The reason I do so is because Kubuntu was the same as Edubuntu just a year or so ago. We had this amazing product but we had a small developer and contributor community, and as many of you probably heard, Kubuntu regularly fell behind what Ubuntu was doing. I would love to prevent this same thing from happening to Edubuntu, even though it already has a bit. One thing we have going for us is our upstreams. There is plenty of work being done upstream for the educational market that Edubuntu already leverages. I am also a KDE developer, and regularly follow what the KDE Educational group is doing. I know on a few occasions they really wanted to see Edubuntu flourish as well, and they are great fans of it. I helped a bit with this when I created the edubuntu-desktop-kde metapackage a couple of years ago. Now what is going on with the GNOME side I am not to up on, but I am sure some of you already are. Let's take a look and see how the futures of our upstreams are looking, take a look at other educational distributions, and see where we can be better. We already have LTSP and that seems to be a very large factor in the Edubuntu adoption, now lets make the rest of Edubuntu just as shiny! Once again, thanks to the support, and I do look forward to working with each and everyone of you. If there is anything you think I can help with, please do not hesitate to ask me. If I can't help or don't know the answer, I know many more who just might be able to help or answer. Thanks! -- Name| Richard JOHNSON Title| Developer WWW| <a href="http://www.ubuntu.com" target="_blank">http://www.ubuntu.com</a> Email| <a href="mailto:nixternal@ubuntu.com">nixternal@ubuntu.com</a> GnuPG| 3578 0981 A21D D662 2A96 7623 F4C1 838C D8C4 4738 -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (GNU/Linux) iQIcBAEBAgAGBQJLL8cCAAoJEPTBg4zYxEc4yzEP/REvIZk4FwxQ4PqgIa37ASnb kWmW8OWVnmgOvOCzRfb7nzasggY31W66lgvrYvxQdoexDdWKhGNqs03UaD590nNT wfAA/t2Xfcnna8KX82ytESf8vSmNShgX0C49hSvxxhGMiEq7HRJjgruVFRRpIFG6 id49cp6UExRWY4wP3yxDV2hRh5urtpRkJhCmvaoHPwkueWwdXL8kvveSx3XGxUsu QRizQz9CI+/iV6qGxiea0Yt8sb91E3HgqPmNreCWxUVb7sm9TXMxpb8oaDPfqRky ENzazs+Q49EBQQj+htob1J8AuvOhKhnDJnq8D/qLySc0vprBe8tpB/D+GqGxQees fzbjuelBSOwFJo8/n6Ql7RdsT169DkjT98dfnMsUj7BcdwMahTNNALbTfKQbbuO2 cwSoCryO8k0iDZAn7EYB3ILQoUUGa1tiRggVrFKf6UOxb/FLnF8AYoehh6f8Jcs8 Fz88kzDgskxPIWsLskLcGCNKE6gvGSYJ5LeVYUCleT3oMOgfPxdCm6fQ69vMn0Ep 64ezRfOzka3oWAAK87TEyWbDh3nhbLlVPVdIdrBdd+pM89+kfp2cCraHV4qAPUp1 DdffMoDIDaDPAprF3C7cUFDenJucdjbaQ5+CPAT25/bFYfydIHMdpABo9y3dEJJj g7xFNJRHfKrcZq2KUKWQ =RLxT -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- edubuntu-devel mailing list <a href="mailto:edubuntu-devel@lists.ubuntu.com">edubuntu-devel@lists.ubuntu.com</a> Modify settings or unsubscribe at: <a href="https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/edubuntu-devel" target="_blank">https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/edubuntu-devel</a> </blockquote></div> -- <a href="http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/p/pablo_picasso.html" target="_blank">Pablo Picasso</a> - "Computers are useless. They can only give you answers."