Suggestion on choosing Distro

Mon May 9 15:12:17 UTC 2016

On Mon, May 09, 2016 at 07:01:22PM +0530, Venkatesh Thennarasan wrote:
:*In Tamil Nadu , India FSFTN has taken an initiative to take Free Software
:to school Students through Education, Initially We have Taken a Rural
:School in Outskirts of Theni Town. And Several Community Computing Centers.*
:
:*We have planned to fork a Distro for the educational purpose and design it
:based on the curriculum of Tamil Nadu's Education System. And also Localize
:it.*
:
:*We like your suggestions on choosing the Distro, Would Your Distro be
:suitable for the Purpose or do you suggest any Other Alternatives*

I suspect the consensus of htis list will be 'yes edubuntu is
approriate' since this is an edubuntu list.

I would suggest you do not want to fork your own distribution.  It is
much better to use a custom installer for to define your
customizations but use upstream packages as much as possible so you
minimize the amount of work your local team does.

I've used edubuntu for some what smaller projects than yours in Kenya,
Fiji, and a community college in a low income area of the US.  Day to
day I'm also resonsible for the Ubuntu (perviously Debian and before
that RedHat) based Linux deployments at a rather wealthy and well
known reasearch institution.

In all cases I've used upstream either directly of through a local
mirror of offcial repositories. I for the cases where I do need custom
packages I have setup a local repository that I also list along with
the official repos.

Local customization for package selection and configuration is done
using configuration management (we use puppet, but there are a number
of similar and equally good options availabe now like chef, ansible
etc.)

With all FOSS software the fewer and smaller changes you can make
locally the less you need ot maintain yourself and the happier you
will be.  For example if you need ot make localization changes to try
and commit those back upstream, you may need to carry a local package
for one release but hopefully after that your changes will become part
of the upstream package and you won't need to keep making the same
changes everytime a new version is released. 

FOSS is great because we can all work together to meet common needs
and individual users can cusomize for their special needs.  It's
important you not bring too much into that second category unless you
really need to because it's easy to take on too much and become
overwhelmed.

-Jon

:
:
:*Communnity Computing Center-Theni*
:
:*Background:*
:
:*https://discuss.fsftn.org/t/tamil-educational-software-packages-for-children/650*
:<https://discuss.fsftn.org/t/tamil-educational-software-packages-for-children/650>
:
:Based on this request, Prasanth and Venkatesh went to Theni district to
:study the requirements, infrastructure and feasibility of the project.
:
:*Site report*
:
:We visited two schools in the area. One of the schools was in Rayappanpatti
:village and the other was in Gokilapuram village.
:
:*Rayappanpatti Village*
:
:The schoool in Rayappanpatti is a government aided private Board High
:school (with 3500 students from 6th to 12th). Most of the students are from
:very poor backgrounds. They have a lab with around 25 computers all of
:which run Windows XP.
:
:We had a discusson with the computer teachers of the school. From class VI,
:students are allowed to come to the computer lab. However, in the absence
:of any syllabus, they are mainly taught Paint and the MS Office suite. The
:teachers said they gave up on ide of teaching C language to 9th graders,
:since Turbo C couldn't be installed
:
:We also had a discusson with the correspondent. He gave us a free hand to
:do anything we like with respect to computer education till class VIII. He
:was also keen on introducing the education of other subjects through
:digital methods (like IT at school in Kerala) as and when we could implement.
:
:*Gokilapuram Village*
:
:Gokilapuram has a small school run by the Harijan Seva Sangh. There are 55
:students stuudying there from classes I-VIII. They don't have a computer
:there. The trust who took us to these villages is planning to buy them a
:couple of desktops. Since they also don't have a syllabus, they are open to
:any ideas we give them.
:
:Medium of education in both these schools is Tamil.
:
:*What we can do*
:
:The idea of this Initiative is to introduce Free and Open source software
:to school childern through their curriculum, and to do so at a stage when
:they are first exposed to computers.
:
:This can first be through defining a computer science syllabus for them.
:Later, after students get used to it, we can look at the idea of bringing
:in educational packages for all subjects.
:
:Initially, it would be wise to take up just class VI and define a syllabus
:and give them the tools for that and as that batch progresses, we can give
:them more options in the future years. This also helpos us evaluate and
:enhance the syllabus and prepare a more elaborate one for the next year.
:
:
:
:Ideally, we can create a distro which can, to start with, have the
:following tools
:
:
:
:*Sl. NO.*
:
:*Tool Name*
:
:*Properaitery tool alterntive*
:
:*Type*
:
:1
:
:mPaint
:
:MS Paint
:
:Paint application
:
:2
:
:LibreDraw
:
:MS visio/CorelDraw
:
:Vector Graphics editor
:
:3
:
:LibreWriter
:
:Msword
:
:Document Writer
:
:4
:
:Gedit
:
:Notepad
:
:Text Editor
:
:5
:
:LibreImpress
:
:MS Powerpoint
:
:Presentation
:
:6
:
:Tamil99
:
:None
:
:Keybord Layout
:
:7
:
:HTML
:
:NONE
:
:Hypertext markup
:
:
:
:
:
:
:
:We can also add whatever educational packages we can localise. But in
:addition to this, we need to define a proper syllabus for class VI. For
:this, we could take a look at CBSE syallbus and maybe provide a series of
:directions
:
:
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