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 -- edubuntu-devel mailing list [email protected] Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/edubuntu-devel
