Rajeev,
You mentioned using Ubuntu (which is a mighty fine distro!) but I would
also suggest checking out Fedora's remix capability
(http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Remix, and Sebastian in particular knows
way more about it than I do, as do others on this list). Basically, you
can create an image with a custom package set, and have a
livecd/liveusb/etc with all the programs you want preinstalled already.
As for suggestions, my subset is below.
Analytics: R,
Not sure if this is still within what you're looking for, but octave, scipy?
Graphic Design (2D): GIMPshop, Cenon
Inkscape. Definitely inkscape.
IDE tools: Eclipse
Vim and emacs? :D (Okay, okay...)
Learning Management System (LMS):
Moodle is the most popular one, but this mostly makes sense for a server
image, not a personal use laptop.
Productivity package: Openoffice,
I'd swap Libreoffice for Openoffice; if you want another lightweight
word processor check out Abiword (or teach your students how much you
can do with plaintext editors -- gedit is nice if you're GNOME-based and
want a graphical thing, otherwise nano/vi(m)/emacs).
IMO, the three most useful Libreoffice things are Writer, Calc, and
Impress, in that order (word processing, spreadsheets, and
presentations). There are other pieces of FOSS presentation software out
there but they tend to be a little bit more off the wall -- but if you
want to play with those, jessyink (sort of like prezi), Beamer (LaTeX),
and techtalk (built specifically for code-centric presentations).
Project Management: ?
Are you thinking about things like Trac or Redmine? Those are
server-side as well.
I found http://www.ganttproject.biz/ to be fine for creating and
managing its namesake chart for a 9-month-long project, but this was
back in 2007 and I haven't tried it since. I've heard good things about
dotproject, phpcollab, and taskjuggler, but haven't used them myself;
there doesn't seem to be a category-killer here. Again, a lot of PM
tools for FOSS are web-based and more suitable to a server rather than a
desktop image. I'd love people to correct me here. :)
Security: Wireshark, Nmap Security Scanner, WinSCP, Snort
Also check out the packages included on
http://spins.fedoraproject.org/security/ (click "List of all FSL
packages" on that page to get to
https://fedorahosted.org/security-spin/wiki/availableApps).
Text Editor: vim, nano
gedit. There's also gvim (vim running as a GNOME app). I'm sure others
here will clamor for emacs.
Video Editing: LiVES,
kino, kdenlive -- see also http://opensource.com/tags/video-editing
Web Browser: Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox
lynx or some other text-based browser; knowing about the existence of
these has saved my butt a few times when I needed to get to a webpage
quickly and only had a terminal available.
Also, something like epiphany is interesting to see in contrast with the
very full-featured Firefox.
Btw, Chrome isn't open source -- Chromium is the open source project
Chrome is based on, so if you want to do truly open software only you
may want to include that instead. That having been said, even Chromium
has... issues. See http://spot.livejournal.com/312320.html for gory details.
view. I will also write a paper/article based on my entire experience.
Let me know if anyone is interested in collaborating on this project.
I'd be curious about what you're planning for this one -- there are
several interesting school spin/remix projects that might be nice to
combine into one paper.
RIT, I'm looking at you. Sebastian, you might know about more, and have
made a fair number of educational spins and remixes yourself. I know
Olin had a Fedora remix customized to its campus setup for a while, and
I'm sure other schools have had the same -- perhaps something like "hey
schools, you can make your own Linux distribution, and here's how"?
Curious what prior lit on this might be.
--Mel
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