debian-edu-10.3.0

operating-system · Linux · Skolelinux team

Debian Edu/Skolelinux is an operating system intended for educational use and a Debian Pure Blend . As skole [ skuːlə ] is the Norwegian word for school, Skolelinux's literal translation is "school linux". It has been created as an overall free software computer solution designed to fit to schools' resources and needs, and is currently being developed by a large and growing international community. Skolelinux provides a terminal server environment suitable to most educational scenarios, and comes with most services pre-configured out-of-the-box. It allows both a technical and non-technical installation process depending on the user's needs and expertise and highly simplifies middle-to-large system deployments and configurations. A bit of history Skolelinux's seed was planted during a warm summer day in 2001 when a group of four computer talented people started discussing the computer situation at schools and how much they disliked the market domination by proprietary software. They dreamed of a better scenario where Norwegian students could enjoy software natively translated and where they could have access to the source code to be able to learn from it. They were also conscious of schools' problems with high costs and the restrictions that proprietary software impose. With great enthusiasm, they started working on a solution and officially founded the Skolelinux project on July 2, 2001. Twenty-five computer programmers and translators combined efforts to improve and promote educational software. Naturally, some pioneers were more interested in developing software and some others in providing as many native translations as possible. At about the same time, Raphael Herzog started the Debian Edu project in France to create an education-related meta-packages collection, and the two projects joined forces in 2003. Soon Debian Edu/Skolelinux's importance grew and it became associated with the "Free Software in Schools" organization (earlier called "Linux in schools") which was founded on July 16, 2001. During 2002, German teachers, developers and translators joined Skolelinux. In 2003, Skolelinux incrementally became included as a standard part of Debian, and since then, many developers from around the world have collaborated on the project. During 2002 Skolelinux was tested in a pilot phase at eleven Norwegian schools, and also introduced in Hamburg schools.