July 2008 Archives

Greg was writing this almost two month ago in his blog. I agree with him. In that time, there was... very few development taking place in the Education SIG. When I founded the SIG, I was hoping for a kind of initial push, to get people interested in joining and maybe later in contributing to the SIG. Well, it turned out, that I was somewhat optimistic. There were some people posting around on the mailing list, but that was it. It became calmer and calmer, and right now, the SIG itself is in a disastrous state - I don't know the real reason for this, because if I knew, I'd have tried to fix it. It might well be that I, myself, also made mistakes. Sure, everybody makes mistakes - that's why we're humans. I'm not going to deny any of them here. I'm also not going to blame anyone, so please don't feel offended, this is really not my intention; I just really want and need to bring this topic to the surface. The whole thing might also sound somwhat exaggerated to you, but that's really not the way it is! Have a look at the mailing list archive - it's very, very calm.

When Greg posted this statement above, this was already the case. But since then, almost nothing has neither changed nor improved. Work has continued and there were some great surprises, but still: Right now, it's mostly Rex (a huge thank you here!) and me doing the work in the Education SIG - but this might look completely different in the various other educational efforts. It's just sometimes very frustrating... I'm posting to the mailing list, asking for opinions, announcing a meeting, but there comes nothing back! I'm far away for running away - therefore, I'm just not ready. But I'd really appreciate a kind of hint, that the people, who are interested in this topic, if they exist, are still alive. Maybe, we just need a heavy restructuring for all this - right now, there're vacations over here, so let me get another cup of coffee... I'll think about it.

On the other hand, there appeared also the OLPC SIG. Greg did a great job (another huge thank you here!) and I'm joining him and all the others in their efforts concerning the OLPC and the Fedora projects. But I'm also dreaming of a kind of joint project of all those efforts in Fedora related to education (OLPC SIG, K12LTSP, Education SIG)... more to come! By the way: Fedora Education Math Spin preview release is close...

Note: This is the short-cut of my recent announcement on fedora-education-list. Please refer to this post here.

I wanted to give you some kind of update (including announcements), what
is happening here right now, as well as in other efforts related to
education.

1. Foundation of the Fedora OLPC SIG (has already been covered here)

2. Lets move to some of our internal topics: I would like to announce a
new meeting for...

If you're interested, please join us there. Further information can be
found here.

3. Our Fedora Education Math Spin... there are also some news concerning
this topic!

Finally, we moved away from our former plans to release a spin for F9.
We're now focused on publishing a spin for F10. But that doesn't mean,
that you'll have to wait until the final release of Fedora 10!

The spin (or more specifically the kickstart file) is already in the GIT
repository. If you want to have a look at it, any suggestions are
welcome. Here is the link:

http://git.fedoraproject.org/git/spin-kickstarts.git?p=spin-kickstarts.git;a=blob;f=fedora-livecd-education-math.ks

We're going to release a preview spin based on F10 Alpha very soon! So
stay tuned... work is still in progress! :)

By the way: I created also a Feature Page for the spin, which is
necessary to get it approved by FESCo later. It is located here.

Please come up with any ideas or suggestions you may have!

Thanks!

Yeah! Here we go...

Greg DeKoenigsberg has just announced the Fedora OLPC SIG - just to say it in one word: brilliant!

The whole OLPC project is doing a great job, including the work concerning the sugar desktop environment, which is also available in Fedora. I'm looking forward to further work of the OLPC SIG and hope that we'll be for example able to produce for example a sugar based spin.

So, I hope to see you soon either on #fedora-olpc or on the fedora-olpc-list!

We were just not ready... that might be the sum of all things we figured out today: When I announced the availability of that, what I called then the unofficial Fedora EDU Spin preview, I didn't even expect, that something like this would happen. It didn't take long for the first e-mails to arrive in my inbox, most of them criticizing the fact that we were using the external KDE-RedHat repository and trying to create a spin for Fedora 9 - all in all: It caused heavy legal / policy concerns, as well as those, related to the general approach. Finally, it had not even been up for one hour, when Rex needed to pull the plug. In my opinion, this threw us somewhat back in our progress - but we are working out a new roadmap, which could include to build a spin on Rawhide and release it later for Fedora 10. I hope all this has not caused any inconveniences, but if it has, I apologize for them. See Rex' blog post here: http://rdieter.livejournal.com/8549.html

It took us some time, but finally, here it is: I'm proud to announce the availability of a first Fedora EDU spin preview!

Some of you may have already noticed Rex' post over here - thanks for producing and hosting it!

You can get it here: [link removed]

In my last post, I pointed already some details out, which applications would be included. There were some minor changes, but the information provided there are still valid.

So what can you expect? Well, as I already mentioned, it is an unofficial spin using external repos, since we're including KDE 4.0.85. The educational apps are currently limited to those with a mathematical purpose due to space problems. We're going to release a final version of this spin once KDE 4.1 is in F9!

The spin hasn't been heavily tested, yet - so if you are able to do so, we'd really appreciate it. If you want to, you can drop comments and questions here, contact me directly or just post to fedora-education-list.

Again, thank you all, who made this possible!

We're really making progress... really! It's time for an Fedora EDU kickstart file:

In a few words: This is only the kickstart file - we're currently preparing the release of a first downloadable image of the spin. I'll notify you as soon as we're able to release it! The kickstart file is located here:

And here are some technical details: This is an unofficial respin of Fedora 9! It uses the F9 repositories, but since we're planning to release the final spin, once KDE 4.1 is out, this is only a preview and therefore uses the unofficial repos at kde-redhat.sf.net.

So you know that you'll have a pre-release version of KDE 4.1 - but what else do you get? We needed to kick out quite a lot of KDE apps, since there was only limited size on the CD, but I hope that it's still usable. If you've any suggestions concerning the choice of applications, please drop a comment. On the other hand, we focussed on mathematical software - so it might even be called an educational spin for mathmatical purposes. It's just impossible to put all educational apps on a CD - and putting all of them on a DVD would have caused a highly bloated spin.

So once again: We're going to release a image soon, so that you don't need to build the spin on your own, unless you want to. But it's still going to be a pre-release version, since KDE 4.1 is not yet final. By the way: Thanks Rex for the ideas, the tips and finally for the work on the KDE preview spin here, which helped a lot to reduce the amount of useless packages!

I'll keep you posted.

Update 2008-07-05: Thanks to Kevin's comment, I was able to upload an updated version of the kickstart file... the link stays the same.