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Re: Debian for rural Peru - (was re: From Puno - Peru)



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Hi Sebastioan, José and everyone else,

On Sun, Jan 04, 2009 at 02:07:58PM +0100, José L. Redrejo Rodríguez wrote:
>El dom, 04-01-2009 a las 08:28 -0300, Sebastian Silva escribió:
>> It may be in the interest of many people to prepare a kit-like 
>> solution, with a pure blend debian in spanish, that includes the 
>> Sugar learning environment.
>> 
>> Our grassroots group, FuenteLibre, also in Peru, is tackling this 
>> task, and will be coordinating efforts in this direction with 
>> everybody who is interested.
>> 
>> Currently I'm focusing in preparing a Debian Live image in spanish 
>> that includes sugar, for release. Then a pure blend for both 
>> workstation and server will be prepared, along with best practices 
>> and training materials (all free as in speech).
>
>> I will really appreciate the assistance of the list for this, as we'd 
>> all like to learn from the debian-edu experience.
>
>Hi Sebastian, currently Debian-Edu dvd for the lenny release is a pure
>blend for both  workstation and server, and has a sugar profile that's
>not finished nor enough tested. Maybe it'd be easier for you to take
>this as a starting point, as it has a several years background of
>knowledge, test and experience. 

If you aim for KDE/Gnome without the hassle of designing a network 
infrastructure, with Sugar as optional add-on desktop, then I agree.

If, on the other hand, you want only the Sugar desktop and rely on its 
dynamic network handling, then I see little benefit from (and some 
obstacles in) starting out with Debian-edu instead of Debian:


Debian-edu ensures installation of a lot of educational applications for 
classical X11 desktops (historically favoring KDE, with José now working 
on improving support for the GNOME desktop). But the Sugar desktop has 
its own set of "Activities" so does not benefit from this.

Debian-edu simplifies disk setup, but this is optimized for the huge 
(compared to Sugar) installation of classical X11 desktop apps.

Debian-edu simplifies network setup by using a predefined network 
design, "taking over" the local network. This especially eases setups 
consisting of multiple servers e.g. storage on one machine and diskless 
server on another. It is still nice for smaller setups with a single 
server, but might cause problems if you do not expect to want same 
static setup, as static hostnames and IP numbers are scattered across 
many onfiguration files and assumptions about them being static is 
fundamental to Debian-edu.

Debian-edu provides organizational LFAP-based infrastructure for 
hierarchical access rights. But these are irrelevant in the context of 
the extremely flat-structured Sugar (even its data storage concept is 
flat - it has no such thing as directories).

(Debian-edu does more than above. These are just the major ones IMO).



Debian-edu is great at what it does: Hide most of the many choices 
offered by Debian to vastly simplify local administration.

But if you want those very choices that Debian-edu hides, then it might 
end up getting in the way, and you are better off using Debian - those 
benefits of Debian-edu that is also available in Debian due to it being 
a pure blend :-)

(not all Debian-edu features are usable in Debian: it is not a DDD[1]).


Kind regards,

  - Jonas


[1] More on the DDD term: http://wiki.debian.org/DDD

- -- 
* Jonas Smedegaard - idealist og Internet-arkitekt
* Tlf.: +45 40843136  Website: http://dr.jones.dk/

  [x] quote me freely  [ ] ask before reusing  [ ] keep private
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