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Introducing LinuxAdvanced



Hello

I want to introduce LinuxAdvanced [1] to the debian derivates list. LinuxAdvanced was founded 2007 from klaus misof and rene schwarzinger. Both teachers at the "bundesgymnasium rechte kremszeile". My part is more puntual. For example to watch debian-edu and debian-derivates ;-)

LinuxAdvanced is a debian-live based usb pendrive solution customized for the need on austrian schools and uses the Xfce desktop. But because is is for pupils from 6 to 14 years it includes the software (openoffice, gimp, etc) for general usage too. Documentation and homepage are german only, but the distribution itself supports english as well.

One of the main goals (besides promoting the idea of free software) is to reduce the administration work for the adminstrator dramatically. Only a proxy gateway and a learning management system are on local servers where the learning management system is used for archiving.

The pupils have their data at the usb pendrive (and are self responsible for backup) and via live system the same environment at school and at home. Booting on a wide range of computers is necessary therefore and one of the tricky parts when creating a new distribution. The data are on a separate fat32 partition so they can be shard with windows and mac.

The most important added software is the LinuxAdvanced TeachingSystem. It provides some functionality simular to iTalk, but was optimized for low bandwidth and works without any deticated server and without configuration. So pupils can change between classes every hour (or change their netbook) and no administration work has to be done.

The whole school (more than 500 pupils and about 60 teachers) work with LinuxAdvanced only, without any installation - only usb pendrives. There are installed systems too for the school-administration and because there are old proprietary programms for delivering data to the ministery also a windows installation exists. The accepting is high because of good training for the teachers and not to forget - because of having the devoloper in house.

Beside the TeachingSystem there is some other development. For example an extended snapshot tool, a tool to "install" the system to another usb pendrive (to allow pupils to create a new pendrive by themself if one is broken or lost), LinuxAdvanced Tools (a collection of small programms to configure the system), LA-Apps-Installer (preconfigured tool to allow installation of sometime needed application that cannot be distributed becaus of license issues. Something like acrobat reader for example), a wii-whiteboard integration is started, etc.


I hope I could give a brief picture.

We will participate more in september - after the holidys are over.

I created a derivtives census page but I am not shure if everything is like wanted (for example I do not know what to do with the Example page).


yours
gerhard


[1] http://www.linuxadvanced.at
and http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/LinuxAdvanced


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