On Thu, 22 Nov 2007, Anders Kringstad wrote:
"low-fat clients" sounds crappy. I know this has been discussed before, and I'm sorry. I'm pretty sure the term should be "thick client", but I know a lot of you guys think that's wrong, in which case you could use "semi-thick client" or stick to the old "diskless workstation", which actually conveys more meaning I think. The Skolelinux / Debian- Edu business. If its a CDD, then shouldn't it be called Debian-Edu? What is the impression of the name skolelinux in different countries and languages? Skolelinux is not a distro based on Debian - its _part of_ Debian, right?Skolelinux as a brand name is well-established and the dual name is mostly there to satisfy situations when people do not know the heritage of the Latin word. Please see this link for an overview: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/skole - It clearly shows how widely used the word 'Skole' is in terms of education. I strongly object any change of name.
I strongly object to your explanation of the therm Debian-Edu. ;-)
Historically SkoleLinux was a fork from Debian that was intended
to be used on schools. There was a Debian Internal Project (these
projects are now called Custom Debian Distributions for reasons
that are discussed at other places) which was called Debian-Edu but
it was more or less orphaned. My idea was to ask SkoleLinux people
to take over / hijack Debian-Edu to come back close to Debian and
care for Debian-Edu to make effectively use of synergy effects
and finally merge the fork back to main Debian which would be a
positive effekt for Debian as a whole and SkoleLinux (the resulting
product of this effort). Thanks to the SkoleLinux people we
had a really good momentum in the CDD effort as well as Debian
now integrates a good amount of educational software, which
reduced the diff of packages that are only in SkoleLinux but not in
Debian drastically. The final goal would be to reduce the diff
to zero (it is not clear whether it is really possible to reach
this goal or whether it becoms kind of "asymptotic" zero diff).
BTW, a similar thing currently happens with Linex. At the
Extremadura workshop last month those people who are spreading
Linex in schools expressed to follow the same strategy and
come closer to Debian. It might happen that they will continue
to call "their SkoleLinux/Debian-Edu" Linex for political reasons.
But finally the name does not matter if we have a common goal
to build an optimal distributions for schools which is a _process_
to get a _product_. The name for the project that leads the
_process_ is Debian-Edu - at least in my understanding.
So the term Debian-Edu is used when you speak about the project
inside Debian that tries to build the best distribution for usage
in schools. The term SkoleLinux is used when it comes to the
product that is "selled" to schools which sometimes is also
called "Skolelinux/Debian-Edu" to make the strong relation to
Debian clear. If the goal stated above SkoleLinux could finally
be a complete subset of Debian with some preconfiguration settings
done on the installation medium.
I hope that this explanation clarifies that the term "Edu" is not
only used to help those people who are lacking some knowledge in
Latin or Norwegian understand what SkoleLinux is.
Skol
Andreas.
--
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