FTP site for educational software on Linux
Here is a piece of information that could be of interest to some
Debian users and developers. It has not been widely advertised and
may thus have remained unnoticed until now.
A project entitled "Compil'Edux" has been started around October 1999
in Grenoble University by a group of people from the (rather big)
local LUG. Here is a copy of the Freshmeat announcement:
> The goal of Compil'Edux is to provide a centralized place where open
> source educational software can be found, either in the form of links
> to other sites, or as an FTP site containing source tarballs. The
> initiative started at Grenoble University in October 1999 and is still
> at its early stage. However, the site already contains more than 100
> links and packages. There are several packages not available elsewhere
> - either developed from scratch by the local team, or enhancements of
> existing open source software. Help is much welcome, especially with
> regards to information on other similar initiatives,
> internationalization of existing packages, educational data available
> under an Open Content license and bug reports concerning the packages
> available at the Compil'Edux site.
>
> Homepage: http://www.ac-grenoble.fr/carmi-internet/ge/liens.php
>
> FTP site: ftp://ftp.ac-grenoble.fr/ge/
In particular, the FTP site contains enhancements or bug corrections
to quite a number of packages whose main development has otherwise
stopped (but which are still of substantial interest, especially for
education purposes). A number of these packages are not yet in the
Debian distribution, or when they are, the Compil'Edux packages might
be in a more "polished" form than those present in the current Debian
distribution (the site makes clear which are those packages). Debian
might possibly consider them for inclusion in future releases.
Also, there is currently a French government initiative in cooperation
with a few commercial Linux distributors (RedHat-France, Mandrake,
SuSE) to produce pre-compiled CD-Roms for French educational
institutions, and that initiative is partly based on the work made by
the Compil'Edux team. Demo CD-Roms combining this with R.Di Cosmo's
DemoLinux distribution should be available in the next months.
(Essentially nothing of this is French specific, though).
Jean-Pierre Demailly,
Universit\'e de Grenoble I
Maintainer of the Compil'Edux FTP site
Reply to: