The Linux for School project ---------------------------- Note: The official languages in Norway are the closely related Norwegian Bokmål and Norwegian Nynorsk. In addition, Sami, the language of the Sami people (Lapps) indigenous to nothern Scandinavia, has a special status." : "We have four years of experience using Linux with user applications in Nynorsk" says Bjarne Hugo Hansen, principle of Høle primary and lower secondary school. Nynorsk is one of the two Norwegian languages, the other is Bokmål. "Our school saves at least NOK 128.000 (Norwegian kroner) a year, and we are able to use new software on old computers". Most of our computer park consists of old, donated computers from private companies. Bjerke high school with 370 pupils, has 3½ years of experience with thin clients and servers running Linux with KDE and StarOffice. They use a hardware-optimized solution with central server-administration. "Our school saves NOK 100.000 a year" says Gro Flaten, principal of Bjerke. July the 2nd 2001, an initiating meeting was summoned for the "Skolelinux" project (a project to create a Linux solution aimed at Norwegian schools. ). 13 out of 25 project participants met, which is good, considering that the participants live widely spread across Norway. The project's objective was discussed, and the Debian distribution was chosen as a base platform because Petter Reinholdtsen, who knows the Debian distribution well, volunteered to build the new "Skolelinux" distribution. Eivind Trondsen, Linux evangelist at IBM Norway, offered a build computer and development site for a couple of summer months. The objective we agreed on is: The "Skolelinux" project will provide Norwegian user applications in the two Norwegian languages and in the Sami language. Among the partial goals are: * provide quality control of the language with assistance from the Norwegian Language Council, * write a textbook for proper use of electronic documents, not a product manual. Pupils should learn to think, be creative and solve problems, not learn to consume. * produce a system administration manual. * a central administration model, adaptable to the "fiber school project" will be configured; Linux is well suited for this as is. * a course framework for system administrators in the schools will be developed . The first release (version 1.0) of "Skolelinux" is scheduled to March 2002. It can either be downloaded as one or more CD images, or be installed directly over the Internet with apt-get. During July and August the Bokmål versions of KDE, Koffice, Abiword and Gnumeric were improved. The Nynorsk versions were already way ahead as more translators were working on this. The Bokmål versions, which had mainly been translated by one person, were supplied with more translators. By the release of KDE 2.2.1, more than 300 user applications were translated to Bokmål and Nynorsk. Character sets and keyboard layouts for Sami were required to translate KDE into Sami. This was done during October. The translation of OpenOffice is also progressing. A simple, informal head count in the beginning of October, showed that there were between 40 and 50 active developers and translators on "Skolelinux". To ensure realistic financing of the "Skolelinux" project, the Royal Norwegian Ministry of church, Education and Research granted NOK 200.000 to do an estimate of the total project cost. Noregs Mållag was the main contributor to get this initial funding. In parallel to the project preparation to get realistic funding, the project is progressing at full speed. These development activities are taking place: * daily build of the distribution * creating a better installation routine (Debian installer is not very intuitive) * creation of setup- and configurations for "Skolelinux" servers, and services * translation to Nynorsk, Bokmål, and Sami * writing system administration manuals and learning material for schools * making an introductory manual for using Linux in the schools computer enviroment We have had difficulties getting hardware, and broadband (WAN) to our development sites. Some things take more time than necessary, especially with low or no funding at all. The money from the government had to be used on the initial project, not to buy equipment, or to finance workshops for developers and translators. We have applied for financing of development activities and hardware from the Norwegian Unix User Group Foundation. We have also applied for funding from different counties and municipalites with partly success. When money is involved things tend to take a lot of time, and the development process is in danger of slowing down. For administrative purposes we have established an interest member organisation, called "Linux i skolen" (Linux in schools) . As of January 1. 2002 there where over 100 registered members. The organisation owns the "Skolelinux" project, and the main objective is to speed up the use of free software in education, and to ensure that user programs are delivered in the two Norwegian languages and in the Sami language. School network configuration is of great importance, and consists of a variety of services . X-clients will start automatically. Network, name server, directory service, web publishing, firewall and other services will be provided with the distribution, and we will use cfengine as a the primary administration tool. It will be a network solution out of the box with everything configured and ready to run. Schools can use their old PCs, such as Pentium 90-200s or 486sb with the latest software available as free software. Today the schools have to deal with 4-5 year old unreliable software. Schools experience a lot of downtime, virus, worms, and exploits on their old software. "Skolelinux" will hopefully put an end to this problem. It has been reported that schools have uptimes of more than 200 days on thin clients, and even more on servers. Debian installer is not very userfriendly in its current state. Skolelinux has to be so simple that anyone, including less experienced users can install it. The installation routine should consist of tre choices, select language, configuration, and source - then go. Thats it, and the rest should be done automatically behind the scenes. We also need programs for detection of hardware, such as as networkadapters, videocard, keyboard, mouse and so on. We had some correspondence with Joey Hess about debianinstaller last fall. He was positive, but we have difficulties supplying him with hardware and food money. As explained earlier, the money issue takes a lot of time. In the meantime we are rewriting the installation routine ourselves, and working to get a solution to Mr. Hess' modest wishes: " Getting back to my own needs, with important things first, they are: * a working floppy drive (of course I can manage this by myself) * a $100 antenna and $75 wavelan card to get the test system up   on the net, gatewayed through my laptop * a cd-writer * additional disk space, preferably scsi, so I can test scsi installs * a better test machine (although testing on a p-133 is a good way                          to make your code not be too slow!) * more than one test machine, for more diverse testing * food money" As this is written, you can download the pre-release of ISO-image nr. 12 of Skolelinux. The build- and distribution server is borrowed from IBM, and the University of Oslo hosts the server. We are building the ISO images every 6 hours, and we are tweaking the buildscripts to be as smooth as posible. The Skolelinux project has recruited two groups of graduating engineering students. They are starting off right now, and will help us to develop and configure some services which will be part of the distribution. They are doing this as a part of their graduating project, and they will be getting grades for their work. We are constantly working to establish more development groups. Groups are being established in Oslo, Trondheim, and Bodø. We are also working with groups i Denmark and Sweden to bulid similar distributions for these countries. The Danish developers are very active in this growing Nordic effort . All managers responsible for computer administrative issues on county level have received an introduction to "Skolelinux". Three or four counties already use Linux servers as their main platform and backbone in their high school networks. More schools are testing Linux as a desktop solution, and others have switched partly or completely, with great luck, but not without difficulties. The "Skolelinux" project is using Bjerke high school, together with 4 or 5 other schools, as a test site. The "Skolelinux" project is said to be a prerequisite for the project called "Nynorsk inn i IKT-opplæringa", a project that works to promote the use of Nynorsk in computer education. We see that the "Skolelinux" project has good relations to the Nynorsk communities. The project is also becoming well known in the Norwegian educational system. It has taken us less than three month to get initial support from the Norwegian education authorities. We are working day and night, and gaining strength every week with more people joining the project. We are more than 50 developers, translators, and authors, and 6-7 people coordinating the effort to get quality language support, smooth installation, and a network out-of-the-box with configurations for thin client, workstation, and servers. Is this something for you? Visit our website: Knut Yrvin - January 13th 2001 - elected project leader.