[I've not been reading this group for a while, due to pressures of work, so please forgive me if I'm repeating points already made] Chris Howells writes:

Hi Jono,

On Friday 01 February 2002 2:35 pm, Jonathan Bacon wrote:

...

This is a great idea. I do have some suggestions though:

- Firstly, use Debian. with debian you make use of the Debian Jr project if needed -also package management is better, and you coulds have educational packages as a unique apt source. This way you could write a KDE program that can list the educational packages on the server and someone can point and click to download it. This would make administration easy.

Interesting idea, but unfortunately I'm not too keen on Debian for this purpose for a few reasons. The main one is that woody has been eternally in beta, and potato is way too out of date.

Well, that's mostly a perception thing. Debian, being a non-commercial voluntary effort, does not have a marketing department forcing releases on us, so we tend to go a long time between releases (too long probably). That said, Debian's unstable is more stable than pretty much any of the other distributions' x.0 releases for the vast majority of the time, so you could quite happily take a snapshot of the testing release (which is generally even more stable than unstable) and base your distribution on that. Other advantages to Debian are that: The rolling development model means that you can be pretty certain that any work you do will not become invalidated by the next release, because any radical changes in policy always have to be done in a backwards & forwards compatible manner. Debian has always encouraged people to build specialised distributions based on it's distribution. The APT package tool allows people to easily set up package repositories that add to or override the standard distribution packages, so you can start a distribution by simply publishing a few extra packages on a small web site, and rely on the Debian resources for the bulk of the work needed to maintain a distro. You can always volunteer to become a Debian maintainer, at which point any locally produced packages could be uploaded into the official distribution. Something that is unlikely to occur with any of the commercial distributions. The Debian-jr project is doing something related (Debian for Children) so might be helpful http://www.uk.debian.org/devel/debian-jr/ Debian is (IMNSHO) the most easy to upgrade operating system in existence. This is an important aspect of one's total cost of ownership. What other OS can you do an upgrade from 2 full releases back, to current, while logged in remotely, without a reboot, and without then having to spend ages checking what happened to your local configuration tweaks? While Kickstart is impressive, the emergence of fai (Fully Automatic Install) for Debian addresses that problem. I run the Debian UK mirror, and could offer you space on it for your schools distro. I've got 100Mbit/s of UK bandwidth and about 40GB of spare disk at present ;-) etc. etc. Cheers, Phil. -- Say no to software patents! http://petition.eurolinux.org/ |)| Philip Hands [+44 (0)20 8530 9560] http://www.hands.com/ |-| HANDS.COM Ltd. http://www.uk.debian.org/ |(| 10 Onslow Gardens, South Woodford, London E18 1NE ENGLAND

-----Original Message----- From: Chris Howells [mailto:chrish@gmx.co.uk] Sent: 06 February 2002 06:31 To: suse-linux-uk-schools@suse.com Subject: Re: [suse-linux-uk-schools] Plans for a Linux distro Hi, On Tuesday 05 February 2002 1:17 pm, Philip Hands wrote:

Well, that's mostly a perception thing. Debian, being a

Exactly. Unfortunately many schools seem to be more worried about the image than how well it will work and how much it will cost :( <snip> THanks for all the other points, I'll bear them in mind if I ever decide to create the thing ;) It's a shame that I can't get to some of the SCLUG meetings to talk about it ;) - -- Cheers, Chris Howells -- chris@chrishowells.co.uk, howells@kde.org _______________________ It's a pity we can't get Suse to comment on this either. On their own forum too. Web: http://chrishowells.co.uk, PGP key: http://chrishowells.co.uk/pgp.txt KDE: http://www.koffice.org, http://edu.kde.org, http://usability.kde.org -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.0.6 (GNU/Linux) Comment: For info see http://www.gnupg.org iD8DBQE8YM3AF8Iu1zN5WiwRAvPUAKClfTP1o5RLWst2VtqLsKHKBif5LACgkIDd 6rwgQCVDM9DCsn++qX5hSak= =IyCu -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: suse-linux-uk-schools-unsubscribe@suse.com For additional commands, e-mail: suse-linux-uk-schools-help@suse.com