News from the LiveCD World
Ars Technica brings news of a new LiveUSB Linux distro aimed at classrooms.
Sugar Labs has announced the first official release of Sugar on a Stick, a Linux-based learning environment that can boot from a USB memory stick. The Sugar platform, which originally emerged from the One Laptop Per Child project, could soon arrive in classrooms.
Journal Of An Open Sourcee reviews the GCompris Live CD.
Shortly after receiving a comment on my other blog (Brazilian Portuguese only) from Armando Silva about an educational Live CD, my curiosity got the best of me and I just had to check it out.
Linux.com reviews an interesting new LiveCD designed for learning software security.
“The main idea behind DVL,” says Schneider, “was to build up a training system that I could use for my university lectures.” His goal was to design a Linux system that was as vulnerable as possible, to teach topics such as reverse code engineering, buffer overflows, shellcode development, Web exploitation, and SQL injection.
TuxMachines.org has a review of the PCLinuxOS based Wizard’s Kid-Safe Livecd. As the name states, it’s made for kids, and includes web filtereing, games, and more stuff to keep kids occupied safely.
Upon login one is immediately greeted by the Kid-Safe Welcome! It is a html page with logos linking to sites of interest to children such as libraries, pbs, online books & games and children friendly search engines.
IBM Developerworks has more reviews, this time of educational LiveCDs.
The Sydney Morning Herald has an article about a developer combining the Wikipedia and Knoppix DVD.
King downloaded the entire English-language version of co-operatively produced online encyclopedia Wikipedia to a readable DVD-ROM to allow it to be accessed from a computer without an internet connection. He will soon post the project online and invite others to help him develop the concept.
Linux Journal has an article about the use of open source software in Italian Schools. One teacher has tailored a LiveCD to focus on education, and is fighting to have open source mentioned alongside the teaching of proprietary software.
First of all, she notes, this is software that can be installed, modified and shared freely, without choosing between the risk of heavy fines and the use of expensive licenses that software companies use to lock in millions of end users.
NewsForge reports that 20,000 LiveCDs will be distributed to students and teachers in Italy. Less than three weeks ago there was an announcement that 64,000 LiveCDs would be distributed to students in France. If only I was given a Linux CD while in school, I’m sure my first computing years in front of BASH would have had a better impact on me then all the time I spent in DOS.
about 20 thousand live-cd will be delivered to students and teachers, with the collaboration of Alpikom [7]. All the students and families will have, for free, the same software environment and all the applications used in the computer classes at school.
64,000 LiveCDs are being distributed to students in French schools. This is great in so many ways, not only will it cut down on software piracy (MS will be happy), it will enable many more students to use tools that they may not have been able to use previously. Not everyone can afford MS Office, Photoshop, etc, and not everyone can/is willing to pirate it. Once this generation comes to expect this kind of capability on any computer, manufacturers will include it on their systems, and people will end up getting a $300 Dell with a full office suite, image editing apps, and practically every program they could ever use.
Every student between the ages of 15 and 19 attending a school in Auvergne will be given a pack containing two CDs. The first CD contains free software for Microsoft Windows and Apple Computer’s Mac OS X, including the OpenOffice.org office productivity application, the Firefox browser and the GIMP image editing application. The second CD is a Linux Live CD, allowing pupils to try the open source operating system without installing it.
The Beer Files has news of a new Linux LiveCD dedicated to setting up working enviroments for schools to give their students. It does not appear to be released yet, but looks like a great use of a LiveCD.
According to OSV, LiveLAMP can turn any PC into an instant server capable of supporting up to 1,000 students doing work on over a dozen programming languages and hundreds of development tools.