Translations by David Symons

ubuntu-doc@lists.ubuntu.com (Ubuntu Documentation Project)

About Edubuntu

2005-09-27

introduction

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Edubuntu - Linux for Young Human Beings!

Credits and License

This document is maintained by the Ubuntu documentation team (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DocumentationTeam). For a list of contributors, see the <ulink url="../../../common/C/contributors.xml">contributors page</ulink>

This document is made available under the Creative Commons ShareAlike 2.5 License (CC-BY-SA).

You are free to modify, extend, and improve the Ubuntu documentation source code under the terms of this license. All derivative works must be released under this license.

This documentation is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AS DESCRIBED IN THE DISCLAIMER.

2004, 2005, 2006

The Ubuntu Documentation Project

This document is an introduction to Edubuntu. It explains the Edubuntu philosophy and roots, gives information about how to contribute to Edubuntu, and shows how to get help with Edubuntu.

This section is an introduction to Edubuntu. It explains the Edubuntu philosophy and roots, gives information about how to contribute to Edubuntu, and shows how to get help with Edubuntu.

Edubuntu Logo

Educators and school personnel who would like to set up Edubuntu in a networked learning environment.

Home users who would like to have a standalone computer system that focuses on education for the younger members of the household.

Edubuntu will always be free of charge, and there is no extra fee for the "enterprise edition," we make our very best work available to everyone on the same Free terms.

Edubuntu includes the very best in translations and accessibility infrastructure that the free software community has to offer, to make Ubuntu usable for as many people as possible.

Edubuntu is released regularly and predictably; a new release is made every six months. You can use the current stable release or the current development release. Each release is supported for at least 18 months.

Since Edubuntu is based on Ubuntu, the team behind Edubuntu are part of the growing Ubuntu community. The Ubuntu community is built around the ideals enshrined in the Ubuntu Philosophy: that software should be available free of charge, that software tools should be usable by people in their local language and despite any disabilities, and that people should have the freedom to customize and alter their software in whatever way they see fit. For those reasons, the team behind Edubuntu makes the following public commitment to its community of users worldwide: <placeholder-1/>

Find out more at <ulink url="http://www.edubuntu.org">the Edubuntu website</ulink>

About the Name

Edubuntu combines education and Ubuntu to form the name (pronounced "ed-oo-BOON-too"). Ubuntu is a South African ethical ideology focusing on people's allegiances and relations with each other. The word comes from the Zulu and Xhosa languages. Ubuntu (pronounced "oo-BOON-too") is seen as a traditional African concept, is regarded as one of the founding principles of the new republic of South Africa and is connected to the idea of an African Renaissance.

A rough translation of the principle of Ubuntu is "humanity towards others". Another translation could be: "the belief in a universal bond of sharing that connects all humanity".

Archbishop Desmond Tutu

"A person with ubuntu is open and available to others, affirming of others, does not feel threatened that others are able and good, for he or she has a proper self-assurance that comes from knowing that he or she belongs in a greater whole and is diminished when others are humiliated or diminished, when others are tortured or oppressed."

As a platform based on Ubuntu Linux, the Edubuntu operating system brings the spirit of ubuntu to the educational world.

Free Software

The Edubuntu project is entirely committed to the principles of free software development; people are encouraged to use free software, improve it, and pass it on.

"Free software" doesn't mean that you shouldn't have to pay for it (although Edubuntu is committed to being free of charge as well); it means that you should be able to use the software in any way you wish: the code that makes up free software is available for anyone to download, change, fix, and use in any way. Alongside ideological benefits, this freedom also has technical advantages: when programs are developed, the hard work of others can be used and built upon. With non-free software, this cannot happen and when programs are developed, they have to start from scratch. For this reason the development of free software is fast, efficient and exciting!

You can find out more about free software and the ideological and technical philosophy behind it at the <ulink url="http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/">GNU website</ulink>.

The Difference

There are many different operating systems based on Linux: Debian, SuSE, Gentoo, RedHat, and Mandriva are examples. Edubuntu is yet another contender in what is already a highly competitive world. So what makes Edubuntu different?

The Desktop

Version and Release Numbers

Backing and Support

Edubuntu is maintained by a quickly growing community. The project is sponsored by <ulink url="http://www.canonical.com">Canonical Ltd.</ulink>, a holding company founded by Mark Shuttleworth. Canonical employs the core Edubuntu developers and offers support and consulting services for Edubuntu.

Canonical Ltd. also sponsors a number of other Open Source software projects, about which more information can be found on the <ulink url="http://www.canonical.com">Canonical website</ulink>.

What is Linux?

The <ulink url="http://www.kernel.org">Linux kernel</ulink>, pronounced 'linnuks' is the heart of the Ubuntu operating system. A kernel is an important part of any operating system, providing the communication bridge between hardware and software.

Linux was brought to life in 1991 by a Finnish student named Linus Torvalds. At the time, it would run only on i386 systems, and was essentially an independently created clone of the UNIX kernel, intended to take advantage of the then-new i386 architecture.

Nowadays, thanks to a substantial amount of development effort by people all around the world, Linux runs on virtually every modern architecture.

The Linux kernel has gained an ideological importance as well as a technical one. There is an entire community of people who believe in the ideals of free software and spend their time helping to make open source technology as good as it can be.

People in this community gave rise to initiatives such as Ubuntu, standards committees that shape the development of the Internet, organizations like the Mozilla Foundation, responsible for creating Mozilla Firefox, and countless other software projects from which you've certainly benefited in the past.

The spirit of open source, commonly attributed to Linux, is influencing software developers and users everywhere to drive communities with common goals.

What is GNU?

The <emphasis><acronym>GNU</acronym> Project</emphasis>, pronounced “guh-noo”, was launched in 1984 to develop a complete UNIX style operating system which is comprised of free software: the <acronym>GNU</acronym> system. Variants of the <acronym>GNU</acronym> operating system, which use the Linux kernel, are now widely used.

The <acronym>GNU</acronym> project is closely linked to the philosophy of free software, which is central to the projects that derive from it, such as Ubuntu. The concept of free software is explained at <xref linkend="free-software"/>.