Edubuntu

Had a great experience with Edubuntu the other day and I felt I just had to write about it.

The Problem:
I'm volunteering at the local Hindu Mandir where they have started a montessori school. They had recently received 20 PCs from a corporate sponsor and wanted to use them for their older children. The PCs were fairly old and had Windows NT loaded on them and the teacher in charge, Sheela, could not figure out a way to use these machines to entertain her 4 year+ olds. Her requirements were as follows:

• The PCs were to be easy to start, stop, login etc - technically inexperienced teachers and children would be operating them
• They had to have some stuff loaded on them to make them into simple entertainment centers
• They had to be robust - not just from the hardware perspective but immune to children accidentally and otherwise deleting, modifying and moving things around, etc (Its amazing how quickly a child can disable a PC by simple deleting key shortcuts from a desktop)

A Solution:
When Sheela approached me, I thought first of Ubuntu. Running Windows NT meant it would be relatively hard to get the latest software to run on the machines and could also attract licensing problems. On the other hand, the desktop Ubuntu had everything already installed on it like games etc. However, Ubuntu does not make a PC immune to kids banging away on keyboards. So I started looking around for a better alternative and thats when I found the Edubuntu Live CD downloads.

With Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn) Sheela could:

• Sheela could simply boot off the CD I created for her and have an attractive, easy to use system with all she needed for her class, and more (of course I was lucky that the PCs had BIOSes that allowed me to set the boot order and also to boot from their CDROM drives.)
• Have a whole host of educational open source applications available on this live CD apart from several popular computer games like Nibbles, Chess, etc
  
• The best part was that now, all she needed to get going was a PC with a working CDROM drive - it didn't matter even if the HDD was dead! And if the kids screwed up something, you simply rebooted to have a pristine system going again!!
• No need to create users and maintain them - the live CD just gives you a default login without a login screen to have to go through