I have been having a look at different software this week.
I digged a bit into Skolelinux (Debian-Edu), a Linux distribution optimized for schools. I was really impressed with the profile system. This is an idea to pre-configure the system for certain roles. For example there is a server profile which gives you a network server with central login, home directories on the server, mail (I think) and other things, tool. There is a client profile which needs almost no configuration and automatically integrates into the network. Language support is quite good, though Spanish is a bit rough in certain areas.
What I want to try next is installing GNOME on Skolelinux. I’m interested in how easy this is going to be. We currently use Gnome here at the Diego and I’d like to continue that. Though I have read quite an interesting mail by Knut Yrvin, stating that GNOME’s language support is worse then KDE’s. His mail is quite interesting to get a general perspective of internationalization of software.
Apart from Skolelinux I also wanted to try out Edubuntu. Unfortunately on my test machines the installation always failed (or maybe just took hours and I was too impatient). I’ll try again with a future release - or maybe just with Ubuntu.
Then I have stumbled over the software SchoolTool, a school administration software. (When I bookmarked it at del.icio.us, I saw that I had already stumbled over that back in August…) The tool likes quite nice, but doesn’t provide the features we would need here, yet. Or so I think. And what annoyed me (at a first glance), was the strange division of courses into sections. I don’t fully understand yet, what courses or divisions are supposed to be. There does not seem to be a demo online, but you can test it out very easily if you use Debian unstable. It’s included in the distribution.
And now I’m going home. A bit early today, because I’m feeling quite dizzy. Have not been as healthy as I’m used to since coming to Lima.