Edubuntu 23.04 Beta Released

Edubuntu is back as an official flavor of Ubuntu!

The Edubuntu Council is pleased to announce the first beta in nine years of Edubuntu! This one is 23.04 beta, codenamed “Lunar Lobster”. While it is free of any showstopper installer bugs and is representative of what will be the final release, bugs may be found within.

Images may be downloaded from https://cdimages.ubuntu.com/edubuntu/releases/23.04/beta.

For those looking for Raspberry Pi images, while they are planned, they will be unavailable for this release.

Where’s the website?
We’re still working on that. A ticket is in with Canonical IS to reestablish the website, so hopefully some progress is being made there. All we can do at this point is sit and wait. In the meantime, this is where we will post items because this is the only place we have.

New Features
This isn’t the Edubuntu you once knew! Gone are the days of the Linux Terminal Server Project (LTSP), which was long-since spun off into its own. Instead, we’re focusing on making classroom and parental administration easy. Since this is the first release in almost a decade, those features are still in-development with many still evolving and being planned.

We plan to showcase more of the included and curated applications, including the application folders in the Application Overview, in the official release announcement on April 20th, but for now we will show off the pieces we have developed.

The Edubuntu Installer is the important piece, which helps select the age group the system will be targeted towards. After the system has been installed, opening this application lets you install and remove the installed software age groups:

Screenshot from 2023-03-30 05-58-01

It also lets you select the default desktop wallpaper and dock defaults for the target age group for the system, where you can choose from four different defaults, which take effect upon logout and login:

Screenshot from 2023-03-30 05-59-21

Another feature we have added is the Edubuntu Menu Administrator which allows system administrators to remove icons from the Application Overview for non-administrator users. This works system-wide for now. Future plans include allowing this on a per-user basis for more atomic control.


Known Issues

  • KDE/Qt apps use a blue accent color as opposed to a red accent color or whatever accent color is set by the user in the System Settings. This is due to adwaita-qt being unable to respect the Yaru color schemes. There is no known fix currently, however future releases may have other configurations which allow this. There are ongoing discussions.
  • The system installer (Ubiquity) provides a minimal install option. This is ineffective for this release.
  • GNOME Notes has a search provider for the Activities Overview which will sometimes crash.
  • As Edubuntu shares a desktop with and is based on Ubuntu Desktop, any known issues can be found in the official Ubuntu Release Notes.
  • Individual applications included with Edubuntu may have their own known issues. Please consult upstream release notes for those applications before filing bug reports.

We do encourage you to test and report any bugs, but not here as this isn’t a bug tracker, nor is it a support site. Information about reporting bugs can be found here.


How To Contact

Edubuntu Users Mailing List (Support Discussion)
Edubuntu Developers Mailing List (Join The Team!)

Social Media

Twitter
Mastodon


From both Amy and I, we thank you for following this journey, and we’re so pleased to bring Edubuntu back to the family!

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Downloading!! I’ll have a try tomorrow from ventoy! THANKS!!!

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I’m writing FROM Edubuntu live .iso (+Ventoy), just a few minutes later. Everything works out of the box as smoothly as the Lunar Lobster isos released these days. Beautiful wallpapers, nice science set, Krita is available to download but Scratch version available is 2.0 (outdated) so I’ll need to install git and download Scratch 3 from MIT repository. Thanks for everything!!!

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I understand that I can install Edubuntu Installer to my normal Lunar Lobster Cinnamon version, and from that add the metapackages, can I? Because I have installed the Lunar Lobster to our computers just today and I think it will be easier that way (my daughter has Scratch 3 already installed in Lunar Cinnamon)

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You sure can, and everything should work except the dock layout and other options that are GNOME exclusive in Edubuntu Installer will be disabled.

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Well, I am able to install the metapackages from terminal with apt. But Edubuntu installer keeps repeating the selection screen (where you can tick and choose between metapackages to install) and doesn’t install them. If I install them with apt, I can uninstall the metapackage using Edubuntu installer.

I suppose it’s because I’m using a different DE (Cinnamon). It’s not really important because the metapackages are available :slight_smile:

I’ll have to troubleshoot that. Theoretically if you installed via the Ubuntu Cinnamon beta it shouldn’t be an issue, but if you’re using Linux Mint, that might be the issue as it’s not supported.

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It’s a fresh install of Lunar Lobster Ubuntu Cinnamon beta :slight_smile: No modifications made after that, just changing wallpapers and grub boot order.

I just tried to duplicate your issue and was unsuccessful, so I’m not sure what happened. Completely fresh install, installed edubuntu-installer from the command line, installed the edubuntu-primary metapackage from the installer without issues.

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Is there any kind of Log that I can read or paste here to see what’s happening? Do I need to execute the graphical installer with administrator’s rights? I’ll try again.

https://youtu.be/CkVrPgZufNg just for you to see… Please ignore my kids hahaha

I see what’s going on, and that appears to be something going on when trying to remove packages. I thought you were trying to install them. I’ll see what I can figure out because I tried that on an Edubuntu GNOME system and had no issues.

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But I actually was trying to install. Packages appear as selected and I take out the ones I don’t need to install. Or isn’t it that way? Is it that the installer thinks I’ve got all the packages installed???

The installer seems to think you have the packages installed, which would be correct if the metapackages were installed already at any point.

There is definitely an error going on that I cannot duplicate on my end, because I tried your exact scenario.

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Just to make sure it’s not a problem with my hard-disk install, I’ve restarted and rebooted into the original ISO (using Ventoy). It happens again, same error. Maybe some problem with cinnamon. I’ll have a try from a different DE. https://youtu.be/_piLL_98nP4 .


I add info here because I cannot write any more new posts today.
You’re RIGHT! shorturl.at/ejEK0 That’s awesome. What’s the problem, what’s happening? Does it affect other languages?


Writing now from Ubuntu Lunar Lobster Budgie flavor. Same error here, if you use Spanish localisation you get it again :slight_smile:

The error is ocurring right before that point. It should be listing every installed package and uninstalling. There’s something that’s not quite right there, and it might be a localization issue. What happens if you change the system language to English?

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So, I determined the issue. I was relying on some explicit strings to determine package installation status, but it didn’t just affect edubuntu-installer, but also affected ubuntustudio-installer. I have a fix uploaded and in queue to be accepted to the repositories.

You can track the progress here.

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I tested Edubuntu with English language and it seems
to loop back to reinstall the educational age group.
Same as her video displayed.
Thank you for the fix you uploaded.

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Hi Bernard,

The good news is that the upload doesn’t rely on any particular language, and any translations that need to be done will only affect the interface. Once I get more versed in creating translation strings, that will hopefully get implemented.

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YES! It’s working now! Thanks!!

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