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