Edubuntu 23.04 Released

[amypenguin]

We are pleased to announce the release of Edubuntu 23.04, codenamed “Lunar Lobster”. This has been a project of love for my husband Erich and myself and I am happy to see it back with the people where it belongs once again.

This release will be supported for nine months (Until January 2024).

My name is Amy Eickmeyer and have worked in early childhood for nearly twenty years. When I was a preschool teacher, I remember using Edubuntu in my classroom in 2015 so the children could learn simple, educational games.

Fast forward seven years and I’m at the Ubuntu Summit in Prague. I learned that Edubuntu was no longer being supported. At this point, I had moved onto administrative work in early education and wasn’t staying as up to date as I would have liked. My last night in Prague, I was talking to someone about why I was there, what I found interesting and what could be added to not only get myself more interested, but my son as well. As I looked at my son, who was the youngest attendee of the summit, I thought of all the wonderful sessions I had heard while there. I thought it would be great if someone could talk about how education was being impacted by Ubuntu. I told my husband about it, and the project took off from there.

I currently work at a nonprofit that helps refugees and immigrants from Africa. Most of the assistance that they get is free and I thought that Edubuntu would be a wonderful addition to our classrooms. However, not only would it be great in our classrooms, but every classroom. My husband and I began organizing Edubuntu into not only grade levels, but subjects to make it easy to navigate.

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Features

By default, Edubuntu’s application overview is alphabetized, which makes it a learning tool out-of-the-box so students can see an example of alphabetization and cataloging. Additionally, educational applications are grouped into folders by subject, making the application overview easy to navigate.

Using Edubuntu Installer, you can configure the system for a certain age group, whether that be Preschool, Primary (Elementary), Secondary (Middle/High School), or Tertiary (College/University). Each configuration comes with a different set of applications and a different layout and default wallpaper.

Using Edubuntu Menu Administrator, administrators can configure which applications are hidden for non-administrator users with the check of a box. This then makes it easy to add non-admin users that are then restricted on which applications they are allowed to see. Some recommended items are pre-selected.

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We hope that Edubuntu will help inspire learners from every age group and make quality learning available for anyone, anywhere. If you are a teacher, parent or student that is passionate about learning, then Edubuntu is for you.

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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.
• Calibre has an issue where lrfviewer is crashing upon launch.
• 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.

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Downloads

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

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How To Contact

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

Social Media

Twitter
Mastodon

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Special Thanks

Huge thanks for this release go to:

• Aaron Prisk: Creating Temporary Website
• Steve Langasek: Technical Guidance, Release Team and Technical Board Point-Person
• Ubuntu Community Council: Giving us the permissions to start working on this
• Stephane Graber and Jonathan Carter: Predecessors, handing us the reigns
• Oliver Grawert: Project Founder, encouragement
• Jonathan Eickmeyer: Testing/Child’s Perspective
• Aaron Rainbolt and Joshua Peisach: Testing
• Erich Eickmeyer: Technical Leader

[aaronprisk]

Excellent work @amypenguin! It’s fantastic to see Edubuntu back as an official flavour

[bashing-om]

Yay-hey

Yall made it !
Most excellent.

[Phil6]

Not about the OS but DNS for the domain:

www.edubuntu.org is a CNAME pointing to: aaronprisk.github.io.edubuntu.org
Distrowatch are using the www. record and this doesn’t resolve currently.

As it’s currently on the front page of distrowatch, it would be advisable either to fix DNS or get distrowatch to update their information page.

Phil6

[eeickmeyer]

Hi Phil,

The current Edubuntu website is a placeholder until Canonical’s IS team can get a permanent one in place.

However, regarding the www, parhaps @aaronprisk can get that straightened out.

Thanks for the heads-up!

[aaronprisk]

Thank you for the heads up. I’ve notified our IS folks and will hopefully have this fixed shortly.

[Phil6]

np, was just checking out the project and thought it was worth a mention.

Really good to see the direction this distro is heading in! Keep up the good work.

[aaronprisk]

Our IS team fixed the DNS issue and Distrowatch is pointing to the right places now.

[viniciusxp]

Really good news! Downloading it right now!

[mcris23]

I think until January 2025 are more than 9 months (the text before first screenshot), in fact more than 12 (we are now in 2023).

[eeickmeyer]

That was most certainly a typographical error and should’ve been pointed out as such. Appears to be fixed now.

[mcris23]

Sure, my bad I haven’t imagine what type of error it was.

[limiz]

Great appreciated work…!!

[jgr072]

I like this flavor of Ubuntu. However, I would suggest changing a particular string in the installer interface. As it is worded, the installer’s menu assumes that the image is stored on optical media. My suggestion: rephrase this so that it’s a more generic reference to the installation media and not limited to CDs and DVDs. I’m not sure if this is specific to Edubuntu or the distro at large, but I hope this gets passed along to whoever writes this part of the distro.

[eeickmeyer]

If it’s not in the slideshow, then it’s the distro at large and there’s nothing Edubuntu can really do about it without affecting all flavors.

[lunanu]

I really appreciate your work here!
Edubuntu (12.04 or 14.04, I guess) was the first operating system I ever used. Back then, my father just put a PC with Edubuntu in my room and told me to have fun with it (which I definetly had).
I installed Edubuntu 14.04 in a virtual machine just a few months ago (nostalgia) and I’m very happy (and surprised, actually) that this great project is finnaly continued.
I really hope that Edubuntu will gain more attention among educational institutions and that many children will be able to learn and play around with it!

~ Luna

[mrgrymreaper]

@amypenguin @eeickmeyer I would suggest being able to have the Edubuntu Menu Administrator centralised, through a client-server model. That way education network administrators (managers) can ensure the menus are configured and applied consistently across all the education facility’s computers.

The applied configuration would be based on the centralised one configured on the server.

• For that matter is Ubuntu Server LTS considered suitable for use in schools?
• Also has the Edubuntu team considered working with the Cockpit project to get some kind of system in place for Cockpit branding?
• I also think some education specific Cockpit modules wouldn’t go a miss for administering a server in that kind of use case environment. What do you think?
• Have you considered seeking any educators in the United Kingdom (England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland) who are knowledgeable and experienced in the Key Stage system? Though I’m not a educator (teacher) but think that if the content could be checked and made suitable then it can seriously help UK’s Department of Education with their budget.

[eeickmeyer]

Hi @mrgrymreaper!

Those are gigantic questions that are a bit out-of-scope at this time. I can say this though:

• Ubuntu Server LTS is likely considered suitable for use in schools. However, remember that any package available for Ubuntu Server is available for Edubuntu. It’s all the same distribution. Edubuntu is not a separate distribution, it’s merely a flavor of Ubuntu.
• We have not considered working with the Cockpit project, and that’s a bit out-of-scope. However, there is Ubuntu branding for Cockpit which is fully supported which I use on my personal Ubuntu LTS server at home.
• I have no idea how to create cockpit modules, and our team is rather small consisting of 3-4 people currently. There is very little coding that goes into making Edubuntu beyond a few configuration files and the creation of a seed file, so don’t be deceived, most of it is just Ubuntu.
• Considering @amypenguin and I are located in the US, having contacts in the UK would be nice, but we currently do not. I’m sure if some would reach out to us and would like to get involved, we’d gladly help.

Edubuntu is very much a time-permitting project for us and is completely volunteer. In fact, we can’t even receive donations for it yet as we don’t yet have the infrastructure for that to be set-up. So, for now, this is what we’ve got.

As far as administrating Edubuntu Menu Administrator, it’s actually fairly easy. The mechanism is that, if the user is a non-admin, it sets the $XDG_DATA_DIRS environment variable to prepend /usr/share/edubuntu in its path, meaning that anything in /usr/share/edubuntu/applications overrides the .desktop files in /usr/share/appllications. So, what Edubuntu Menu Administrator does is add a file with the following contents with the same name as whatever you’re trying to hide fron the non-administrators:

[Desktop Entry]
NoDisplay=True

Therefore, all one would need to do is install sshd on the client machine and ssh into it (either via Cockpit or some other mechanism), find the application icon in /usr/share/applications, and create a corresponding .desktop file for whatever application they are trying to hide in /usr/share/edubuntu/applications with the contents above. The actual application Edubuntu Menu Administrator would detect this as well and reflect it in the checkboxes.

I hope this helps!

[mrgrymreaper]

@eeickmeyer In regards to Edubuntu Menu Administrator, that may work for small instances, but for larger ones could be a problem. That’s why I suggested developing it to have the possibility of a client-server model. A centralised daemon server and client daemon could standardise the setup of what options are shown, as well as maintain the settings. Preventing tampering by students, who try to by pass the restrictions.

Cockpit modules can be used say to make it easier to administer login access times for students and/or staff as it’s pretty cumbersome at the moment. Additionally to aid in configuring and administering proxy servers with content filtering.

Anyway here’s information on creating cockpit modules (https://cockpit-project.org/blog/cockpit-starter-kit.html, Part III. Developer Guide (cockpit-project.org)).

It could be considered feedback for future releases to help administrators in education with large deployments. So please seriously consider adding this for a future release.

[eeickmeyer]

@mrgrymreaper

So please seriously consider adding this for a future release.

I’m not saying no. But what I am saying is that, as I said before, it’s a time-permitting project with deadlines. Feature Freeze for 23.10, to be released in October, is later this month and it certainly will not make it in time, and I certainly don’t have the time to be working on it now.

What I am saying is that, if you want it or need it, this is an open project and, as an open project, your contributions are welcome. If you were to create the module, I’d be more than happy to package it into Ubuntu for you so that it could be included and installed in whatever way you see fit. If you were to host it on Github (or anywhere really), simply telling me where it is and asking for it to be packaged would be how that happens.

Most open source projects are born out of a need someone has that they share with others, which is what I see potentially happening here. What I’m saying is that this is a great idea, and if there were more time I’d love to create it, but there’s simply not enough time for myself right now (in addition to being the technical guy Edubuntu, I lead Ubuntu Studio which has quite a few complicated priority items and potential changes with regards to the audio stack). I don’t know what the timeframe prior to 24.04 looks like, but that’s an LTS release so we want everything to be absolutely solid for that.

So, what I’m saying is, if you want the module, feel free to create it and I’ll do my best to get it included in a future release. If it can be done before August 17, then we’ll be good for inclusion without much delay. If it can be done before September 18th (Beta Freeze), then we can at least get it in the repositories. But all this said, sadly, I can’t do it myself.