We are pleased to announce the latest release of Edubuntu 23.10 codename Manic Minotaur. Edubuntu has really been received with open arms and we are excited to have this available once again. It’s been a labor of love, and we would especially like to thank Aaron Prisk (@aaronprisk) for helping with our website.
We’ve also received some help from a special guy of ours, Jonny Eickmeyer. Jonny is our son and has been a great “Guinea Pig” regarding testing out games and learning apps in Edubuntu. His feedback and contribution to the project has been invaluable in shaping it into what young users are looking for.
We hope you enjoy this latest version of Edubuntu as much as we enjoyed working on it.
This release will be supported for nine months (Until July 2024).
Downloads
Images may be downloaded from https://cdimages.ubuntu.com/edubuntu/releases/23.10/release .
What’s New (Compared to 23.04)
This release is meant to be evolutionary, not revolutionary. We are still working out which applications and features work best in the overall educational ecosystem. As always, feedback is appreciated.
New Apps
- Startup Disk Creator: This will help users and administrators make an easy USB drive from a .iso image of any Ubuntu flavor.
- GNOME Videos: Video player
- GNOME Music: Music player
- Backup: Backup utility
- Basic256: Teaches students the BASIC programming language (@eeickmeyer, our technical lead, first learned to program in this language when he was 10 years old on a Commodore VIC-20!)
- Extension Manager: An easy way to add and administer GNOME Shell extensions.
- OpenBoard: A whiteboard application for teachers
- Mnemosyne: A flashcard application
- Convertall: A powerful standalone unit converter (Bonus: GNOME Shell can also convert units, just ask it!)
Bugfixes
- Edubuntu Menu Administratior can now hide snaps
- KDE/Qt apps now respect dark/light settings of the desktop. However, they still only use a blue accent color. The ongoing discussions on how to solve this previously mentioned in the Edubuntu 23.04 Beta Known Issues have stalled.
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. There is no known fix currently, however future releases may have other configurations which allow this. There are ongoing discussions that seem to have come to a halt.
- The system installer (Ubiquity) provides a minimal install option that is currently work-in-progress.
- 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.
Future Goals
At this time, we were focusing less on the client-server model of old. While centralized management for multi-computer environments and large organizations certainly is a distant goal, it isn’t as immediate as getting this into the hands of individuals and small organizations.
In the next release cycle, we hope to start working on Raspberry Pi images. A donor has been kind enough to donate the Edubuntu project a Rapberry Pi 5 in order to accomplish this goal so that we can start testing any images we produce. This is also being done with the help of certain team members at Canonical. (Note that Edubuntu is not a direct project of Canonical).
Another goal will be to implement a new system installer: the same one that is currently used by Ubuntu Desktop and Ubuntu Budgie. It is a Flutter GUI wrapper for subiquity which is the same installer used to install Ubuntu Server. By combining these efforts, we hope to help sunset the old Python-based Ubiquity installer so that we can continue forward with the rest of the Ubuntu community.
We have two other goals to implement in the next cycle that will be of major interest to students and teachers alike:
- We want to create a teacher-centered metapackage to provide teachers with the tools they need to effectively instruct and create assignments for their students. At least one of these applications is included in the form of OpenBoard, but many more tools are out there.
- Partnering with Ubuntu Studio, we want to create a Music Education metapackage, consisting of many tools already existing in Ubuntu Studio but also found in the Ubuntu repositories.
We realize these are big goals just before our first long-term support (LTS) release in 10 years (!), but we knew this would be the case when bringing this project back from its nine-year hiatus. That said, we are excited to make our next release of Edubuntu an LTS release, which we plan to support for 3 years.
How To Contact or Participate
Mailing Lists
Edubuntu Users Mailing List (Support Discussion)
Edubuntu Developers Mailing List (Join The Team!)
We Have a Merchandise Shop!
Buy a t-shirt, coffee mug, hat, teddy bear, or anything available! Browse and find something you like! Commissions support ongoing development!
Special Thanks
Huge thanks for this release go to:
- Aaron Prisk (@aaronprisk): Temporary Website, Website Maintenance
- Steve Langasek (@vorlon) : Technical Guidance, Release Team
- Jeremy Bicha (@jbicha): GNOME Desktop Guidance
- Oliver Grawert (@ogra): Project Founder, encouragement
- Jonny Eickmeyer: Testing/Child’s Perspective/Advice
- Erich Eickmeyer (@eeickmeyer) : Technical Leader, Merch Store
- Amy Eickmeyer (@amypenguin) : Project Leader
