Edubuntu. Edubuntu, previously known as Ubuntu Education Edition, is an official derivative of the Ubuntu operating system designed for use in classrooms inside schools, homes and communities.

Edubuntu is developed in collaboration with teachers and technologists in several countries. Edubuntu is built on top of the Ubuntu base, incorporates the LTSP thin client architecture and several education-specific applications, and is aimed at users aged 6 to 18. It was designed for easy installation and ongoing system maintenance.

Features
Included with Edubuntu is the Linux Terminal Server Project and many applications relevant to education including GCompris, KDE Education Suite, Sabayon Profile Manager, Pessulus Lockdown Editor, Edubuntu Menueditor, LibreOffice, Gnome Nanny and iTALC. Edubuntu CDs were previously available free of charge through their Shipit service;  it is only available as a download in a DVD format.

In 23.04, Edubuntu's default GUI is GNOME. From 12.04 to 14.04, Edubuntu's default GUI was Unity; however GNOME, which had previously been the default, was also available. Since release 7.10, KDE is also available as Edubuntu KDE. In 2010, Edubuntu and the Qimo 4 Kids project were working on providing Qimo within Edubuntu, but this was not done as it would not have fit on a CD.

Project goals
The primary goal of Edubuntu was to enable an educator with limited technical knowledge and skills to set up a computer lab or an online learning environment in an hour or less and then effectively administer that environment.

The principal design goals of Edubuntu were centralized management of configuration, users and processes, together with facilities for working collaboratively in a classroom setting. Equally important was the gathering together of the best available free software and digital materials for education. According to a statement of goals on the official Edubuntu website: "Our aim is to put together a system that contains all the best free software available in education and make it easy to install and maintain."

It also aimed to allow low-income environments to maximize utilisation of their available (older) equipment.

Versions

The first Edubuntu release coincided with the release of Ubuntu 5.10, which was codenamed Breezy Badger on 2005-10-13. With the 8.04 Hardy Heron release of Edubuntu it was given the name of Ubuntu Education Edition and was changed to be an add-on to a standard Ubuntu installation instead of being an installable Live CD. From version 9.10 onwards, Edubuntu changed to be available as a full system DVD instead of an Add-on CD. Edubuntu is also installable via a selection of "edubuntu" packages for all distributions using the official Ubuntu repositories (Ubuntu and Kubuntu mainly).

Since 14.04, Edubuntu became LTS-only; Edubuntu announced that they would skip the 16.04 LTS update and that they planned on staying with 14.04 due to lack of contributors. It would then be discontinued for a number of years, but as of April 2023, the distro has returned as an official flavor.

See also

List of Ubuntu-based distributions
Comparison of Linux distributions
UberStudent – Educational Linux distribution based on LTS versions of Xubuntu
Sugar-on-a-Stick – Educational Linux distribution based on Fedora

References

External links

Edubuntu
2005 software
Educational operating systems
Free educational software
Linux Terminal Server Project
Ubuntu derivatives
Linux distributions