"Ubuntu" is an ancient African word, meaning "humanity to others". The Edubuntu Linux distribution brings the spirit of Ubuntu to schools, through its customised school environment.
The current version of Edubuntu is aimed at classroom use, and future versions of Edubuntu will expand to other educational usage, such as university use.
| Edubuntu is a complete Linux-based operating system, freely available with community based support. The Edubuntu community is built on the ideas enshrined in the Edubuntu Manifesto: that software should be available free of charge, that software tools should be usable by people in their local language and despite any disabilities, and that people should have the freedom to customise and alter their software in whatever way they see fit. These freedoms make Edubuntu fundamentally different from proprietary software: not only are the tools you need available free of charge, you, and thousands of developers around the world, have the right to modify and build upon your software until it works exactly the way you want it to. Many people around the world exercise this right. And you can expect many improvements with each new release of Edubuntu. |
The Edubuntu Promise
The team behind Edubuntu makes the following public commitment to its users:
- Edubuntu will always be free of charge, and there is no extra fee for the "enterprise edition", we make our very best work available to everyone on the same Free terms.
- Edubuntu includes the very best in translations and accessibility infrastructure that the Free Software community has to offer, to make Edubuntu usable by as many people as possible.
- Edubuntu is released regularly and predictably; a new release is made every six months. You can use the current stable release or the current development release. Each release is supported with security updates for at least 18 months.
- Edubuntu is entirely committed to the principles of free and open source software development; we encourage people to use free and open source software, improve it and pass it on.
- Requesting CDs from ShipIt
Ubuntu is available free of charge and we can send you CDs of the latest version (7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon)) with no extra cost, but the delivery may take up to ten weeks, so you should consider downloading the CD images if you have a fast Internet connection.
For the next release (9.04), due to be released in April of 2009, we will be adding additional application bundles that will be supported on a best-effort basis by the Edubuntu community. This is on top of the existing applications bundles that are fully supported by Canonical and the Edubuntu community (found on the Ubuntu Education CD). This addition will allow us to give more software options to educational users.
Edubuntu Goals
 | Kids Pre-school aged children should have educational and fun games. |  | Students Students, K-12 and beyond, should have the best open-source educational software available. |
 | Teachers The tools teachers need to manage their classroom should be easily installed and usable with minimal fuss. |  | Schools Powerful and cost-effective education platforms for schools bring education into the 21st century. |
The GNOME Desktop Environment
GNOME is the GNU Graphical Desktop, it's the default desktop environment on Ubuntu, as well as Edubuntu. It provides us with file managers, network browsers, menus, and system tools. GNOME also provides an application framework, and many of the applications available in Edubuntu has been created using the GNOME framework. Edubuntu also provides three different theme setups, 'young', for younger users, 'plain' for a clean desktop setup, and 'default', which is a general purpose theme setup.
GNOME project (Offsite link): http://www.gnome.org
The KDE Edutainment Suite
KDE is another graphical environment, and also serves as an application framework. The KDE project has a sub-project called the KDE Edutainment Suite, which is a collection of fun educational software that makes use of the KDE framework. KDE applications runs fine under GNOME. We have included the very latest versions of the KDE Edutainment software in Edubuntu.
KDE Edutainment Suite (Offsite link): http://edu.kde.org
GCompris: I Have Understood
Gcompris is huge collection of activities for the kindergarden. It gently introduces kids to basic computer use, then it builds on that by expanding to basic maths, reading activities, and more.
Tux4Kids
The Tux4kids project has produced software such as TuxPaint, TuxMaths and TuxTyping.
Schooltool Calendar
With the latest version of Ubuntu, School Tool is now completely functional. Once installed, the Schooltool Calendar can be accessed from the Firefox web browser, by entering "localhost:7080" into the address bar.
Schooltool project (Offsite link): http://www.schooltool.org
OpenOffice.org Office Suite
Edubuntu includes OpenOffice.org version 3. OpenOffice.org 3 includes many enhancements and new features. The newest component is OpenOffice.org Base, which is a powerful database front-end. Other OpenOffice.org components include a word processor, spreadsheet, presentations, simple vector drawing and web authoring.
OpenOffice.org project (Offsite Link): http://www.openoffice.org
Off-site Screenshots
OSDir- Edubuntu 7.04: OSDir Screenshot tour
Coding Studio- Edubuntu 7.10: Edubuntu screenshots
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