nubae's Habari | Linux and Education

Wow, I've seen this happen on other people's blogs, where literally half a a year can go by without anything significant being written. I'l like mnay ohters I'm sure, had promised myself to keep writing, and not let the thing slowly fade our of existence as it seems to be doing.

Normally there are lots of excuses people employ, that go anywhwere from my day job's a bitch, to I need a long break from the Internet. Usually its a mixture between laziness, slight depression (perhaps a break up recently happened) and just way more outdoorsy things to do [Though I must interject, the new lines of smartphones have made that a non-issue]

Without further ado then, I'll paste the first of many articles which I hope to start springing on you people, the readers, on a regular basis. BTW if you do have questions and think I could/should answer them, then by all means drop me a tweet, a dent, a message through the contact forum, msn me (dvanassche) or gtalk me (being the owner of an android based system now means I really am online day and night. I am not yet convinced of the entire smartphone process in general,but I think the ease with which android has tied in all the social networking elements by just typing in your gmail account details in is awesome, That automatically leads to sending youtube flicks from the phone, pics to fñickr or auto update with just about any ,material your social networking sights (facebook being the big one since like flickr and youtube are meshed into the google world, allowing a single sign on for all. I cannot compare the iphone since I don't own one, but I am a computer specialist, dabbling in open code from time to time which I have seen first hand is deal easier with a gphone (like being able to use skype through other protocols and not just wifi (apple has locked skype users in this way=

Still, with 100,000 apps on the android platform and about 1 million apps on the iphone, we have some catching up to do, which will no doubt happen as the cellular providers keep pumping them out. Anyway setting up and using the gphone takes some time but is a lot of fun, and each app you install will give ideas for new ways of using the google mesh of application libraries.

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For some odd reason it seems that going from an earlier version of python or some of the other tools used in pyqclic (gettext) one cannot just define _= lang.gettext anymore and must put global _ on the line above it. You'd imagine this would have been mentioned some place but after searching the net for weeks and weeks I found nothing. Since the error I was getting was global variabñe '_' not defined, I tried setting global _ above it, and voila, everything works again. There are still some visual and aesthetic elements to be fixed in the pyqclicuser module, but creating quizzes, the most vital part, works great. My next step will be to integrate adding multiple choice questions to the quizzes and perhaps the option for grouping of quizzes so that if one chooses geography, all the geography related quiizzes, inlcuding multiple choice, lessons, and maybe even an essay question could be done, so as to create whole modules. Of course each country and language has variations on how this is done, so as much flexibility in the building of these will be left as possible. I appologize for it taking this long to find such a simple bug, but I didn't throw in the towel yet ;-)

Long live PyQClic

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I was anxious to try this distribution since I'd already been quite impressed with its predecessors, in terms of content, ease of use, stability, and pre-installed server and non-server based services. To say this version is the true perfection of that is almost an understatement and I don't say it lightly.

Remember, openSUSE 11.2 - Educational Edition is avilable here: http://en.opensuse.org/Education/Live

As has always been the case, almost all features are controlled through yast2, which has been optimised, revamped and perfected to the point where most users would not really know how it could be any better than it is. Beginning at the top, we have Hardware based controls, such as hardware information which gives you a complete hardware audit of your system, Fingerprint reader, infrared devices, TV cards and other usual suspects, all of which seemed to work great, though most of my setup didn't require tinkering with that of any kind, since openSUSE 11.2's auto detection is pretty accurate. Network settings can be either controlled via Network Manager (the default, which I did not have to tinker with, as I had in previous versions, or Yast2's own network manager which has tighter integration with some of SUSE's other network services such as LDAP or NIS.

As in previous versions an LDAP server and Client are part of Yast's control domain and are deceptively simple to setup. Even adding the computer to a windows domain is a click of a button. Many additions to apparmor have been included with profiling reports, audits, and wizards to make the process much easier to implement. A new setting, or at least one that didn't catch my eye previously was the local security button, which allows you to control which services will run in a chroot or not, as well as various other items, I the software management section there is a link to the package searcher (webpin) which is a highly used tool by developers, but can be useful to anybody.

If there is something you are searching for that isn't immediately visible, you can use that service to find the application or service. Integrated visual backup and restoration have been simplified even further, as have kernel settings, boot loader parameters and profile managers. Visualization has been further integrated into the system with a create virtual machine applet as well as a virtual machine manager, along with the already well known hypervisor tools.

The overall look and feel of the system have been optimised to feel and look more professional, and other than my graphics card, which ati no longer supports (though the free radeonhd driver does a perfect job at detecting and setting) all services and applications were there upon start. I had to download skype, but there was no more fiddling with codecs and optimizing sound. All of that just worked out of the box. It is going to be hard for other distributions to get things running as smoothly as this runs.

A quick glance at the application list shows there are an astounding 200+ educational applications, and I'd be surprised to see any other linux distributions come even close to the quantity or quality of the offerings. All in all this is the educational distro by which all others will be measured I'm sure.

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Hi folks,
A lot of my time has been taken up lately by 2 external projects that are quite neat, and could use volunteers. One is the creation of a python based generic lesson plan creator. Its actually more simple than that, its basically an image a teacher loads up, places some points on, and then labels. He can then pass that on to the kids so they can fill in the labels collaboratively (like in those TV quiz shows when questions get passed from one user to another and they can ask for some letters which takes away some points.) Or the teacher can simply print these out and let the kids fill out the answers by hand (still working on the print/pdf module) You can see pyclic advances here:

http://www.launchpad.net/pyclic or here
http://git.sugarlabs.org/projects/pyclic

The other thing I've been working on is a very complete Moodle that should contain courses about everything related to education and Linux. One of the latest things I did was add courses on how to create the perfect Ubuntu and Opensuse desktops, and a database of linux commands and their usage (lots of loving is needed for this project, so please email me if you want to get involved....) It doesnt take long to make a course and there is even how to copy courses from other sources into Li-f-e there:

http://www.linux-for-education.org/course/view.php?id=69

and a course on why to use moodle here:

http://www.linux-for-education.org/course/view.php?id=9

enjoy

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