FOSDEM review / Status 11.1

Hi @ll

Lets start with a first subjective view about FOSDEM 2009:

Friday/Saturday)
First time in Brussels, first time at FOSDEM, first Beer Event, ...

...I found my way back to the Hotel around 02:00 or 03:00 in the morning 
(~2km/~1mile). Thinking about the people been there for the 4th or 5th 
time and talking about "lost in Brussels" after their first Beer Event, 
I'm shure they're telling the truth. Thanks to Google and all the other 
people for the free Beer!

The booth was very crowded (university catacombs are very small :).  
openSUSE-Education was present with our own Demo-System from HP. 
(Thanks to HP and Lowry to make this happen!) and even if the current 
11.1 graphic driver for the ATI graphics card was not really stable for 
the hardware (interesting: the pre-installed SLED on this machine runs 
without problems), we could show many of our Education Applications to 
interested people.

Afternoon and night are full with interesting talks with teachers, 
users, and ambassadors of some Education Initiatives.

Sunday)
Too early for me ;-) Our "early morning presentation"[1] has ~15-20 
attendees, thanks for joining! We've interesting discussions afterwards 
about the whole Education area - here are some topics (Andrea, please 
add what I've missed):

1) A global storage solution for "test results" and "instruction  
tutorials" is missing. 
Instruction tutorials (for teachers) about using a software in their 
lessons should be placed in the wiki. This way, everyone is able to 
work on it and the license is clear from the beginning. But we really 
need a solution to extract the information from the wiki and add it to 
the packages. 
For test results and other stuff, we should think about a 
generic "Education Daemon" running on a server and receiving/sending 
configuration data for applications and also storing test results. This 
way, all Edu-Applications could be configured on a central place and 
the progress of a child could be stored. I've already talked with Tim 
and David from Tux4Kids and Bruno from GCompris about this idea. I hope 
to get this discussed more widely on the edubuntu-devel mailinglist 
[2] - let's see what we can do.

2) A simple frontend for administrating and installing many identical 
clients.
Installation is not the problem as we already have tools like AutoYaST. 
Keeping a configuration in sync is a "ToDo" - but as tools like the 
YaST2-WebUI and Pupprt shows us, thinks are already work in progress.

3) Finding really useful packages for Education.
We still need people telling us which applications are *really* needed 
for Education. I'm currently fine with using our Education wishlist[3] 
as starting point - as these packages are requested by users. But we 
should reduce the number of "duplicated" packages - means: packages 
with the same goal like tuxtype & ktouch. 
Think about the "Popularity Contest" of Debian. We should evaluate, if 
this can also be used/packaged for openSUSE.

4) Focus on endusers:
Start with a simple to use internet filter. Enhance this in the future.

5) Where is the Live-CD?

First: we need more Live-CDs. I'm currently thinking about different CDs 
containing applications for our defined age-groups. But there 
could/should be more:

* Think about a Live-CD connecting to a server and automatically 
creating/using a home-directory on this server.

6) Where is Sugar for openSUSE?

7) Using Remote-Applications ?

Having a server in Stockholm and running your application in your local 
school.

8) Translation is important.

What openSUSE-Education can do is to provide a translation tool for 
packages (to get a summary and description in the prefered language). 

But we even should work together with upstream developers to get the 
application translated. Think about the openSUSE-Education team 
as "connector" between developers and endusers. If people want to 
translate an applications, we should provide the "HowTo" and the 
conection to upstream developers, so everyone can benefit from the 
work.

--------------- 

Status 11.1:

Our current frozen repository contains RC2 since FOSDEM - including all 
bugfixes for 11.1. If nobody has a blocker until Friday, 2009-02-20, I 
think we should declare this RC2 as "Goldmaster" and freeze it. (Means: 
1.0 will be done for all openSUSE Distributions!)

With kind regards,
Lars


[1]: http://en.opensuse.org/FOSDEM2009#Sunday.2C_February_8th
[2]: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/edubuntu-devel
[3]: http://en.opensuse.org/Wishlist_Education resp. devzilla