As I already said and Branden announced on his latest DPL Report, last week we celebrated the II Free Software Congress, Valencian Community in Castelló (Spain).
During the Congress the LliureX distribution was presented to the public, the CD that was given away is a LiveCD built using the Metadistros system that includes a simple script to install on Hard Disc; we plan to distribute also another LiveCD based on Morphix during this week to show the users that we can have more than one LiveCD and because the work has been done anyway.
The distributed version is based on a snapshot of Sarge from last month, but for the next academic year we will distribute a newer version based on the released Debian Sarge, this time with a debian-installer CD that can be used to install the standalone version (the current LiveCD), a simple classroom server and the classroom clients (of course the LiveCD will also be updated, and if I manage to have time to do it, there will also be one Live system based on debian-installer, similar to the Ubuntu LiveCD, but probably using unionfs).
On the Congress I've learnt some things that have surprised me:
As far as I know, the distribution has been very well received by the teachers; the people that went to the Congress received a copy of the LiveCD and a User Manual written by two of my co-workers and a lot of them told me that the system looked good and they liked it (for the ones that don't know it, it's simply a selection of Sarge packages running on a GNOME 2.8 desktop). Why has this surprised me? Well, because everybody critiziced the project a lot last year and I thought they will do it again this year, but probably the LiveCD has left them happy for now.
Normal users don't care about how the system is built, they only care about it's look and feel and about functionality. That could seem obvious, but I dislike how customizations are done now (it was meant to be a temporary way to do it, but it has been the one distributed, at least for now) and always thought that the system was going to be criticized by how it was implemented, but I doubt that anybody cares.
Don't over engineer; our distribution is aimed at Primary and Secondary Schools, and when we started to think about it we followed the ideas behind Skolelinux/Debian-edu and defined a Classroom Model to be implemented on the schools, but after testing on about 10 schools we've had problems with it and have not been able to build or select a set of tools to administer the full model.
Anyway, the biggest problem is that we were solving a problem that the teachers don't have, as, at least on primary schools, the people is not from the Computer Science field, and they don't know how to use the facilities we were giving them.
After thinking and talking about this issues we've arrived to a compromise for the September edition of the distribution; this year we will provide a light version of the classroom server with a minimum set of services (probably only a dhcp server, a proxy and thin clients support) and configuration options and will continue testing the full classroom model only on some schools, as we won't be able to solve all problems if everybody starts to use the full model, we and our users have to develop and learn step by step.
Cooperation on free software projects; I'm preparing a paper for a Congress about my ideas of how people cooperates. I don't know why, but it seems that for all the free software projects everybody says that needs the code to cooperate, but later nobody does if it means effort from their part.
In fact, when someone asked how to cooperate on LliureX I redirected them to the Custom Debian Distributions lists, but I have not seen anyone on the list or on the irc channels. Let's hope that now that the distribution is out we will at least get some user cooperation in the form of useful bug reports (if we do, we will work as a bridge between them and the BTS if they are not able to do it directly).
Well, that's enough for today, tomorrow I'll talk about the CDD Development Camp we celebrated inside the Congress.
