14 DAY TRIAL // Two Kubuntu derivatives will be used for education in the Canary Islands, one being installed in all the schools and the other used by the largest university. From 18th to 21st September, a conference called "Jornadas de Software Libre" took place at the University of La Laguna, in Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain, organized by the University's Software Libre Office (OSL).
The distribution called mEDUXa 1.2 was shown to the president of KDE e.V, Aaron Seigo, and to Jonathan Riddell, Kubuntu's main developer, on a trip to one of the schools where it will be installed. For more than one hour, members of the MEDUSA project from the Educational Department of the Canary Island Regional Government, along with the conference organizers and some members from the mEDUXa 1.2 team, talked about the project, about its actual state and future plans.
MEDUXa 1.2 is already installed in 300 schools, and the MEDUSA project is developing a new version, v2, based on Kubuntu Feisty Fawn with KDE 3.5.6. It will be deployed in 100 schools until the end of this year, so 8000 computers will have mEDUXa installed on them by January. During 2008 and the first six months of 2009, every school will have installed mEDUXa on their desktops. A mEDUXa LiveCD is planned for distribution.
At the "Jornadas de Software Libre" conference, Aaron Seigo talked about the new capabilities coming in KDE4, and Jonathan Riddell described the growing Ubuntu world and other different distributions based on Kubuntu like Linux MCE, mEDUXa and more. He also talked about Kubuntu Gutsy and the Launchpad Free Software project hosting platform. One more subject from the conference was the Canary Island regional government's plans for free sofware in education (besides mEDUXa, courses for teachers, mEDUXa's Live CD and free software applications that will be included in Windows by default in schools are scheduled).
During the 4-day long conference, some workshops were held. One of them described the Kubuntu packaging and a tutorial on using bzr and Launchpad was presented.