Skolelinux International announced the final release of their Skolelinux 3.0 Linux distribution: "This is an community release with comprehensive support from regional and national projects in Germany, Spain, France, Greece and Norway. The Skolelinux project is now a part of Debian under the name Debian-Edu. Several other projects have made additional functionality to Skolelinux tailored for national needs. Skolelinux now supports more than 50 countries."

Highlights of Skolelinux 3.0 include:

￭ Debian 4.0 "Etch" based.
￭ Linux kernel 2.6.18.
￭ KDE 3.5.5.
￭ Thin clients, LowFat (diskless) clients, Workstations and Laptops support.
￭ More than 80 pedagogic applications.
￭ Available in 50 languages.
￭ Single installation DVD for i386, PowerPC and AMD64 platforms.
￭ Translations of the install time questions were updated.
￭ The whole documentation was updated.
￭ Some links to documentation to select the correct language for those with translated documentation were corrected.
￭ The package installation for the barebone profile was also corrected.

Be aware that the installation DVD requires Internet access during the installation process, as opposed to the previous versions, that could be installed from one CD without Internet access. Also, there is a new web-based user administration tool named lwat, instead of wlus, which was based on the Webmin project. Webmin is not supported anymore by the Debian Linux distribution.

Skolelinux is a custom, easy to maintain and administer GNU/Linux distribution based on the Debian Etch project. It provides a complete software solution using only free applications and it's especially created for educational needs. The included software is also pre-configured for easy installation.

Features of Skolelinux:

￭ Based on Debian 4.0 Etch
￭ Graphical installer with mouse support
￭ LSB 3.1 compatible
￭ Support for SATA controllers and hard disks
￭ Automatic tracking of installed machines using Sitesummary
￭ Automatic version control of configuration files in /etc
￭ Local Device Support on Thin clients
￭ The amd64 processor is fully supported
￭ PowerPC platform is in experimental phase

Skolelinux is internationally available and it is currently being translated into many languages, including German, French, Norwegian, Polish, Greek and Spanish.

You can download Skolelinux right now from Softpedia.