Distributions

Fedora takes Linux to college

The idea of Linux in the classroom is nothing new. From a grassroots push for district-wide adoption in secondary schools, to a plan to offer the One Laptop Per Child program in every developing country, the FOSS community is always looking for ways to encourage schools to use Linux. Recently, however, there's a new movement afoot that's aimed at snapping up a segment of computer users before they spend their money on computers with commercial operating systems. Linux is headed to college.

For the last few weeks, volunteer members of Fedora's marketing team have been kicking around ideas on ways to encourage college students to give Linux a try and draw new users into the Fedora fold. Rather than approach university IT departments running Windows to convince them to switch operating systems, the team hopes to create a groundswell of college-aged users who will march into classrooms and lecture halls with Fedora-laden laptops and eagerly dive into work-study projects that focus on Linux development.

Jack Aboutboul, Red Hat's Community Engineer and the main impetus behind the tentatively-named Campus Ambassador program, says though it is similar to Fedora's existing Ambassador program, the new program will have a different governance model and slightly different goals. Students from Auburn, Texas A&M, Berkeley, and other U.S. colleges, as well as team members attending universities in other countries, have already shown an interest in assuming the role of Campus Ambassadors, and have agreed to speak at campus events about the benefits of Fedora and of Linux in general.

Taking the idea a step further, many Fedora team members would like to see the development of promotional material designed with college students in mind, such as posters that encourage students in the art department to volunteer their skills creating artwork for Linux distros. As one Fedora marketing team member notes, "How many marketing majors are aware that there are real life marketing opportunities for them within the Fedora project while they are still students? Reaching these students should be one focus of any campus outreach."

At least one school, Cabrillo College in Santa Cruz County, California, is already hard at work promoting Fedora on its campus. In addition to forming a GNU/Linux Users Group (LUG) and holding regular installfests, the LUG is also creating its own Fedora-based distro called Seahawk GNU/Linux, named after the school mascot. LUG President Larry Cafiero explains, "Not that the world needs yet another distro, mind you, but we're using the project as a teaching tool more than an actual distro that will take the world by storm." He says that not only do students gain hands-on familiarity with Linux, but "those who get introduced to GNU/Linux through the school-based distro get a sort of introduction to Fedora as well."

Since Fedora already has a strong Ambassador Program, the question of why a separate university Ambassadorship is necessary has come up. Essentially, it boils down to a difference in how users will be mentored. In the typical Ambassador arrangement, Fedora users simply evangelize Linux and encourage people to give Fedora a try while offering assistance and tips along the way. Marketing team member Chris Tyler sees the role of Campus Ambassador as more finely-tuned and as a "a matchmaker between a student, a potential need (project), and community resources." Tyler says that there are many benefits to this arrangement, including the opportunity for students to work on projects with a larger user base which, will therefore have a bigger real-world impact than student projects that remain inside the walls of the school.

Team member Jeff Spaleta says finding projects with a long shelf life is vital to keeping students interested in Linux, and good for the long-term health of the community. "If students as part of their degrees need to work on a year or semester-long project, I want Fedora to be obvious place to look for compelling things to work on, with an aim towards well scoped projects that have a good chance for long lived utility," he says. "I hate seeing good academic projects die because there was no real plan to hand them off outside of that academic group which incubated them."

Team members seem to be in agreement that the Ambassador program is a winning situation for everyone. Students get hands-on experience — and, in some cases, a grade — for participating in a software development project. Computer technology departments can offer a wider learning environment with little to no investment, Fedora may garner new users, and the Linux community as a whole grows.

In an effort to move the Campus Ambassador project forward, Jack Aboutboul plans to formally present the idea at a Community Architecture meeting later this month.

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Gentoo Linux 2008.0 released

Gentoo Linux 2008.0 is out. "Code-named 'It's got what plants crave,' this release contains numerous new features including an updated installer, improved hardware support, a complete rework of profiles, and a move to Xfce instead of GNOME on the LiveCD."

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openSUSE Build Service 1.0

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Rawhide users: brace for a new RPM

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Fedora Board Recap 2008-JUL-01

Click below for a look at the July 1st meeting of the Fedora Board. Topics include Board Elections, Guarding Privacy and Trademark Guidelines.

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New Gentoo council elected

Elections for Gentoo council are finished. The newly elected council members are Donnie Berkholz, Mark Loeser, Diego Pettenò, Petteri Räty, Luca Barbato, Markus Ullmann, and Tobias Scherbaum.

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Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter #98

The Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter for July 5, 2008 covers: Ubuntu 8.04.1 LTS released, Intrepid Alpha 2 due out Thursday, Ubuntu Brainstorm, Two new Ubuntu Teams, Kubuntu Intrepid News, Ubuntu Nicaragua TV show, Launchpad 1.2.6 released, Launchpod episode #6, New Ubuntu Forums Interviews Host, Ubuntu-UK podcast #9, and much more.

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OpenSUSE Weekly News/29

This issue of the OpenSUSE Weekly News looks at openSUSE 11.1 Roadmap, Novell Client for Linux Public Beta for openSUSE 10.3, People of openSUSE: Jan-Simon Möller, John Anderson: Find duplicate files by content not name, Lukas Ocilka: Package Search and One Click Install in YaST, Miguel de Icaza: Moonlight 0.7 is now Available, and several other topics.

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Fedora Weekly News Issue 133

The Fedora Weekly News for July 5, 2008 looks at Planet Fedora articles "Func and Certmaster 0.20 Released", "Transifex receives some updates", "Inkscape tutorials", "New Fedora business cards", and "Bug Triage meeting", plus Fedora reviews, Help Wanted at the Utah Open Source Conference, Development articles "SELinux Eats Babies, Confines Wives, Gives Birth", "Help Wanted: Samba4, Heimdahl, OpenChange", "Java, So Many Free Choices", "Fedora 9 Now Officially Supported On Itanium/IA64", and "Running As Root", and several other topics.

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DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 260

The DistroWatch Weekly for July 7, 2008 is out. "What were the most exciting Linux events of the first half of 2008? The continued success of Linux on ultra-portable laptops? The arrival of KDE 4? The miscellaneous distribution releases? Our lead article takes a quick look at the most interesting events in the Linux world that shaped the year so far. In the news section, the first stable release of Gentoo Linux in 14 months hits the download servers, Ubuntu receives high marks from French legislators, Xandros acquires Linspire and its software assets, PC-BSD releases the first BSD with integrated KDE 4.1, and OpenBSD prepares for the forthcoming release of symbolic importance - version 4.4. Also not to be missed, news about Ikki Boot, a compilation CD with an excellent collection of rescue utilities, and the latest distro statistics from this site's web server logs. Finally, we are pleased to announce that the recipient of the DistroWatch.com's monthly donation for June 2008 is the MythDora project."

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Debian Misc developer news (#9)

This edition of Misc developer news has some advice on quilt usage, plus update-grub starts using UUIDs by default, wxwidgets2.8 upload to unstable, and Volunteers needed to handle update of release notes.

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Next Ubuntu Developer Summit

The next Ubuntu Developer Summit (UDS) has been scheduled for December 8 - 12, 2008 at the Google Campus, Mountain View, California, USA. The primary topic will be version 9.04. See the UDS wiki for more information.

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People of openSUSE: Joe Brockmeier

Here's a People of openSUSE interview with Joe Brockmeier, openSUSE community manager. "What especially motivates you to participate in the openSUSE project? I want to see openSUSE become a more independent project, to allow external contributors to have a strong voice in its development and direction, and I want to see as many people as possible introduced to Linux through openSUSE."

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