Petter Reinholdtsen: Fourth alpha release of Debian Edu/Skolelinux based on Debian Wheezy

Fourth alpha release of Debian Edu/Skolelinux based on Debian Wheezy

3rd July 2013

The fourth wheezy based alpha release of Debian Edu was wrapped up today. This is the release announcement:

New features for Debian Edu 7.1+edu0~alpha3 released 2013-07-03

These are the release notes for for Debian Edu / Skolelinux 7.1+edu0~alpha3, based on Debian with codename "Wheezy".

About Debian Edu and Skolelinux

Debian Edu, also known as Skolelinux, is a Linux distribution based on Debian providing an out-of-the box environment of a completely configured school network. Immediately after installation a school server running all services needed for a school network is set up just waiting for users and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable Web-UI. A netbooting environment is prepared using PXE, so after initial installation of the main server from CD, DVD or USB stick all other machines can be installed via the network. The provided school server provides LDAP database and Kerberos authentication service, centralized home directories, DHCP server, web proxy and many other services. The desktop contains more than 60 educational software packages and more are available from the Debian archive, and schools can choose between KDE, Gnome, LXDE and Xfce desktop environment.

This is the fourth test release based on Debian Wheezy. Basically this is an updated and slightly improved version compared to the Squeeze release.

Software updates

Dropped ispell dictionaries from our default installation.
Dropped menu-xdg from the KDE desktop option, to drop the Debian submenu. It was not included with Gnome, LXDE or Xfce, so this brings KDE in line with the others.
Dropped xdrawchem, xjig and xsok from our default installation as they don't have a desktop menu entry and thus won't show up in the menu now that menu-xdg was removed.
Removed the killer system to kill left behind processes on multi-user machines, as it was no longer able to understand when a X display was in use and killed the processes of the active users too.
Dropped the golearn (from goplay) package as the debtags in wheezy are too few to make the package useful.

Other changes

Updated artwork matching http://wiki.debian.org/DebianArt/Themes/Joy
Multi-arch i386/amd64 USB stick ISO available.
Got rid of ispell/wordlist related debconf questions that showed up for some language options.
Switched to using http.debian.net as APT source by default.
Fixed proxy configuration on Main Server installations.
Changed LTSP setup to ask dpkg to use force-unsafe-io the same way d-i is doing it.
Made sure root and user passwords were not left behind in the debconf database after installation on Main Server installations.
Made Roaming Workstation dynamic setup more robust and added draft script setup-ad-client to hook a Roaming Workstation up to a Active Directory server instead of a Debian Edu Main Server.
Update system to install needed firmware packages during installation, to work properly in Wheezy.
Update system to handle hardware quirks (debian-edu-hwsetup).
Corrected PXE installation setup to properly pass selected desktop and keymap settings to PXE installation clients.
LTSP diskless workstations use sshfs by default, allowing them to work without adding them to DNS and NIS netgroups for NFS access.