[seul-edu] [arturo@mezcal.dyndns.org: Re: Greetings from Red Escolar Linux.]

[Roger Dingledine <arma@mit.edu>]

----- Forwarded message from owner-seul-edu@seul.org -----

Date: Fri, 19 May 2000 18:41:54 -0500 (CDT)
From: Arturo Espinosa Aldama <arturo@mezcal.dyndns.org>
To: Doug Loss <dloss@suscom.net>
cc: seul@seul.org, seul-edu@seul.org
Subject: Re: Greetings from Red Escolar Linux.]

On Fri, 19 May 2000, Doug Loss wrote:

> Arturo,
> 
>    I would be overjoyed if we could put our two groups in closer
> contact.  Here at SEUL we try to help everyone who is working to make
> Linux easier to use and more appealing to the computing community
> outside of the traditional techie enclave.  Let's think about how we
> can accomplish this.  First, do you have any ideas about how you'd like
> to structure the association?

Red Escolar Linux and seul/edu are two projects that were founded with the
same purpose: to bring the freedom of GNU/Linux to users of computers
related to education. This portion of users have more bennefit from free
software, because the budget for education-through-computer projects are
commonly low, and their requirements go beyond the propietary software
companies' target user. We all recognise this, and push the free
software development towards this part of the community.

Red Escolar Linux was created to address the specific didactic scheme in
Mexico (the computer is a communication transport). Still, we find a lot
of simmilarities between the necessities of Mexican schools and those from
other countries. We have a development structure that follows that of the
typical free software project, hoping to make our efforts cross our
borders, and make it useful for as many people as possible all over the
world. Using rpm packages, you can customize the installation,
elliminating those parts of our system that you may not need.

Seul/edu concentrates an international community of people geared towards
using GNU/Linux in educational projects. Well, I say: come and use our
distribution, in the full sense of what 'use' means to the free software
user: send in patches, fixing bugs, add those rpm packages that may help
your particular need, translate to your local language. We are ready to
integrate all that, and to receive volunteers for specific tasks.

>    We already have you listed on our worldwide links page.  We could
> also list you as a project on our projects page, which would likely
> make you more visible to visitors to our site.  What would probably be
> most useful is if you could send me regular updates on the status of
> Red Escolar and news when it occurs so I can include those in my
> regular Linux in education reports that get linked to on Linux Weekly
> News and LinuxToday.  That would help me too, as sometimes it's a bit
> of work to find enough to say to fill the report.

No problem. I'll Cc you the weekly reports we are sending to our mailing
lists.

>    I think it would also be very useful to have someone from Red
> Escolar on our mailing list (I know you were and still may be on the
> list from your UNAM address; let us know if we should put you on from
> this address and remove the UNAM one).  That way you could quickly see
> if we come up with anything interesting and useful to you, and you
> could help direct the development of these things.  Also, you could let
> us know what you're doing and where we can help you.  We have some very
> knowledgeable and helpful people on the list, and I like to think we'd
> be of some use to you.

Translation and testing is one of our main concerns right now. Please
contact redescolar-devel@redesc.linux.org.mx if you want to participate.
We make take hands on the translation issue, one of these days, and there
is never more than enough testing done.

I am a subscribed user of seul-edu, but my participation has been close to
none, because of the work load we used to have. As we are close to supress
the last bugs or omissions we know of, we are now focusing on "word
spreading" and the installation fase (5 states of our country, in the
next months).

>    We have a number of people from Latin America on the seul-edu list. 
> I know they'd like to know much more about Red Escolar.  I think they
> might also be interested in developing open source educational contacts
> within Latin America to help each other promote the use of Linux and
> Free (libre) Software generally in their respective countries.  It
> would be very nice if we could help all of you get something like this
> going.

Well, I'm sure they will find our project pretty interesting.

>    Finally, Alejandro Diaz Infante <ainfante@gauss.logicnet.com.mx>
> sent me a wonderful multimedia presentation on CDROM on Mexican history
> (the Porfirian Period and the Maderist Revolution) that we displayed at
> the LinuxCanada Expo just past.  Alejandro is a teacher at a teacher's
> college in Zacatecas (ENMAC, I think).  His group is still working on
> obtaining permission to use all the copyright material in the
> presentation before they can distribute the CDROM widely, but I think
> it's just the sort of thing that could make Linux take off in the
> schools.  The ENMAC group isn't made up of programmers but of teachers.
>  They used MetaCard to create this presentation.  As soon as it's
> distributable, we hope to make it downloadable from our website, and to
> have Alejandro and his group write a document in the terms teachers are
> familiar with on how they created it.  We'd like to see other teachers
> and students from around the world create similar things.  This would
> be a major event in the use of Linux in education, I think.  If you're
> not familiar with this presentation, you ought to contact Alejandro and
> see how you can all work together to your mutual benefit.

I've got an alfa of that one. He sent it to us for review. I hope he had
used GTK+/GNOME for this, but how could we ask him to do so, without an
end-user system? I've really got an itch on the
free multimedia/presentation app development issue, and even expressed my
desire to start such a project with some guys at Porto Alegre, Brasil.

GNU/Linux is short of this kind of software, and we have been hoping to
convince ILCE to give us resources to develop our own MultiMedia titles,
but that is something that we have had to leave for the future.
Initiatives like those of Alejandro set the background for this kind of
developments.

Well, I hope to get the support of the seul/edu community.

Greetings from Mexico,
Arturo


BTW: here goes the weekly report sent to redescolar-news@redesc.linux.org.mx.


///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

We'll start sending weekly reports, so that the subscribed people get to
know in detail the advancement of Red Escolar Linux.

There has been quite some action the last week. We made an announcement to
the Free Software community, to let them know that we are still alive and
that we are doing more than fine. Also, due to the maturity of our product,
we have finally made an announcement to the distance education authorities
of all the mexican republic's states, and we have gotten requests for demoes
and possibly tests from the states of Sonora, Sinaloa, Jalisco, San Luis
Potosí and Tamaulipas. They want to know about the project and the
possibility to start tests.

I have released version 1.0-11 of the disc, which includes the registry
files that come in the Samba documentation, so that the Win9x machines are
configured not to use crypto authentication for file sharing. Still, we need
to document this configuration procedure in the users manual. The users
manual has been expanded with the file sharing section and the main
document's Appendix B has been fixed: it didn't show any information, due to
a path change.

Also, we worked this week on an article that will come out in issue number 5
of the Red Escolar mag, printed by ILCE. We hope that this will help get us
more participants into the project.

Next week we will put some time on disc polishing (debugging and PGP
configuration) and to finish the documentation, hoping to go to San Luis
Potosí the week after with a disc without any glitches. Our stance at San
Luis Potosí will be of 5 days, with the idea of advancing completly into the
school test phase (stage 2).

Greetings,
Arturo

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