20,000 Ubuntu laptops for teachers in Nicaragua

This is a follow up on my last post about Nicaraguan schools using Ubuntu.

Today we had a second meeting with the authorities of the Ministry of Education (MINED) and the National Autonomous University of Nicaragua (UNAN) in order to clarify some aspects of the project and draft a preliminary plan of action.

Guardabarranco GNU/Linux is now the official name of the project who aims to develop a Nicaraguan educational distribution.

This distribution will be based on Ubuntu Lucid Lynx, making an extensive use of the official Ubuntu repositories, adding only some new educational software and adapting other to fit the Nicaraguan curriculum for primary and secondary schools.

20,000 laptops for teachers with Guardabarranco GNU/Linux pre-installed will be deployed in the first phase of this project, followed by the installation of the system in computer labs in public schools using LTSP.

As some people erroneously pointed out in my previous post, this is not a fork, it may not even classify as a derivative distribution… it’s more like an ‘Ubuntu Remix’ with some extra packages designed to fulfill the needs of the Nicaraguan school system.

We want to work as close as possible with the upstream Ubuntu developers, pushing back our patches and changes to Ubuntu whenever it’s possible.

IMHO, this is a great project, both for the Nicaraguan educational system and for Ubuntu. We’ll be able to deliver a powerful and flexible operative system ‘out of the package’ with all the applications needed for our teachers and students, and at the same time, build a core team of developers that can contribute with its code and knowledge to the Ubuntu project and community.

If you can read Spanish and want to contribute, check out the announcement and join the Ubuntu-ni mailing list.

Guardabarranco, or Turquoise browed motmot, is the name of the official bird of Nicaragua. It’s also the name of the first public school that’s using GNU/Linux exclusively in their computer labs. Our community has been giving technical support to the Guardabarranco school since 2008, and started recently a project for recycling old hardware in order to deploy computer labs with LTSP in Guardabarranco and other public schools in Nicaragua.