Debian Edu / Skolelinux Wheezy — a complete Linux solution for your school

September 28th, 2013

Debian Edu is a complete operating system for schools. Through its various installation profiles you can install servers, workstations and laptops which will work together on the school network. With Debian Edu, the teachers themselves or their technical support can roll out a complete multi-user multi-machine study environment within hours or a few days. Debian Edu comes with hundreds of applications pre-installed, but you can always add more packages from Debian.

The Debian Edu developer team is happy to announce Debian Edu 7.1+edu0 Wheezy , the sixth Debian Edu / Skolelinux release, based on Debian 7 (aka Wheezy ), which has been updated and carefully improved compared to the previous Squeeze release while keeping its unique feature set and ease of maintainability.

Some recent feedback:

Giorgio Pioda, system administrator, who is using Debian Edu at SPSE (Scuola per Sportivi d’Élite) in Tenero, Switzerland (Cantone Ticino, Italian speaking part), says: I can report that I'm on production with Debian Edu Wheezy since mid-August and it works rock solid, we are using it every day.

Nigel Barker, IT Coordinator at Hiroshima International School, Japan: I was able to get a new Tjener and computer room ready for the new school year in only 4 days following the beta 1 release. I have been very happy with the way things have been running during the first month of school.

Lucas Nussbaum, Debian Project Leader: Debian Edu is a fantastic project, for at least two reasons. First, because it exposes a wider public, and specifically children, to Free Software and Debian. Second, because it demonstrates how one can build a successful distribution on top of Debian, while doing all the work inside Debian.

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 to be added via GOsa², a comfortable Web-UI. A netbooting environment is prepared using PXE, so after initial installation of the main server from CD or USB stick all other machines can be installed via the network. The provided school server provides an LDAP database and Kerberos authentication service, centralized home directories, a DHCP server, a web proxy and many other services. The desktop contains more than 60 educational software packages and more besides are available from the Debian archive, and schools can choose between KDE Plasma, GNOME, LXDE and Xfce desktop environments.

Full release notes and manual

Below the download URLs, there is a list of some of the new features of Debian Edu 7.1+edu0 Wheezy . The full list is part of the manual. (See the English version on the wiki and the manual translations installed on maintainer.skolelinux.org).

Where to get it

To download the multiarch netinstall CD release (655 MiB) you can use:

The SHA1SUM of this image is: bebcb64d38e34e7c9f04db9f251a5e55bdb56670

To download the multiarch USB stick ISO release (5.4 GiB) you can use:

The SHA1SUM of this image is: a86ec62c06890dc0d32a82ebaca093e72b35e09c

New features for Debian Edu 7.1+edu0 Wheezy

These are the (shortened) release notes for Debian Edu / Skolelinux 7.1+edu0, based on Debian 7.1 with codename Wheezy .

Installation changes

New version of debian-installer from Debian Wheezy, see the installation manual for more details.

The DVD image was dropped; instead we added a USB flash drive / Blu-ray Disc image, which behaves like the DVD image, but is too big to fit on a DVD.

Software updates

Everything which is new in Debian Wheezy 7.1, e.g.:

Linux kernel 3.2.x

Desktop environments KDE Plasma 4.8.4, GNOME 3.4, Xfce 4.8.6, and LXDE 0.5.5 (KDE Plasma is installed by default; to choose GNOME, Xfce or LXDE: see manual)

Web browser Iceweasel 17 ESR

LibreOffice 3.5.4

LTSP 5.4.2

GOsa 2.7.4

CUPS print system 1.5.3

Educational toolbox GCompris 12.01

Music creator Rosegarden 12.04

Image editor Gimp 2.8.2

Virtual universe Celestia 1.6.1

Virtual stargazer Stellarium 0.11.3

Scratch visual programming environment 1.4.0.6

Debian Wheezy includes about 37000 packages available for installation.

More information about Debian Wheezy 7.1 is provided in the release notes and the installation manual.

Documentation and translation updates

Translation updates for the templates used in the installer. These templates are now available in 29 languages.

The Debian Edu Wheezy Manual is fully translated to German, French, Italian and Danish. Partly translated versions exist for Norwegian Bokmål and Spanish.

Other changes

New Xfce desktop task.

LTSP diskless workstations run without any configuration.

How to report bugs

Where to get the sources

The source of the packages on the CD and USB stick ISO is available as a USB stick ISO (7.6 GiB). To download it you can use:

The SHA1SUM of this image is: 1e926e49fdd1076f332c7c4abce3fb43049cddb7

About Debian

The Debian Project was founded in 1993 by Ian Murdock to be a truly free community project. Since then the project has grown to be one of the largest and most influential open source projects. Thousands of volunteers from all over the world work together to create and maintain Debian software. Available in 70 languages, and supporting a huge range of computer types, Debian calls itself the universal operating system .

Contact Information

For further information, please visit the Debian web pages at https://www.debian.org/ or send mail to <press@debian.org>.