Here is a piece of information that could be of interest to some Debian users and developers. It has not been widely advertised and may thus have remained unnoticed until now.
A project entitled "Compil'Edux" has been started around October 1999 in Grenoble University by a group of people from the (rather big) local LUG. Here is a copy of the Freshmeat announcement: > The goal of Compil'Edux is to provide a centralized place where open > source educational software can be found, either in the form of links > to other sites, or as an FTP site containing source tarballs. The > initiative started at Grenoble University in October 1999 and is still > at its early stage. However, the site already contains more than 100 > links and packages. There are several packages not available elsewhere > - either developed from scratch by the local team, or enhancements of > existing open source software. Help is much welcome, especially with > regards to information on other similar initiatives, > internationalization of existing packages, educational data available > under an Open Content license and bug reports concerning the packages > available at the Compil'Edux site. > > Homepage: http://www.ac-grenoble.fr/carmi-internet/ge/liens.php > > FTP site: ftp://ftp.ac-grenoble.fr/ge/ In particular, the FTP site contains enhancements or bug corrections to quite a number of packages whose main development has otherwise stopped (but which are still of substantial interest, especially for education purposes). A number of these packages are not yet in the Debian distribution, or when they are, the Compil'Edux packages might be in a more "polished" form than those present in the current Debian distribution (the site makes clear which are those packages). Debian might possibly consider them for inclusion in future releases. Also, there is currently a French government initiative in cooperation with a few commercial Linux distributors (RedHat-France, Mandrake, SuSE) to produce pre-compiled CD-Roms for French educational institutions, and that initiative is partly based on the work made by the Compil'Edux team. Demo CD-Roms combining this with R.Di Cosmo's DemoLinux distribution should be available in the next months. (Essentially nothing of this is French specific, though). Jean-Pierre Demailly, Universit\'e de Grenoble I Maintainer of the Compil'Edux FTP site
