OS School DVD
Free and Open Source Software for Education
The open source educational DVD was created as an aid for schools and universities. The catalogue on the OS-school-DVD is aimed at the Key Learning Areas used in Queensland schools as well as more learning areas used at University.
The objectives of the DVD are firstly to provide schools with a catalogue of useful free and open source educational software for Windows, MacOSX and Linux. The Windows software can be installed directly from the DVD. The second objective is to provide a live (bootable) Linux DVD which will allow the user to run open source educational software before installing it. The Live Linux DVD component also provides non Linux users exposure to software which is not available on Windows, such as software written for KDE desktop or developed on Linux but yet available on Windows such as Rosegarden (music composer).
The DVD can be used to demonstrate open source software without the need to install software. To do this you’ll need to reboot your computer from the DVD and it will start Linux. It may take a few minutes due to the size of the image. The default Linux image runs in RAM and from DVD and does not use the disc drive, the Linux image can be placed on a 4G Byte USB drive to improve speed. Linux will start with the KDE desktop, which will allows you to run hundreds of applications such as Leocad (bricks in 3D), Blender (3D modelling and animation) and Kstars (planetarium). The DVD also contains searchable documentation and content management systems. More informations about what is available and how to use the DVD are available at http://os.cqu.edu.au/adios/adiosdvd.html.
The virtualisation software QEMU can be installed so that the Linux image can be run within Windows, although slow to load this allows people to run Linux without the need to boot from the DVD.
The OS-school-DVD is a combination of two DVDs namely the OSWINS-DVD and the ADIOS-DVD. These are described at http://os.cqu.edu.au/oswins and http://os.cqu.edu.au/adios and you can download these from http://os.cqu.edu.au/pub/iso. For more information about the OS-school-DVD contact n.richter@cqu.edu.au.
Please provide feedback via http://os.cqu.edu.au/open/feedback.
This page was written by Neville Richter and was last modified on the 30 July 2007