ubuntu-africa team mailing list archive

[Miles <msdomdonner@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello,

This Linux distribution has previously been installed to reformed computers from French
companies and brought to Mali by the Bilou Toguna non for profit association where the
computers (several dozens) have been given to some high schools and universities, as an
equipment for the teachers.

Here is the website of the Bilou Toguna assocation: http://www.biloutoguna.org/

This Linux distribution is branded so that it's light on resources for old computers. It
comes with Xfce4, has tech tweaks in it: zram-config to improve the ram capacity, and
prelink configured to prelink Firefox and Libreoffice only, so that they start faster.

And there are two more tricks: if and when the children/yougsters mess up with the
default icons setup on the desktop, they are reset as they were at each session. They
also are setup so that the program can be launched once only, because it has been
observed that they would click several times if the machine does not have enough power
and makes it a bit slow to start in the first place.

The two scripts responsible for that are located in /usr/local/bin, and the first one is
started thanks to the file Malinux-session.desktop located under /etc/xdg/autostart.

For the final version, my intention is to add the program http://www.kiwix.org/ as the
main replacement to the former "Moulin Wiki" which isn't developped anymore (and was
installed in the previous Malinux). Also, there were a bench of tutorials, which I found
very much outdated (ie: OpenOffice.org 1.1, IPCop, "guide du rootard", "guide de survie",
the more recent was of 2005. I will rather gather recent docs, and add them to the ISO
which will be used to install the distro in France for the next trip to Mali, and brand
them as a tarball which can be installed as a script, available on the web (a tar.xz
following the structure of the filesystem tree, easy to install).

For that part, if some are willing to help, we could gather the best docs coming from the
Libreoffice community, in French and in English (and make one package for each), and same
related to docs about Ubuntu, about GNU/Linux…

One more thing, some of the default programs installed are the Libreoffice suite, and
also flashplugin installer. If you have suggests and wishes related to programs to add,
relevant for high schools and universities, you can ask. 

One last thing: it is my intention to redo the same setup on a Bento Openbox base, to
gain in lightness and in size, so that it can be also used on computers even lower in
resource (ie : with a proc coming with 1 Ghz and 1 GB RAM). I hope I could make it hold
in less than 700MB, which is not the case right now.

The different spins can  be again re-spinned using Customizer (I think… I haven't tested
yet, however I have been told this tool works well).

Best regards,
Mélodie