[TOS] Request for grant

[Mel Chua]

Rajeev,

You mentioned using Ubuntu (which is a mighty fine distro!) but I would 
also suggest checking out Fedora's remix capability 
(http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Remix, and Sebastian in particular knows 
way more about it than I do, as do others on this list). Basically, you 
can create an image with a custom package set, and have a 
livecd/liveusb/etc with all the programs you want preinstalled already.

As for suggestions, my subset is below.

> Analytics: R,

Not sure if this is still within what you're looking for, but octave, scipy?

> Graphic Design (2D): GIMPshop, Cenon

Inkscape. Definitely inkscape.

> IDE tools: Eclipse

Vim and emacs? :D (Okay, okay...)

> Learning Management System (LMS):

Moodle is the most popular one, but this mostly makes sense for a server 
image, not a personal use laptop.

> Productivity package: Openoffice,

I'd swap Libreoffice for Openoffice; if you want another lightweight 
word processor check out Abiword (or teach your students how much you 
can do with plaintext editors -- gedit is nice if you're GNOME-based and 
want a graphical thing, otherwise nano/vi(m)/emacs).

IMO, the three most useful Libreoffice things are Writer, Calc, and 
Impress, in that order (word processing, spreadsheets, and 
presentations). There are other pieces of FOSS presentation software out 
there but they tend to be a little bit more off the wall -- but if you 
want to play with those, jessyink (sort of like prezi), Beamer (LaTeX), 
and techtalk (built specifically for code-centric presentations).

> Project Management: ?

Are you thinking about things like Trac or Redmine? Those are 
server-side as well.

I found http://www.ganttproject.biz/ to be fine for creating and 
managing its namesake chart for a 9-month-long project, but this was 
back in 2007 and I haven't tried it since. I've heard good things about 
dotproject, phpcollab, and taskjuggler, but haven't used them myself; 
there doesn't seem to be a category-killer here. Again, a lot of PM 
tools for FOSS are web-based and more suitable to a server rather than a 
desktop image. I'd love people to correct me here. :)

> Security: Wireshark, Nmap Security Scanner, WinSCP, Snort

Also check out the packages included on 
http://spins.fedoraproject.org/security/ (click "List of all FSL 
packages" on that page to get to 
https://fedorahosted.org/security-spin/wiki/availableApps).

> Text Editor: vim, nano

gedit. There's also gvim (vim running as a GNOME app). I'm sure others 
here will clamor for emacs.

> Video Editing: LiVES,

kino, kdenlive -- see also http://opensource.com/tags/video-editing

> Web Browser: Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox

lynx or some other text-based browser; knowing about the existence of 
these has saved my butt a few times when I needed to get to a webpage 
quickly and only had a terminal available.

Also, something like epiphany is interesting to see in contrast with the 
very full-featured Firefox.

Btw, Chrome isn't open source -- Chromium is the open source project 
Chrome is based on, so if you want to do truly open software only you 
may want to include that instead. That having been said, even Chromium 
has... issues. See http://spot.livejournal.com/312320.html for gory details.

> view. I will also write a paper/article based on my entire experience.
> Let me know if anyone is interested in collaborating on this project.

I'd be curious about what you're planning for this one -- there are 
several interesting school spin/remix projects that might be nice to 
combine into one paper.

RIT, I'm looking at you. Sebastian, you might know about more, and have 
made a fair number of educational spins and remixes yourself. I know 
Olin had a Fedora remix customized to its campus setup for a while, and 
I'm sure other schools have had the same -- perhaps something like "hey 
schools, you can make your own Linux distribution, and here's how"? 
Curious what prior lit on this might be.

--Mel