I am a student in Humanities. I went through my studies using Ubuntu. It was great, but it could have been better.

Recently I dicovered a non-free software called Mendeley, which provides many features required for academics and studies:

- management of library and implementation of citation in LibreOffice
- share and annotation of PDF articles and books among work-groups and think tanks
- find and communicate with others who work on similar subjects

Mendeley however is made in such a way that it uploads all one's PDFs on a cloud, before you can upload your library, you already have surpassed the default 500MB capacity of the cloud, and you are required to pay 5 to 10 or more EUR per month.

As a student, I cannot afford such a price, and I doubt many could (especially in countries where currency is weak).

Ubuntu, and Linux users in general deserve better. If anything free and open source software should encourage education and sharing. Hence, the idea is to create a free and open-source software similar to Mendeley for students and academics.*

* yes, there are already few available tools that do bits of what is described above, but no complete and comprehensive working environment to do all the above consistently.

Well idea is quite simple, there are Bible and Quran reading tools which could be equated with electronic books.
But gnomeSword and BibleTime only support Bible.
Wouldn't it be better if this tools would be linked with Project Gutenberg which "ports" books in electronic version.
I'm not a religious person but I would like to use "Bible" tool to read any other book. And project Gutenberg has thousands of books.

Edubuntu users tend to have different types of needs and issues. They could use their own forum. The 'education and science' section in the ubuntuforums isn't really it.

Teaching Physical Geography is mostly boring to the students. A nice tool which visualises physical geographical items would be a killer application for edubuntu.

- Earth, moon and sun to teach how seasons, day/night and the moon phases work.

- Focused on earth a tool which allows to visualize athmospheric processes, erosion, tectonics...

In order to get the trust of the users (which MS is lacking totally) I think we should clearly highlight was is currently not working perfectly. A link to the related launchpad.net page highlighting the bugs would really help...

The 'Ubuntu Code of Conduct' has too much programmers slang. It should be addressed also to 'Humans' who don't know what is 'frozen system' or 'upstream community'.

http://www.ubuntu.com/community/conduct

Museums are perfect places for computers with Ubuntu, as they usually do not to requiere proprietary applications designed to run with other operating systems. They can also benefit of a very specific interaction with the user that Ubuntu can offer.

In other to promote this use, it could be useful to offer some kind of quickstart tools with Edubuntu to get a running museum workstation easily and quickly.

This tools could include a special user login (where the user can only run a defined set of applications) and maybe some kind of new application specially designed to create and provide an enhaced interaction with the museum visitor.

Some kind of partnership with some hardware vendor could be useful in order to provide a complete product (computer+operating system) to museums.

Hi. I'm a teacher who is about to implement Edubuntu Thin Clients in my classroom. This is my first post here and apologize ahead of time if this is a dup or off-topic.

Though tech-literate, I'm an Ubuntu newbie. I read all over the place for all the necessary info to implement Edubuntu in my classroom and I'm coming up shorthanded. I read debates here about whether Edubuntu ought to have this feature or not. Frankly, to my eyes, these debates are overpopulated by ideologists who push their ideals and that's good, but if we want schools to use Edubuntu we must listen to teachers felt needs, not tell them they don't know what they are talking about! Debating whether teachers need to set limits (put controls) on technology access just turns off educators who know their trade; and another customer is lost. Done with rant.

Please indulge me in this analogy: A well functioning classroom is like a well running car--no parts are missing. For example, I might have all sorts of Ed. software, right hardware, great internet access, fine printing and file servers, know how to take full advantage of Ubuntu educationally, but if I can't find a way to easily manage permissions for groups of users I won't be able to use Ubuntu with classes!

Two solutions come to mind:
--purchased solution: http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/3865/ This is great for some teachers/administrators.
--diy solution: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MinnesotaTeam/Education This is great for some teachers.

I'm proposing the second. A one-stop wiki not only connects one to all the parts available, but also highlights the parts needing to be created. Here's a page that's attempting this: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ComputerLab This wiki would connect people like me (teachers who want to use Ubuntu in class) and people like (many of) you who want to see Ubuntu spread like wildfire into schools! I sincerely thank you for all the great software you have inspired, designed and documented.

[....]

I saw a lot of publishers having books for Red Hat and Fedora.I think Ubuntu should take note of this.Online help and wiki is great.But, if there are books specially dedicated to Ubuntu then it will be very helpful for the people who don't have internet connection at home and have Ubuntu on their PC.
In developing countries internet penetration at home level is very low as compared to west.So, it will become a handy reference for them.

When people will see books about Ubuntu in the book store they will get noticed of Ubuntu.It will create many adopters of Ubuntu.

Also this is one of the way to promote Ubuntu.(the books can have CD or DVD of Ubuntu)

A simulator for designing and testing electrical circuits with a nice big juicy library and REAL active readouts during the simulation (with a timer).

Doesn't have to be crazy, something for college students like me (electrical engineering) who don't feel like jumping on the band wagon of pirating/hacking/stealing bloated MS software.