Open source for study
Free and open source software can help you learn, so here’s our pick of the best tools and distros for guaranteed classroom success.
W hatever subjects you or your spawn are studying, you’re going to need to edit some documents, maybe mess with some spreadsheets, and perhaps make presentations, too. To that end, LibreOffice is very much your friend.
There’s a fair amount of slanderous cant uttered about this awesome software, and we’d really like to set the record straight. Firstly, MSOffice and LibreOffice are format compatible. Word files will open in LibreOffice
Writer, and vice versa. Anyone who tells you otherwise is lying; MSOffice has supported OpenDocument file types since 2007. Even the UK government has endorsed OpenDocument as the standard file format for use across government operations. That said, LibreOffice is not MicrosoftOffice, and occasionally you’ll find a document that doesn’t look quite the same in Writer as it does in Word. There’s a number of reasons for this: complex or higgledy-piggledy formatting; some kind of unholy embedded macros; or, more commonly, missing fonts. While nobody wants Comic Sans MS on their system, it can be useful to have the other typefaces, especially if you’re sharing documents with Windows users. The required fonts can be installed in Ubuntu with: $ sudo apt-get install ttf-mscorefonts-installer
As we write LibreOffice5.4 has been released with exciting new enhancements. This won’t be available from most distro’s repositories for a while, but the adventurous should be able to install it via Flatpak ( www.
libreoffice.org/download/flatpak) by the time you read this. As well as words, many an assignment demands some kind of graphics as well. GIMP is great for all your generalpurpose imaging needs, whether it’s cropping photos or adding lens flare. It’s not
Photoshop, but most people don’t need all those features nor the hole in the wallet that goes with a Creative Cloud subscription. Inkscape, being more akin to Adobe Illustrator, can take care of all your vector drawing needs. It’s a bit beyond the scope of this article, but also look into setting up your own Nextcloud instance. Doing so will give you Dropbox-like storage, collaborative document editing and a calendar for keeping track of your many tasks.
Which distro?
Newcomers to Linux are often baffled by the sheer number of different distributions out there. And we can help with this. There’s a couple of education-specific ones we should mention first: Edubuntu and Uberstudent. These are both Ubuntu-based and offer all kinds of pre-installed goodies. Uberstudent bills itself as “a unified system for learning, doing and teaching academic success”, and comes with tools not just for solving equations, but for time management, too (youwritethatand we go to press tomorrow–Ed ). Edubuntu aims to provide educators with everything they need almost out of the box. Not only do you get all the goodies from KDE’s edu
“There are two education-specific distros:E du bun tu and Uberstudent”
bundle and Gnome’s Gcompris (see boxout), but there’s even a Linux Terminal Server, so you can set a machine up for several thin clients (Raspberry Pis, for example) to connect to and run desktops remotely. Unfortunately, Uberstudent hasn’t seen a new release for over 18 months and Edubuntu hasn’t fared much better, with a release last August. Both are based on the venerable Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, so they will continue to get security fixes until 2019, but it’s possible and perhaps preferable to install newer versions of the tools embodied by these distros on a nicer-looking, newer distro.
We recommend Ubuntu 16.04.5 (yes, there’s a 17.04 release but it’s only supported until January 2018, at which point you’ll have to upgrade, which is time that could be spent learning) or Linux Mint (18.2 was released recently, based on the former) as a starter OS for budding penguin learners. Neither requires much in the way of CPU power, RAM or disk space. Mint is friendlier for people coming from Windows, and has undone much of what makes Ubuntu unpopular. More adventurous creatures may wish to try Ubuntu Gnome. This desktop will become the norm for Ubuntu next year, so getting used to it now could be a wise move. As Edubuntu is an official Ubuntu flavour, the tools it provides (newer versions, no less) are available from its official repositories, helpfully divided into preschool, primary, secondary and tertiary categories. Install them with, for example: $ sudo apt install ubuntu-edu-primary
KDE, another major desktop environment within the Linux ecosystem, maintains its own educational bundle ( www.kde.org/ applications/education) with some excellent tools to make learning fun. There’s
Marble, think Google Earth, for improving your geography. Kturtle for programming using turtle graphics, wherein a pen-bearing turtle is directed with simple commands.
KmPlot takes care of all your function graphing needs, for aspiring mathematicians. And Parley (apart from being a right you can invoke if you’re captured by pirates) can help with vocabulary learning, using flashcards.
Learn to code
In the minds of many, coders are seen as today’s shamans and priestesses, invoking wyrd incantations and sigils to produce something akin to the impossible. There is a magick side to programming, but it can be experienced by all, and we hope that the new coding curriculum helps the youthdem to embrace it. We’ve got some great hardwarebased projects over the page, and there’s all manner of great resources out there. Scratch
(see below) and MIT’s AppInventor ( http:// appinventor.mit.edu) are great ways to learn to code visually, but there are all manner of other tools that can help with proper, grown-up coding. Codecademy ( http://codecademy.com) offers free and paid-for courses to help you code in pretty much any language you like, whether ‘easy’ languages like Ruby, PHP and Python, web development languages like JavaScript, CSS and HTML, or something more hardcore like Java. There’s also some great resources for GCSE compsci students from the BBC ( www. bbc.co.uk/education/topics/zq6hvcw). The Code Club movement has grown into a worldwide phenomenon (over 150,000 children have learned to code this way) that connects volunteers, educators and pupils. In the UK alone there are nearly 6,000 clubs at which children aged 9-13 can learn for free. Find out more at www.codeclub.org.uk.