Overview

gnuLinEx is as a heavily customised Debian based Linux distribution used by the Autonomous Community of Extremadura. Although part of Spain, it is one of seventeen such ‘autonomous’ communities that have individual control over their own schools, universities, health, social services, culture, urban and rural development and, in some places, policing. gnuLinEx was conceived due to the prohibitive cost of licensing proprietary software like Windows (approx €20 million for Extremadura). It is designed to be used in schools and official institutions throughout the community and as the name suggests, it’s an open source operating system conforming to the GNU/GPL licence.

Extremadura accounts for 8.2% of land mass in Spain, and 2.5% of the total population [1]. It is important to note that despite Extremadura being the poorest region in Spain, and the fifth poorest in the EU they have the best ratio of computers to students, standing at a computer per two students.

Despite its clear focus on being the premiere educational distribution for Spain and Spanish speaking countries, I decided to give gnuLinEx a try to see if it could be adapted to an African scenario. Unfortunately during the period of my attempted testing (17th - 22nd December) the link on their homepage to the 2008 Beta 4 release was dead, and I was unable to find other mirrors hosting the release.

Advantages

• Stable underlying architecture (Debian)
• Install base of 90,000+ machines.
• Choice of Gnome or XFCE window managers so can run on even very old hardware
• Includes software provisions for all 3 key levels of education
• Includes a thin client platform, albeit based off an old LTSP code set
• It has sprouted many offshoots such as Guadalinex and MAX, widely used in other areas of Spain.
• Includes specific classroom management tools such as ControlAula
• Designed for more than just educational scenarios

Disadvantages

• Spanish focused educational tools, revolving around that particular culture
• Support is difficult due to the language barrier.
• A handful of developers maintaining the distribution
• Only updated sporadically, and this mainly involves updating common Linux packages rather than major new features
• Not much in the way of support for users with disabilities by default

For more detail, visit the project homepage.

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