Review: Edubuntu 11.04 "Natty Narwhal"

GNOME Main Screen

Before I get on with the rest of this post, I need to apologize for not having posted anything this week. It turned out to be a good deal busier than I anticipated, and even otherwise, there wasn't a whole lot to write about, at least at the beginning of the week. I did say in the latest "Featured Comments" article that I would review the latest release of Ubuntu — version 11.04 "Natty Narwhal". That is still happening, but for reasons that will become clearer, I will not write reviews of Ubuntu/Kubuntu/Xubuntu/Lubuntu just yet, but will wait a day or maybe a little more.

JAVA Session Welcome Screen

With that aside, I find it interesting that having written this blog for almost 2 years and having reviewed Linux distributions for almost as long, I have never formally tried and reviewed Ubuntu or any of its official other editions (Kubuntu, Edubuntu) or officially-sponsored community derivatives (Xubuntu, and hopefully soon Lubuntu as well). I've reviewed quite a few other derivatives, most notably Linux Mint, but I've never tried straight-up Ubuntu itself. I guess that's because I've always sort of taken Ubuntu for granted; I installed it on the laptop of a member of my family, I've seen people put it on their computers, and I've used it at the Athena clusters here at MIT. Well, that's changing today, with a review of Edubuntu 11.04 "Natty Narwhal".

Why Edubuntu, and not Ubuntu? As mentioned earlier, one reason will become apparent when I publish the review of Ubuntu. The other main reason is that I haven't really seen Edubuntu reviews on the Internet; that could be because of its specific target audience, but in any case, I think it deserves a review, especially given that it is an official Canonical product. For those who don't know, Edubuntu, as you might be able to guess from the name, is a packaging of Ubuntu with lots of education-related software included out-of-the-box.

Thanks to Canonical's efforts in this regard, I was able to test it in two ways: I was able to try it out online from the comfort of my current Linux Mint system, and then I tried it through a live USB made with UnetBootin. Follow the jump to see what it's like.

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