I am pleased to announce that the final version of Guadalinex v6 is out 🙂
The official news are at the Guadalinex website. But it’s in Spanish, so I’ve decided to explain a bit (in my poor English) what is all about.
Before to start I like to thank to all those people who help to develop, test, fix, translate and document all those great projects which Guadalinex is based on. I really do. They make this possible and deserve most of the credits.
This is the 6th edition of Guadalinex which is a GNU/Linux distribution based on Ubuntu. The distribution is paid by the local government of a big region at the south of Spain, which is Andalusia.
There are a lot of people who think this is waste of public money, but I think quite the opposite. And I think so because we don’t just make Ubuntu booting in Spanish and change the wallpaper, we try to listen to real end users from this region of the world and bring them the closer system to what they need and demand.
The distribution is oriented to the regular citizen, but it is being used at schools for few years. Thousands of children have been using Guadalinex (ergo Ubuntu/Debian/Gnome and much more free software stuff) everyday at the schools for about four years now.
But also people from very low populated areas of Andalusia have been using Guadalinex at centers with computers where they can learn computers skills and use internet for free. Now there are around 700 centers working from Monday to Friday for them.
Even the public libraries are using now Guadalinex.
Because of that, Guadalinex is more than a few technical or artistic changes. It’s a social project.
I think the changes we have made in this version are useful no just for Andalusian, but for all the people who feels more comfortable reading and writing in Spanish. And there also some interesting stuff for a normal Ubuntu user.
We like to push those improvements to Ubuntu, Debian, GNOME and all the wonderful projects we touch. And also new small tools we develop because our users need them. We think those are also useful for everybody.
I have to say that Guadalinex don’t try to compete with any distro. Guadalinex have its owns users with their needs and we just want to give them what they need. And in the process (if we can) to help the community and other people.
Our goals are really different from Ubuntu’s ones. Ubuntu need to be for everyone. Need to be universal and be useful and “compatible” with every person and culture.
We are the opposite. We need to target to specific people, with specific language, culture, needs and resources. That’s why Ubuntu is so useful for us, but Guadalinex is more useful for our users.
We have to deal with users who barely know how to write and know nothing about computers. Ok, we have also real good IT people or people who really know all this stuff, but our threshold is the user who less know.
We like fancy things on our desktops but sometimes we have to wait a bit to get them into Guadalinex because our users aren’t ready for them. And we know because we have professional helpdesk services, forums, feedback from teachers, from our technicians at the tele centers. So it’s not something we figure out by ourself and then take “conservatives” decisions, it’s something we do, because we know well to our users and we are here for them.
What I was trying to say is that Ubuntu (or any other generalist distribution) has a very important mission and there are a lot of smaller and more focused derivatives distributions that need to be there. This is an ecosystem and everyone grown and learn on this interaction.
Sorry for been so tedious, I’ll promise to tell shorter and funnier stories next time 😛
Well, actually my next post probably will be the list of things that are different between Ubuntu Jaunty and Guadalinex v6. The list is in Spanish now, so I want to explain it in English.
And If anyone like to try Guadalinex, we have a DVD version (the full edition) and a minor version on CD.
Thanks for reading 😉
Happy hacking!
