Growing list of schools using Ubuntu

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Education/UbuntuSchools

In case you ever doubt that your work is making a difference, just take a look at this growing list of schools using Ubuntu and its derivatives. And an entire project of kids building their own machines to take home and use after completing class – impressive!

Feel free to add other schools and learning projects you know about.

Python2.4, Python2.5 and Ubuntu 10.04 lucid lynx

Ubuntu lucid lynx does not have Python 2.4 and 2.5 runtimes available in the repositories, so if you are a developer and you are in need of those, then you have two options: One is try to find binaries somewhere else or just compile them from source. In this article, I’m going to point out the steps for compilation.

Go to python.org and download the sources for the version you want. In my case I download Python2.4 Untar the bz2 or gzip file. Go to Python-2.4.4 (my Python version) and cd into Modules. Edit the Setup file and uncomment those modules you need. Amongst them I uncommented the zlib module. You’ll need to install from repos the zlib1g-dev package and the Tcl/Tk one as well. I take for granted you’ve got g++ compiler as well as it is necessary. ./configure, make and sudo make install. Take into account that the python2.4 runtime will be installed in /usr/local/bin/python and /usr/local/bin/python2.4 In my case I deleted the “/usr/local/bin/python” leaving the “/usr/local/bin/python2.4″  (both are the same) to avoid clashing with the python (2.6) in /usr/bin as apparently the shell looks first in /usr/local/bin.

Ubuntu Karmik and Eclipse Galileo

The great Ubuntu Karmik is just around the corner. If you happen to use Eclipse from the official eclipse webpage and you see that some eclipse buttons do not work, then apply the following hack. Make yourself a one line script to execute eclipse like follows:

#!/bin/bash

export GDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS=1
./eclipse

and it will work again. For tptp (the profiling tools for eclipse) you’ll need libstdc++5 package from debian.