OpenSUSE 13.1 "Education Li-f-e" Review: More than an educational distro!

I have a 3.5 year old daughter. For her I often search suitable educational distros. I like the educational distros released by Zorin, Ubuntu, Doudou, etc. but nothing comes close to the superb experience I had with OpenSUSE 13.1 "Education Li-f-e". The beauty of the distro is that it ships with an enviable ensemble of packages suitable for both young and adults alike. I'll take you through my experience of using it for over a month or so.

The "Education Li-f-e" is an extension of the OpenSUSE base distro and ships with KDE 4.11.4 and Linux kernel 3.11.6. The 64 bit ISO I downloaded is about 3.3 GB in size and the bulk is primarily due to a whole lot of packages it ships pre-installed.

From OpenSUSE 13.1 "Education Li-f-e" http://mylinuxexplore.blogspot.in

I created a live USB using Mint Image Writer on a 4 GB pendrive. First I did a live boot on my Asus K55VM laptop with 2.3 Ghz Core i7 processor, 8 GB DDR3 RAM and hybrid graphics with 2 GB NVIDIA GeForce 630M graphics. Once satisfied that everything is working well, I installed it on a 70 GB partition.

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Zorin 6.4 "Educational" Review: Very good for Kids, Fun to use, but lags a bit behind for Graduate students

During post graduate education and doctoral studies I was relying primarily on Windows 2000 and Windows XP to write my thesis. I could recall the nights spent with Adobe Pagemaker, LaTeX and MS Word for writing dissertation, managing references and citations using EndNote and many other software which actually helped me a lot in my research work. Unfortunately those days I wasn't initiated to Linux and today I feel Linux could have helped me a lot better to finish my work faster. For example, once my Windows crashed and I lost about 3 months of work. Fortunately, I had backup of my research data.

With that context, it is not surprising that I check out a lot of the Linux distros which come with "Education" tag. I tried UberStudent 2 earlier this year and was very impressed by the developer's focus on post graduate students. Similarly, Edubuntu is another distro which impressed me a lot. However, majority of the so-called "Educational" distros I tried have little to offer in terms of aesthetics. In fact, quite a few of them look pretty ugly and/or boring.

The Zorin 6 "Educational" is an effort in that direction to combine an aesthetically pleasing interface to a host of educationally relevant software. Like Zorin 6 Core, it is based on Ubuntu 12.04.*, has an LTS focus (5 year support ending Apr'17) and comes with a tweaked GNOME 3.4 DE.

From Zorin 6.4 "Educational" http://mylinuxexplore.blogspot.in

I checked out Zorin 6 Educational earlier but didn't get time to write a review. So, here I am with my review of Zorin 6.4 Educational - the latest update which brings in the goodness of Ubuntu 12.04.3 release. 

One point here: unlike Ubuntu 12.04.3, Zorin still comes with long term Linux kernel 3.2.0 and hence, may not work as good as Ubuntu LTS on machines with the latest Intel Haswell processors.

Zorin 6.4 Educational comes in two flavors: one, heavier with GNOME 3.4 and another "lite" version with LXDE desktop. For this review, I used the GNOME one.

I first created a live USB of 32-bit Zorin 6.4 "Educational" ISO (~2 GB in size and with GNOME 3.4) using Unetbootin. Then I did a live boot followed by installation on my Asus K54C with Core i3 2.2 Ghz processor and 2 GB RAM. I have only proprietary Intel graphics and hence, didn't have to worry of installing Bumblebee or AMD Radeon specific drivers. Installation is pretty simple - for details please refer my Zorin 7 review.

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