Debian Edu / Skolelinux Stretch — a complete Linux solution for your school

June 18th, 2017

Do you have to administrate a computer lab or a whole school network? Would you like to install servers, workstations and laptops which will then work together? Do you want the stability of Debian with network services already preconfigured? Do you wish to have a web-based tool to manage systems and several hundred or even more user accounts? Have you asked yourself if and how older computers could be used?

Then Debian Edu is for you. The teachers themselves or their technical support can roll out a complete multi-user multi-machine study environment within a few days. Debian Edu comes with hundreds of applications pre-installed, but you can always add more packages from Debian.

The Debian Edu developer team is happy to announce Debian Edu 9 Stretch, the first Debian Edu / Skolelinux release based on the Debian 9 Stretch release. Please consider testing it and reporting back (<debian-edu@lists.debian.org>) to help us to improve it further.

About Debian Edu and Skolelinux

Debian Edu, also known as Skolelinux, is a Linux distribution based on Debian providing an out-of-the box environment of a completely configured school network. Immediately after installation a school server running all services needed for a school network is set up just waiting for users and machines to be added via GOsa², a comfortable web interface. A netbooting environment is prepared, so after initial installation of the main server from CD or USB stick all other machines can be installed via the network. Older computers (even up to ten or so years old) can be used as LTSP thin clients or diskless workstations, booting from the network without any installation at all. The Debian Edu school server provides an LDAP database and Kerberos authentication service, centralized home directories, a DHCP server, a web proxy and many other services. The desktop contains more than 60 educational software packages and more are available from the Debian archive. Schools can choose between the desktop environments KDE Plasma, GNOME, LXDE, MATE and Xfce.

New features for Debian Edu 9 Stretch

These are some items from the release notes for Debian Edu 9 Stretch, based on the Debian 9 Stretch release. The full list is part of the manual.

Download options, installation steps and manual

A multi-architecture CD / USB stick image (647 MiB) for network booting can be downloaded at the following locations:

Alternatively an extended DVD / USB stick image (5.45 GiB) is also available, with more software included (saving additional download time during installs):

The images can be verified using the file SHA256SUMS.asc containing signed checksums of the images; see http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/SHA256SUMS.asc


Once you've downloaded an image, you can check that

For more information about how to do these steps, read the verification guide.

Debian Edu 9 Stretch is entirely based on Debian 9 Stretch; so the sources for all packages are available from the Debian archive.

Please note the Debian Edu Stretch status page.

When upgrading from Debian Edu 8 Jessie please read the related Debian Edu manual chapter.

For installation notes please read the related Debian Edu manual chapter.

After installation you need to take these first steps.

Please see the Debian Edu wiki pages for the latest English version of the Debian Edu Stretch manual. The manual has been fully translated to German, French, Italian, Danish, Dutch, Norwegian Bokmål and Japanese. A partly translated version exists for Spanish. An overview of the latest translated versions of the manual is available.

More information about Debian 9 Stretch itself is provided in the release notes and the installation manual; see https://www.debian.org/.

About Debian

The Debian Project is an association of Free Software developers who volunteer their time and effort in order to produce the completely free operating system Debian.

Contact Information

For further information, please visit the Debian web pages at https://www.debian.org/ or send mail to <press@debian.org>.