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<html>
<head>
<title>Software Components</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>Software Components</h1>
<p>
An Edubuntu lab includes both free educational software as well as office tools
and web browsers. At its core, however, it consists of the server software
that runs the classroom server.
</p>
<h2>Classroom server</h2>
<p>
An Edubuntu classroom server is built on moo cow...
</p>
<p>
The moo cow server defaults to an IP gateway and firewall when two Ethernet
cards are present. This will only be the case in Edubuntu labs that are
permanently online, which will usually not be the case.
</p>
<h2>Applications</h2>
<h3>OpenOffice.org</h3>
<p>
OpenOffice is a full office suite, intended to measure up to and surpass
Microsoft Office. This is what its original author, Marco Börries,
intended when he started StarDivision to create the software that would
eventually become OpenOffice in 1984, when he was just sixteen. He called it
StarOffice. By the time Sun Microsystems bought Marco's company in 1999, over
25 million copies of Star Office had been sold to customers who needed platform
independence and an alternative to Microsoft.
</p>
<p>
In July 2000, Sun released most of the Star Office source code (about 7.5
million lines of C++) to the stewardship of the open source community, under
the Free Software Foundation's LGPL license. The community project has as its
goal: <q>To create, as a community, the leading international office suite
that will run on all major platforms and provide access to all functionality
and data through open-component based APIs and an XML-based file format.</q>
The open APIs and file formats are turning OpenOffice into a platform in its
own right, supporting projects such as OpenGroupware, which aims to provide an
open alternative to Microsoft's Exchange and SharePoint products.
</p>
<p>
This is in direct contrast to Microsoft's approach, who have always used the
fact that only their own software could easily use their document formats to
keep customers locked in, in effect reserving the Office platform to Windows
applications.
</p>
<p>
OpenOffice includes a word processor, spreadsheet, database, presentation
builder, and diagramming tool. It is now able to decode most variants of
Microsoft Office document formats, but although its StarBasic macro language is
syntactically identical to Visual Basic, OpenOffice cannot execute Visual Basic
scripts. Although these are preserved upon conversion, the scripts need to be
adjusted to use the OpenOffice API before they can be used.
</p>
<p>
OpenOffice can be used to teach all the basic computer skills required to enter
the job market, and as the design paradigms of the software is very close to
Microsoft Office, the skills learnt are readily transferable.
</p>
<h3>Firefox</h3>
<p>
In 1998, Netscape Communications released the source code of its Navigator web
browser software as open source, and the Mozilla project was born. Netscape
released their software as open source in order to compete with Microsoft, who
were bundling Internet Explorer with every copy of Windows sold. Netscape
hoped that the cooperation of thousands of developers around the world would
create a better product than Internet Explorer. It did, but it took years, and
Netscape fell by the wayside. The code lived on, though.
</p>
<p>
In 2004, six years after the start of the project, the non-profit Mozilla
Foundation that was created to coordinate the project finally released version
1.0 of the Firefox browser. Earlier versions of the software had been in use
for years, but at last it was deemed ready for a high-profile release to the
general public.
</p>
<p>
The full Mozilla suite includes far more than the web browser. It includes
Thunderbird, a mail client with address books and calendaring support, and
Composer, a web page editor. For developers, it includes Venkman, a Javascript
debugger, and the DOM Inspector, a wonderful tool for interactively exploring
the enormous, intricate internal structure of complicated web pages.
</p>
<p>
The code base has been painstakingly restructured to get as much use out of it
as possible. So, for instance, all the Mozilla applications use the same
rendering engine, called Gecko, to layout and display HTML pages on screen.
This is critical, since it is extremely hard work to implement the standards
that govern web page structure and display correctly. Mozilla has the best
support for the HTML and CSS standards of any browser out there. In the past,
Microsoft has used Internet Explorer's idiosyncratic and incomplete
implementation of web standards to coerce people to craft their web pages to
look good in Internet Explorer at the expense of other browsers. For the web to
become a dependable platform, however, developers have to be able to build on
solid public standards that don't leave them at the mercy of any company's
prosperity.
</p>
<p>
As with OpenOffice, the Mozilla project is becoming a platform for extensions
from the community.
</p>
<h3>Security</h3>
<p>
As the internet has become more popular, viruses, spam, spyware and trojans
have grown to be an enormous problem. These are all caused by programs that
are received and executed on computers without the knowledge or consent of
their users. How can this happen?
</p>
<p>
In general, there are two ways for this to happen:
</p>
<ul>
<li>You may have given implicit permission without intending to do so;</li>
<li>The unwanted program may be exploiting errors or bugs in some program in
order to insinuate themselves into it, so that it can execute with the
permissions of the original program.</li>
</ul>
<p>
Firefox and Thunderbird try to protect you as far as possible by setting up
reasonable defaults. Nothing in an email message is executed unless you
explicitly run it yourself. And execution of Javascript in web pages can be
switched off at any point. Firefox also allows you to grant or revoke specific
permissions (e.g. opening popups, hiding the status bar, or changing images) to
Javascript.
</p>
<p>
The Mozilla suite also affords you a measure of protection from the second
case. While Internet Explorer has access to practically the entire running
system of a Windows PC via a powerful integration technology called ActiveX,
Firefox and Thunderbird are far more restricted. It also helps to be running on
Linux, where the user of the web browser will generally not be able to damage
the operating system, and the system administration account is never used to
run user applications.
</p>
</body>
</html>
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