Religious versions of Ubuntu

[Andrej Marjan]

On July 16, 2009 05:57:04 pm Colin McGregor wrote:
> Something that caused me to shake my head there are now versions of
> Ubuntu aimed at different religious faiths:
>
> Ubuntu for Buddhist:
> - http://buddhabuntu.8m.net/
>
> Ubuntu for Christians :
> - http://ubuntuce.com/
>
> Ubuntu for Judaism:
> - https://launchpad.net/ubuntu-je
>
> Ubuntu for Muslims:
> - http://www.sabily.org/website/
>
> Ubuntu for Satanist:
> - http://ubuntusatanic.org/
>
> And for all I know there may be versions of Ubuntu for some other
> faiths. I tossed the names of a few other religions plus Ubuntu at
> Google and didn't find any others, but that may not mean much...
>
> Qustion is, why? Do we not have enough things to split up the OS world
> without religion?

These seem essentially like package sets slipstreamed into the Ubuntu install 
CD. It doesn't seem that any of them are creating forks of Ubuntu. So are they 
really splitting up anything?

It's something that I'd expect to be an add-on repository to a regular Ubuntu 
install.

A few things come to mind:

1. Maybe Ubuntu doesn't have an equivalent for suse's "add repo X and install 
package(set) Y" GUI installation functionality. I wouldn't know, I always use 
apt-* directly.

(UbuntuCE has a really painful explanation of how to add their packages to a 
regular Ubuntu.)

2. Maybe Ubuntu makes it really really easy to create your own derivative and 
these are geeks doing it more for the experience of doing it than for any real 
need

3. There can be value to having custom packages slipstreamed into an installer 
(e.g. target computer has slow or no Internet connection), so maybe these 
groups are providing a valuable service to their coreligionists.
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://gtalug.org/
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://gtalug.org/wiki/Mailing_lists