I ran across this through an RSS feed from one of the Linux sites. Uberstudent is designed both for students (high school up) and for researchers, and is a tweaked version of Ubuntu Karmic.
There is a two gigabyte DVD image for a live installer, and I thought it would be interesting to take a look at it, so I downloaded it and installed it on a USB thumb drive using unetbootin.
I had not yet done anything with it when my hard drive began to act up--the computer would suddenly crash with no apparent cause--either suddenly shut down or else die entirely in an instant. Over a few days, this grew more frequent.
I booted from the thumb drive--and when entering the live environment the first thing it reported to me was that the hard drive was reporting it was in process of failure--somehow, my previous install had not picked up the drive's SMART notification.
Fortunately, I had a second drive in an external case that had a sizable first partition I had set aside just for this sort of situation (I've been to this particular rodeo before...)
Last night, therefore, I swapped the drives and put the failing disk in the external case and the other one in my laptop. Then, I loaded the Uberstudent onto the hard drive.
I must say that so far at least it is an extremely interesting distro. They include quite a few customizations and many applications that will be a blast to explore, since I was unfamiliar with many of them before. Since my Firefox bookmarks were backed up already, I am fully functional already--although I did set up the Ubuntuzilla repository to upgrade Firefox to the latest version.
My largest challenge now is to resurrect my Zotero libraries from the copied repository, but I should have that ironed out fairly quickly.
Otherwise, it seems a very worthwhile distribution. I just finished installing KDE in the background, although I debated waiting for a week or so until the new 4.4 release is available in finished mode.
So--if you want a pretty polished, extended version of Ubuntu Karmic, you might give Uberstudent a try. The additions mean it seems well worth the time, IMHO.
<http://www.uberstud
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