Here at FOSSed one of the great project on show is the Open 1:1 project which is an Ubuntu based distribution specially designed for large middle and high school deployments of netbooks for students. It’s currently deployed in a number of large schools and is on it’s second year of refinement.
It’s currently got the netbook interface and a set of education software specially picked for inclusion based on the needs of American schools much like Edubuntu for a specific region. The system is fast and responsive even on older ASUS netbooks and the install is very easy.
They’re currently moving from 9.10 to 10.04. The current plan is to create a new version once per year based on the spring release. This should allow for Open 1:1 to base it’s distro on the LTS releases and one STS release in the general Ubuntu cadence and it means that the people involved in the project are focused on delivering the distro in the summer in time for deployment for the next school year in the USA.
Right now the distro is being deployed and configured using a file-imaging system which installs by wiping out the machine and installing the distro on it. There is a plan to move to something more manageable with packages and a desire to be involved further with the Ubuntu community to make sure tweaks are in sync and going upstream and educational software is available ready to use.