staging.inyokaproject.org

Hello everyone.

Please forgive my lack of German language. I can only read a little German, which is why I could find the proper forum to make my request for help.

I am Project Lead for UberStudent, an Ubuntu-based distribution for higher education and advanced secondary students http://uberstudent.org . We could not become a project of Ubuntu because our distribution includes too many packages that are not included in the official Ubuntu repositories. So we are developing our project while respecting Ubuntu and making everything we do benefit all of the Linux community.

We are wishing to create a version of UberStudent for German-speakers. We need people who have the language skills to help us.

Here are specific areas where we need help:

--During undergrad, in which paper formats were you most required to write? In first year courses, in which format were you required to submit papers? In following years, in which then? I ask this because we wish to include templates for each.

--Search Engines in Firefox - If you as a student in Germany could perfectly customize the available search engines in Firefox, what would they be? Make your list!

--Textbooks - how do you get them? Is there a German-based company from which you rent or buy them really cheaply online? In the U.S., where I am, universities have given up running their own bookstores. They don't want the expense of paying their own employees to run a bookstore that sells books to students at a cheap price. They therefore pass that expense to students by contracting with for-profit companies who own the exclusive right to run bookstores at the unoversity. This is very bad, to say the least! Unsurprising, online companies like http://www.chegg.com now rent textbooks to students for much cheaper than they can buy them on campus. Is there a German company that rents textbooks to student? Or that sells them cheaper than they can be bought on campus? Answering this may help a German edition of UberStudent pay for itself.

--Other - we have several programs and some customizations that need to be translated into German. I'm working on creating a Pootle site http://translate.sourceforge.net/wiki/pootle/index where people can very easily help with this. Of course, the programs we've created work well in Ubuntu or any other Debian-based system, and they are open source, so you can be happy that you would be contributing to the whole Linux world. ☺

Hi there!

ewens schrieb:

--During undergrad, in which paper formats were you most required to write? In first year courses, in which format were you required to submit papers? In following years, in which then? I ask this because we wish to include templates for each.

In nature sciences, it is not common to tell the students which software they have to use. Submitted papers should be *.pdf, if not the teachers prefers a printed copy. Oh, if you refer to paper format as matter of size and shape of the actual paper, then it is so called "DinA4".

--Textbooks - how do you get them? Is there a German-based company from which you rent or buy them really cheaply online? In the U.S., where I am, universities have given up running their own bookstores. They don't want the expense of paying their own employees to run a bookstore that sells books to students at a cheap price. They therefore pass that expense to students by contracting with for-profit companies who own the exclusive right to run bookstores at the unoversity. This is very bad, to say the least! Unsurprising, online companies like http://www.chegg.com now rent textbooks to students for much cheaper than they can buy them on campus. Is there a German company that rents textbooks to student? Or that sells them cheaper than they can be bought on campus? Answering this may help a German edition of UberStudent pay for itself.

In Germany, it is not allowed to sell books cheaper (ore more expensive) then a certain given price set by an organisation. Used books can be sold for the price of your choice. I haven't heard of a book rental system in Germany. The libraries of the Unis have various amounts of the textbook that can be rent without a fee. Where students buy textbooks? Undergrad stuff in German at online stores like amazon.de, bol.de. English textbooks can be cheaper to buy online in the US or UK.

--Other - we have several programs and some customizations that need to be translated into German. I'm working on creating a Pootle site http://translate.sourceforge.net/wiki/pootle/index where people can very easily help with this. Of course, the programs we've created work well in Ubuntu or any other Debian-based system, and they are open source, so you can be happy that you would be contributing to the whole Linux world. ☺

Good luck, seems to be a nice project!

Hi there!

ewens schrieb:

--During undergrad, in which paper formats were you most required to write? In first year courses, in which format were you required to submit papers? In following years, in which then? I ask this because we wish to include templates for each.

At my school (Gymnasium, somewhere equal to your High School?) there is a lot of trouble concerning data formats. If you want to offer templates, PDF might not be the best choice, because of its rather limited editing options. What is widespread are .doc Documents if text should be edited afterwards and nearly every pupil has a way to read and edit them. Popular are M$ Office and Openoffice. But there are some old versions of M$ Office around, so Opendocument-format or docx are bad ideas. Documents that need no editing afterwards are often handed out in .pdf

--Search Engines in Firefox - If you as a student in Germany could perfectly customize the available search engines in Firefox, what would they be? Make your list!

(?) What do you mean by that? As far as I'm concerned, it is just fine... It searches for words in documents, and that is what I need... There are far too many search Engines around (Google, Yahoo, etc.; among academics: MetaGer), which can be used for researching... Or did I get your question wrong there???

--Textbooks - how do you get them? Is there a German-based company from which you rent or buy them really cheaply online? In the U.S., where I am, universities have given up running their own bookstores. They don't want the expense of paying their own employees to run a bookstore that sells books to students at a cheap price. They therefore pass that expense to students by contracting with for-profit companies who own the exclusive right to run bookstores at the unoversity. This is very bad, to say the least! Unsurprising, online companies like http://www.chegg.com now rent textbooks to students for much cheaper than they can buy them on campus. Is there a German company that rents textbooks to student? Or that sells them cheaper than they can be bought on campus? Answering this may help a German edition of UberStudent pay for itself.

At schools, you borrow them of your school for free for each form. At universities: refer to Diego's post

Best wishes,
noctux

P.S.: I just looked at your page: Was your question about Firefox-search aimed at Zotero? If so, I would _personally_ wish an own application that might have an Firefox addon (to save web content), to put up a research folder for each poject, where I can download, organize, and search what I have found out so far. And for such a search, I'd use abilities like: Source, author, filetype, ... Somewhat similar to evernote (http://www.evernote.com/) maybe.
I hope that helped, but I'm only guessing your question or intention behind that.

Hi,

I am currently a student at Ruhr-University Bochum, so perhaps I can help.

During undergrad, in which paper formats were you most required to write? In first year courses, in which format were you required to submit papers? In following years, in which then? I ask this because we wish to include templates for each.

See the problem is, almost each faculty or subject has its own recommendations. I study History and English, and both use different formats. For example, in History classes the edge on the right hand side has to be around 6cm, on the left about 2cm. In English it looks different. But they always want a line-spacing of 1.5 . Oh and it doesn't matter whether it's in the first year or the last.

And yeah, I've never heard of any company that rents books for you here in Germany. Fortunately, academic books in Germany are cheaper than in the US ☺

Best regards,

PekkiBear