eyeOS

For those interested in operating systems for education, such as the OLPC Sugar project, you must check eyeOS out. The OS is completely browser-based and built on open source technologies. Apart from being painless to administer, it has amazing possibilities for the classroom. From their website:

eyeos can provide schools and universities with a full web platform where students, teachers and parents will have a personal yet collaborative desktop to work and, communicate between themselves and get organized inside and outside the school. The students and teachers will have an intuitive and easy-to-learn Desktop System, to work with school resources and communicate with other students and teachers.

One of the interesting features is their re-architecture of how the operating system should look for children of different ages. The interface can be used anywhere. It also has some creative applications for learning support – such as a mindmapping application. It has special affordances for the teacher, for example, an exam mode that blocks off applications that are not permitted to be accessed during exams.

They also have a developer outreach program where developers who are proficient in pHp can build applications for that platform.

This broadly mirrors what Sugar can do in terms of functionality, although their are  substantial differences in their instructional and technical architecture and design.