Huayra GNU/Linux is a GNU operating system distribution tailored for educational purposes in Argentina. Its development was started by the CENITAL (Argentine National Center for Research and Development of Free Technologies) for the 2012 Conectar Igualdad project of the Argentine Government, and now is maintained by Educar Sociedad del Estado.
As such, it includes full localization in Spanish and a complete kit of education applications, several of whom were released by Cenital itself. Cenital got together a great group of educative programmers, who design the Linux distribution.
The Conectar Igualdad technological inclusion project involved providing a portable computer for students. These computers used low-spec Intel Atom microprocessors to provide computing power to 12-inch nationally produced netbooks, 5 millon of such provided for highschool students.
While the portable machines specs has been continuously improved in next computing generations and batches, since the launch of the program in 2011 great care has been taken to provide with a great experience with such low computing power.
The software hearth of Huayra involves a Debian 12 derived-Linux Kernel, a MATE desktop, LibreOffice suite, GIMP and Inkscape graphical apps, several music and sound design programs, video and digital TV experience. All these are freely available. Also provided are serveral local applications (Huayra Motion for stopmotion animation), and many more.
All of the reference material and as many as 12500 highschool educative books and reference materials are already included as PDF documents in the machine hard disk.
As many other Linux distributions, Huayra (which minds "Wind" in native quechua language) has a "spirit animal". Vaca Hacker, its Pilot Cow, provides computing knowledge also as a special app.
The newest version its 6.5, but several spin-off has been created, including Huayra Bonaerense (for the Government of the Buenos Aires Province), Huayra Servidor (a server version), Huayra Medios (for cooperative and school FM Radios and Internet broadcasting).