blog/draft/2012-03-skolelinux-wolfgang-schweer.txt

   1 Title: Debian Edu interview: Wolfgang Schweer
   2 Tags: english, debian edu, intervju
   3 Date: 2012-03-15 11:30
   4
   5 <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>
   6
   7  Wolfgang Schweer
   8
   9 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
  10
  11 <p>I've studied Mathematics at the university 'Ruhr-Universität' in
  12 Bochum, Germany. Since 1981 I'm working as a teacher at the school
  13 'Westfalen-Kolleg Dortmund', a school of second chance. Besides
  14 teaching I was involved in developing online courses for a project
  15 called 'abitur-online.nrw' and in some other information technology
  16 related projects. For about ten years I've been teacher and
  17 coordinator for the 'abitur-online' project at my school. Being now in
  18 my early sixties, I've decided to leave school at the end of April
  19 this year.</p>
  20
  21 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
  22 project?</strong></p>
  23
  24 <p>The first information about Skolelinux must have come to my
  25 attention years ago and somehow related to LTSP (Linux Terminal Server
  26 Project).  At school, we had set up a network at the beginning of 1997
  27 using Suse Linux on the desktop, replacing a Novell network. Since
  28 2002, we used old machines from the city council of Dortmund as thin
  29 clients (LTSP, later Ubuntu/Lessdisks) cause new hardware was out of
  30 reach. At home I'm using Debian since years and - subscribed to the
  31 Debian news letter - heard from time to time about Skolelinux. About
  32 two years ago I proposed to replace the (somehow undocumented and only
  33 known to me) system at school by a well known Debian based system:
  34 Skolelinux.</p>
  35
  36 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
  37 Edu?</strong></p>
  38
  39 <p>It's open source, easy to set up, stable and flexible due to it's
  40 Debian base. It integrates LTSP out-of-the-box. And it is documented!
  41 So it was a perfect choice.</p>
  42
  43 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
  44 Edu?</strong></p>
  45
  46 <p>Nothing yet.</p>
  47
  48 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
  49
  50 <p>At home (Debian Sid with Gnome Desktop): Iceweasel, LibreOffice,
  51 Mutt, Gedit, Document Viewer, Midnight Commander, flpsed (PDF
  52 Annotator).  At school (Skolelinux Lenny): Iceweasel, Gedit,
  53 LibreOffice.</p>
  54
  55 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
  56 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
  57
  58 <p>Some time ago I thought it was enough to tell people about it. But
  59 that doesn't seem to work quite well. Now I concentrate on those more
  60 interested and hope to get multiplicators that way.</p>